Publisher and developer PlaySide spent a long time refining and beefing up Age of Darkness: Final Stand during early access before it finally hit 1.0 last month while promising an engaging campaign, deep and challenging Survival runs, and even a crushing online co-op offering. Is it a valiant triumph or an apocalyptic failure?
Most players would argue the game didn’t need a story-heavy campaign. The lore was easy to understand and just enough to carry the gameplay loop forward: A mysterious force of darkness has come to the surface of this world, and humanity is trying to keep the ‘nightmares’ at bay “through the power of light and fire.” As for the loop itself, it’s easy to digest and experiment with: Players choose one of the three factions and build and develop a town during the day, maybe even daring to explore beyond its walls to grab additional resources. At night, it’s all about survival.
That premise alone, coupled with the attractive art direction, was an easy sell. The game had already consumed a large number of players over the course of its early access run, so does the campaign add something worthwhile to the table? The short answer is nope. That doesn’t diminish the game’s strengths though.
Age of Darkness excels when it sticks to what it ‘says on the cover’ and offers a bone-crushingly hard survival experience. It’s snappy, easy to pick up and play, and takes the right lessons from RTS classics such as Warcraft 3. In-game tutorials are reduced to a minimum and aren’t annoying at all because there isn’t much to slowly figure out. The quirks of each faction and their heroes become apparent very quickly, and the in-game descriptions for skills and buildings are concise and useful. As far as onboarding goes, PlaySide has done a great job.
As you expand across a procedurally generated map in the main mode, Survival, you get access to more resources and can manage to gain territory back from the Veil. In fact, you’ll need to do instead of simply focusing on a ‘turtling’ strategy as you’ll need more soldiers and buildings to push back increasingly dangerous assaults. That means more mouths to feed, more housing, and plenty of other needs. It all sounds familiar, but the split between day-time and night-time gameplay takes pressure off players, making an admittedly hard game way more chill than the average RTS title.
The loop just works, and there’s enough variance found in the distinct factions and all the different town layouts and unit strategies to warrant coming back for more if you enjoy what PlaySide was going for. It’s a structure that also shines in both small and bigger doses. You can just save a long, punishing run and come back later. But if you stick around and finish what you started, each one can become a small odyssey with its ups and downs. The likely outcome? That you’ll fail and return with renewed hope and fresh strategies, especially in the higher difficulties.
All this, however, is only a fraction of the campaign. While it’s a short journey when compared to other story modes in the RTS genre, it just comes across as completely misguided. Despite some interesting narrative beats and solid voice acting across the board, it takes too long to properly get going and ends up feeling more like a prologue to the Survival option that was available all along. For a game with such a tight premise and clear-cut moment-to-moment action and strategy, it’s too meandering and doesn’t play to the core mode’s strengths. This is why most players will want to skip it or only play it after they’ve been convinced by the meat and potatoes of Age of Darkness.
More egregiously, the full, post-1.0 release continues to exhibit critical issues for this sort of game such as the pathing and targeting AI on units failing to deliver to desired results in the middle of hectic battles; far too often, soldiers will switch targets despite the issued orders, walk away from melees once they’re hurt again, or get stuck behind a larger unit they don’t know how to walk around. Coupled with frequent stutters, audio effects that cut out seemingly at random, and late-game framerate issues that come from high-end hardware being underutilized (I’ve been able to test it), Age of Darkness ends up feeling half-baked in spite of all the content it’s packing and how good it looks for the most part.
If PlaySide can manage to squash pesky bugs, give the unit AI a good polish, and fix the wobbly performance no matter the power level of the PC you use, this new take on the defense-oriented classical RPG subgenre might have a bright future ahead, especially with an uncomplicated online co-op option that’s ideal for friends and relatives. Right now, however, nightmares aren’t the scariest thing found in this one.
AGE OF DARKNESS: FINAL STAND VERDICT
There’s a great ‘town defense’ RTS at the center of Age of Darkness, but the lack of polish even after its 1.0 launch is disappointing and the campaign lacks punch.
TOP GAME MOMENT
Creating a ‘maze’ of walls and towers to waste the nightmares’ time during their night attacks.
Good vs Bad
- The visual presentation is appealing without sacrificing readability.
- Clean UI with a good amount of tactical options readily available.
- Engaging central loop while playing Survival.
- Higher difficulties encourage proper learning and experimentation.
- Voice acting is really solid for the most part.
- Pathing and targeting AI on the player units is often unreliable.
- Abundant audio glitches.
- Poor usage of high-end hardware leads to stutters and FPS drops.
- The campaign misplaces its priorities and thus ends up feeling dull.
