A great game lies nestled within the original design of Age Of Darkness: Final Stand but seemingly some combination of committee-thinking and lack of commitment to the vision has robbed players of what might have been.
A lot of visible effort has been put into the presentation and polish of an intriguing setting, some strong themes and compelling aesthetics, but unfortunately, the same standard does not apply to the gameplay, where the flaws seem deeply rooted and marred from conception.
Age Of Darkness: Final Stand (ADFS) is a top-down strategy game focused on base-building and survival. After picking one of three factions each with subtle differences in abilities and research options, you are thrown onto an unexplored map with nought but a central stronghold, a powerful leader and a few soldiers. An ever-present timer begins, and the pressure is immediately on to begin exploring, clearing the land of ghouls and building a settlement strong enough to withstand three successively more powerful waves of onslaught that you will be facing.
Your main tools for survival come in the form of soldiers, who are recruited at a high price, and defensive walls and towers, which are affordable but require protection lest they quickly succumb to the attacks of wandering ghouls. Soldiers can clear enemies away from your walls, which hold enemies back from attacking your farms and mines, which are necessary to recruit soldiers. This puts a high cognitive load on success – you cannot merely master ground combat tactics, as you must also perfect the efficiency of base-building and successfully identify effective defensive locations and bottlenecks for your fortifications, all whilst attempting to explore and secure a map full of monsters and preparing for the next nighttime onslaught.
As time progresses, day passes into night, when monsters are faster and more powerful, but when the rewards for killing them are also greater. Soldiers gradually become “emboldened” as they kill monsters, and emboldening prevents them from being debuffed due to horror, which they will experience when fighting more powerful monsters. Your fourth night is Death Night, when a sinister red crystal cracks open, spewing forth a horde of ghouls, or ‘nightmares’, which advance upon your stronghold. Should they destroy it, you will lose the game. Defeat all the nightmares, 140 in total on your first night, and you may survive a little longer, but five nights later will be the next Death Night, where you must destroy 600 nightmares. Then you will be left with just six days to prepare for the final Death Night, where thousands of nightmares, including incredibly powerful variants, will begin their assault. Surviving the final Death Night is a challenging, and rare, achievement.
Before I address the faults of ADFS, it is important to note that this game will provide a unique challenge which many players will find compelling. Splitting your attention between every task required to survive (exploration, combat, base-building) feels more urgent and desperate than in other RTS games, and the developers, PlaySide, have achieved a lot in that regard.
Sadly, there are faults, and they are numerous. First of all, the choice of starting faction feels arbitrary each time – none of the three options feels particularly different as all require the same approach for success. The main difference is the handful of changes to the tech tree for each, but this sadly just means that they differ only in how effective they are at the one mandatory playstyle.
Each faction has a different hero, and these heroes are powerful, with unique abilities – but the abilities themselves lack punch. A large number of the abilities are passive or automatic, and those that aren’t are so drab in execution that I felt no excitement when using them. This exacerbates the lack of variation between the factions: each hero looks different and is characterised differently, and their abilities are certainly distinct, but it never boils down to much more than sending a big mob of units, including your hero, to the next mob of enemies, and using their few triggerable abilities for some minor buffs and effects.
But by far the biggest fault, for me, is the dissonance between the game’s theme and setting, and its gameplay. In ADFS, you begin with just a few soldiers and a single Stronghold building, but by the final Death Night, you have expanded across the map with dozens of houses, farms, warehouses and technology buildings, increasing your population by hundreds of workers and advancing technologically in leaps and bounds. This clashes with the Final Stand theme of the game, and instead ADFS feels more conventional than it might have. Had each map instead begun with a large, functional settlement that you must attempt to preserve against ever-increasing hordes of nightmares, with the game getting harder as parts of the settlement are overcome and destroyed, it might have fit better with the theme. Instead, it falls in line with the standard gameplay progression of increasingly dangerous enemies being taken on by an increasingly powerful player, and this feels like a wasted opportunity.
Age Of Darkness: Final Stand will offer players a challenge, but sadly it is the same challenge on every map with each of the three factions. In order to succeed, you will simply have to get better and better at the same tough strategy, and for now, at least, it feels like a very small game – a passing distraction with little to offer any but the most obsessive perfectionists.
