Age of Darkness: Final Stand

So recently I decided to play this game again after having tried it quite a while ago. The thing is that I couldn't remember why I stopped playing it the first time despite liking it initially. And then it hit me again, as I was playing the 4th mission (~4 hours each playthrough), I remembered there was this enemy kamikaze unit that explodes one-shotting every unit and sometimes even your heroes, forcing you to load a save. This unit sometimes even spawns out of nowhere in the middle of your army, killing everything and giving you zero reaction time. So once again after reloading saves a few times, I alt+F4 out of frustration and uninstall, but this time I created a new Steam collection and named it "Do not try to play this again".

[b]TL;DR - Don't get it unless you really want to play co-op and it's on a big sale. Just play They Are Billions or From Glory To Goo[/b] I bought this game in November of 2021, when it first launched into EA. Between then and the official 1.0 launch, it progressively got worse, despite having more content. I see comments saying that the devs were laid off, but I can't speak to that. It's been left in such a bad state that it is arguably abandonware. If you're buying this to play co-op, you're going to have desync-related issues. I've logged a few hundred hours and came back yesterday expecting some things to be fixed, and the first game of coop disconnected about 20 minutes in. If you're just in it for the single player, achievements are completely broken. To this day, the Warden achievement says I have only survived 4/15 Death Nights. For context, a single survival match has 6 Death Nights. I've played dozens of matches and have easily survived well over 100 death nights/swarms, but the achievement never updates. The game also runs like ♥♥♥♥, even on good hardware. Coop? Yeah, it runs even worse. Max difficulty + final wave, me and my buddy had like 10 FPS. It's actually unplayable in that moment and you can't pause on that difficulty, so you simply can't micromanage anything and just hope for the best. As for the actual gameplay itself, the best point of comparison is They Are Billions (a game I have 1k+ hours on) with an AoE feel/aesthetic. Personally, I don't think it's half as good as TAB and it's way easier, even if this game wasn't broken. Anyone arguing otherwise is higher than a kite. [i]For anyone interested why I think this game sucks compared to TAB, here's a long ass rant:[/i] this game is much easier (which isn't necessarily bad), but it's done so in a way that I feel like it cheapens the game. The only way to get comparable difficulty is to turn on every modifier/affix in co-op (coop is much harder), but the core gameplay loop for 99% of players will still be a breeze relative to TAB. 1) Enemies are mostly scarce outside of POIs or until you get to the edge of the map, so the threat of being overrun/losing doesn't exist outside of death nights/swarms, which is the opposite of TAB. It's also REALLY easy to de-aggro an enemy by running away from it. It's much harder/next to impossible in TAB. 2) There's no noise mechanic like there is in TAB, which can be crazy on max difficulties since zombies snowball out of control from a single gunshot/building placement. That doesn't happen in this game and you can build freely without consequence in most cases. 2) There's no infection mechanic. Destroyed buildings in TAB result in more infected spawning from infected workers/colonists. These games are partly colony sims after all. This is yet another snowball mechanic for being overrun that doesn't exist in this game. 3) You don't need to expand a build/energy radius. As long as you have vision, you can build wherever like a traditional RTS. This makes it SO easy to expand and hold chokes. 5) In TAB, you can't build to the edge of the map nor truly see where zombies spawn, so you always have to defend the outer boundary. You can get to the edge in this game.. and it's truly the edge of the boundary with nothing outside of it. It makes it easy to build and not defend. This also means waves are predictable and you can see which crystal they're spawning at and just camp it. Yes, you can f*cking camp where the horde spawns. 6) You can build something that highlights the exact path of the horde.. and even if you forget to do that, the green fog that spawns will tell you where it's going by highlighting a white path through the fog. 7) If that wasn't good enough, there are 5 Crystals, each representing a death night where the horde spawns from. When you deal with all 5 individually, you'll get a final wave where you deal with all 5 at once, and they'll take the SAME path as they did before. Not only can you camp the horde spawn, but you'll know the exact direction they head in. 8) The game runs like sh*t compared to TAB. It's on UE4, while TAB uses pre-rendered graphics and a 2D engine that "looks" 3D, so it handles horde simulations way better. But it doesn't just run worse than TAB. It looks much lower fidelity. Again, don't buy this hunk of garbage unless you enjoy setting your money on fire. There are plenty of similar games and better spiritual successors to TAB. This one completely dropped the ball and got progressively worse the longer it was in Early Access. I'm half considering a refund since it's abandonware with egregious bugs. "From Glory to Goo" and "Here Comes the Swarm" are much better alternatives.