Age of Darkness: Final Stand

TLDR: This game is a perfect showcase of the limitations of the RTS genre but works well enough on its own merits. On to the details, the entire thing is horde mode, just the horde mode, the game. You can expect massive waves of enemies clashing against an absolutely ridiculous defender`s advantage, sally forth with a massive army of your own and meet the hordes head on, hold them off while things build or repair, or go explore in a classic warcraft creeping experience. It`s quite fun, but that`s about where the positives end and it`s a crying shame as most of the negatives do seem like they could be fixed relatively easily. So the game`s economy is balanced around having an absolutely massive empire, which creates some strict bottlenecks early and a little bit into the midgame that are just straight up unreasonable, your early game storage is absolutely tiny and crucial structures and upgrades will frequently deplete the entire thing so if you have some inefficiencies, say didn`t find any good wood or stone fast enough? missing one wood on your production to cap out? Is gold being wasted on account of it? Did you get wrecked because it delayed you a little too long? Tough tits, start over. This is doubly exacerbated when playing without pause which for all the hardest achievements you`re gonna have to do, good luck, it`s quite painful. This creates 2 major issues, one: the punishing cap on storage translates across the entire game and if you forget to continue building your defenses because you were doing something else, even your maximum storage of materials in the endgame is barely enough to hold off one direction, and the production isn`t going to save you in a day, which frequently leads to very frustrating losses that feel downright unfair. And two: It bogs down the campaign something fierce. So let`s talk about the campaign... in a word? Pointless, maybe i should say it didn`t quite work out. Most the missions are either no build or no build while you have a base behind it. And since the economy is balanced around an exponential curve and that curve takes quite a while to hit and the units are quite expensive for where you get your economy at... you`re gonna be stuck watching your heroes slowly clear out the non respawning enemies one section at a time... most of the time. There are a lot of creative ideas in the campaign (shifting terrain, a full on boss fight) that didn`t quite work out, and boil down to being more annoying than anything else. The whole thing feels a bit undercooked, there are only a handful of factions(3), each of them only has 2 heroes, and only 2-3 different faction specific units in each, some of which are useless or debatable or a reskin of the same thing... The difference in stats and cost between the early game units and the elite versions is also quite stark, downright punishing. The base archers have basically no range and the advanced ones are expensive AF, basic soldiers die instantly to your beloved suicider so if you looked away for more than 5s... say goodbye to your army. In a game this focused on defense, there`s no elevation, what a travesty! No i suspect they had issues with pathing so that`s probably why... but it`s still a travesty! To sum it up i like it, but it could have been a hell of a lot better. It feels more like a proof of concept than anything.