Age of Darkness: Final Stand Review - Real Time Survival
“Fear the night, for in the darkness, you must confront the horror of the nightmare horde at your walls.”
Age of Darkness: Final Stand has been a long-gestating project. Just over three years after it launched into Early Access, the 1.0 version is here, and I have been diving into the campaign and survival modes to experience what it is like in the dark fantasy world of Erodar. The darkness brings the ‘nightmare’ hordes, but the brutality of the factions that vie for control of Erodar proves humanity can be just as dark as these supernatural horrors.
From Playside Studios in Melbourne, Age of Darkness: Final Stand feels almost like two different games in one package. On the one hand, you have a campaign that puts you in control of numerous heroes as you complete objectives, often making do with very limited opportunities to engage in base-building and scarce resources as you battle your way to your objectives, and on the other you have a tower defence-style survival mode in which you aim to build your defences to protect yourself from the incoming horde of nightmares every third night.
While the campaign is a respectable narrative experience, even if some parts of it are predictable, it is the survival mode that shines the brightest in that dark world and provides me with the most enjoyment during my time with AoD. And, for myself at least, the reason for that is the freedom the game mode provides.
In a survival game, you are free to expand and explore as much as you want, without restrictions being placed on what you can or cannot build or how many soldiers you can train. Yes, many of you reading this may be thinking, “Duh, that’s how RTS campaigns usually work”, however, being that I am an older gentleman on the downhill slide to middle age, back in my day, the campaigns for RTS games involved an intro or mission briefing before you load the map and decide how you want to accomplish your objectives.
That’s why the survival mode grabbed me the way that it did. It took me back to the days of Command and Conquer and the original Warcraft games, where base-building and expansion were the keys to success. The inclusion of the horde gives the game that much more urgency, and choosing between expansion for resources and exploration or spending what resources you have to bolster your defences is a sometimes difficult choice. Unlike the RTS games of old, you need more than just the basic resources to construct buildings and train units. The taxes from the villagers within your base are the key to financing your operations, providing you with the gold to pay for the upkeep of buildings and military units. To build houses for these new villagers, you must first ensure you are producing enough food to provide for them. It is a balancing act that prevents you from just pumping out combat units continuously.
As mentioned above, every third night in survival, in what is known as a ‘Death Night’, you will see hordes of nightmare creatures assaulting your base in an attempt to wipe you out. Apart from a small distance around your base, the entire map will be enveloped in a deadly fog known as ‘the veil’, which not only kills any of your units not within the small boundary around your base but additionally conceals where the horde will be coming from and respawns nightmare creatures throughout the map.
As mentioned, the campaign offering for AOD is respectable. Through the narrative, you soon see that none of the three factions present can claim to have the moral high ground. One particular ‘hero’ you control early on is quite the antithesis of what a hero truly is, and while at that moment, I knew I had to keep him alive, there was a strong part of me that hoped his death would come about on my journey through the campaign. Despite some of the missions feeling like a bit of a slog to get through, the entirety of the campaign is fully voice-acted, bringing depth and emotions to the characters that text can often lack. To me, the biggest disappointment of the campaign was the lack of opportunities to engage in the base building that would allow me to build a giant army, but at least I can do that in survival mode.
Despite coming out of early access, I still managed to encounter a few bugs. While none of them broke the game, having a portrait of my selected hero in the top left of the screen for easy viewing without the health bar updating as they take damage resulted in more than one instant fail. Once I realised I could not rely on the portrait, the biggest issue I had was with the AI behaviours of my soldiers and enemies. My soldiers could be destroying buildings in clear view of enemy troops, and yet, because they had not entered the aggro range of the enemy forces, the enemies just stood there and did nothing. This same AI forced me to micromanage the attacking priorities of my troops as well, often taking the time to attack a wall or building without a care for the archers firing arrows into their backs. Maybe I am expecting too much, but it just felt really out of place.
While Age of Darkness: Final Stand does not attempt to reinvent the wheel, it does provide an entertaining RTS that players can sink their teeth into, especially if they want to take on the challenge of a survival run. Even the issues that do affect gameplay right now can be fixed, given time. For fans of the RTS genre, there is enough to keep you engaged and satisfied as you try to outlast the nightmare horde in survival mode.
Age of Darkness: Final Stand was reviewed on PC with code kindly provided by the publisher.
