You know when you want to get on the crowded subway at peak hours and a horde of people comes out of it? Because in Age Of Darkness: Final Stand you will have the same feeling of thousands of monsters coming towards you.
THE GAME
Age Of Darkness: Final Stand is a survival RTS from PlaySide Studios, distributed by Team17. Abyssal monsters called Nightmares emerge from the threshold to take over the entire land in darkness. It is your duty to protect and survive against all the hordes that are sent by the thousands to extinguish everything and engulf everything with a lethal mist.
Build your base, reinforce your defenses, train soldiers and set your hero to command the defense of your lands so they survive one more night.
MY IMPRESSIONS
I've never been very good at the RTS genre. Despite having played all the classics at some point in my life, I've had little success with this style of game. Age Of Darkness requires a little more from the player than just the basics. The game does not have subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese, which can make it difficult for non-English speakers to understand the story and mechanics.
At the time of this review, the game is still in early access and I take that into account. So, everything I say here has room for improvement. The game itself has a good idea, but I don't know if the execution is the most attractive in terms of gameplay. Everything is very stuck, running over. Units don't respect commands and stand still out of nowhere when asked for an action. Selecting troops is a challenge, as the interface does not help you at all. And the game requires you to have complete and fast control of your units, because the monsters have several different forms, such as one that explodes in an area around itself. The chaos on the screen and the unfriendly interface will frustrate those who want to perform well.
We have the campaign (for now, only Act 1 and 2) that did not attract me at all. The character highlighted as the main one does not make you want to have any connection with him. I won't spoil the story, but he has noble attitudes at the beginning of the campaign and soon after you control him for the rest of it. I cared very little about the character. In fact, no character presented has any kind of appeal for anyone to like them. In addition to the campaign, we have the survival mode, which is nothing more than the name says: survive. And that's the main mode, basically.
The game has potential, but it really needs to improve the interface, commands and everything that can make the game more dynamic, as it is the proposal here. As much as the idea of the game is to be a little more difficult than normal games of this style, I believe it is better to improve the gameplay so that it is more attractive and less repetitive.
ACHIEVEMENTS
For now, the game has no achievements. Perhaps the final version of the game will contain some, as it would be interesting and more of a challenge for the game.
CONCLUSÃO
The game was very frustrating for me. Both in terms of gameplay and lack of rhythm. Campaign missions that do not add anything, with confusing objectives, characters without charisma, terrible character control. Anyway, it has a lot to improve. Since it is in early access, it will improve. Maybe not in the character part, but in everything else, there is still a lot to improve.
For these and others, I couldn't have fun playing Age Of Darkness. It was very tiring and annoying when several of my units died because of their artificial disintelligence. Or because part of my army was watching their comrades dying, without moving a muscle to help. Or because I had to restart a whole chapter of the campaign because my hero died trying to escape an explosion, but his whole army made a wall that made him have this tragic end.
It's a good idea, but the execution left so much to be desired that the real Nightmares were other things in the game.
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