This is as close to a game that created what I had always wanted from the original Destiny in 2013. An elaborate pve game where I defend a base from waves of bad guys and aliens, then explore an interesting world. This game was out before Destiny ever released, but it sounds a lot like they cut that original story because they were plagarizing Sanctum 2 without even knowing. So they cut the story out and replaced it with paywalls.
So how's this game? It's good. Sanctum 2 is an elaborate tower defense fps hybrid game where you fight increasing waves of bugs and big monsters that progressively get harder and more powerful as it goes along with more elaborate maps and scenarios that put your creative thinking skills to the test. I found it to be rather intense and enjoyed my time with it, although I found that it was lacking in a few aspects. More later.
What I liked the most was the world and setting. Very colorful, pretty, and over the top. Been a long time since I've seen this kind of creativity in a scifi shooter. Some places clearly must've had hundreds, if not thousands of hours put into them. Despite the textures being a bit blurry and taking a second or two to load due to Unreal 3 being the clunky diesel truck it is, I found that the game looked extremely polished and super detailed, if not for lacking in some textures resolution, which could probably be fixed with rtx remix or ai upscaling.
Basically if a game from 2012 just looks like a new game on low settings, I count that as pretty good. So it visually holds up, and looks pretty, what about gameplay? Well, this is later. I'm mixed, because the base gameplay was pretty good, however, difficulty and balance was putrid. I played this game solo, and found myself constantly unable to have even enough basic resources to make maybe at most 3 walls and 3 gun towers if I was really rationing it out. There was a hard limit of only being able to place 15 gun towers, but strangely no limits on actual walls? But then there was also a resources currency limit on top of that.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have 25 gun slots I could place, then 50 walls or have a higher limit of bases that gets bigger periodically during a level and that just cost resources so I still have to ration them out, but also not have huge undefended areas left open? There doesn't really need to be 2 limits. For example, in another fairly popular tower defense game: Plants vs Zombies, I would have a set sun power currency cost for the various plants, but I wasn't limited to 15 of anything. In that game, they balanced it so as long as I had sun, and nothing was on an active cool down, I could plant anything I wanted as much as I wanted.
So if I could buy 20 pea shooters, then that's fine although it might take a few minutes, but compared to Sanctum 2, that's 5 guns over budget of my entire defense. And by the way, the big monsters don't always come from one spot like PvZ, near the end of the game until the exact last mission, I was having to defend three places at the same time completely alone while my gun towers failed to kill almost every monster, requiring me to lower the difficulty to easy just so I had a fighting chance of beating the game solo. Which is complete dog schiitt.
So couple that with bases really not being easy to recognize or upgrade at a glance, mostly all looking like the same white and orange, I did have some issues with the game. So it wasn't perfect. What kinda hurt was that they had a really cool final mission where they gave me 60 towers and 6000 resources to make a big base with as a last stand sort of. And it really would've been nice to have more setpieces like that throughout, because the best parts to me were the first act, and the last mission. They seemed considerably more polished than most of the middle. Having regular people helping and calling out monsters, and seeing the impact the invasion was having on the world was great.
Acts 2 and 3 weren't very fun. Felt like padding for time while the art and gameplay did most of the heavy lifting. Thus the Destiny comparison, although that game doesn't do anything well anymore other than make me want to play anything else, including the sound of reading unfunny comments on youtube videos and steam reviews aloud. Because at least those are done in 5 minutes, meanwhile, about 70% of this game was really struggling with consistent balance and difficulty, and likely is all made with coop in mind, thus the poor balance, which is generally more fun in online games. And 0% of Destiny is any good.
Some things I would've wanted to see more of are: different enemies and factions (I don't imagine the Lumes are the only monsters or hostiles in what appears to be such a massive scale universe with world building and big tech), more recognizable towers, more characters, and definitely some more story moments with unique setpieces. Tower Defense games aren't known for their great stories, sure, but it's not like that ever stopped Portal from making a puzzle game with a good story, or Command and Conquer from putting in cheesy, but admirable efforts in their games.
I don't expect a decent story in most games, but it does help. And I think Sanctum 2 did have a fairly neat one with these comics and bits of banter. Would've been nicer to know the squad I played a lot more, but I guess all they had time for was Skye grunting like she's ran a marathon after going down 3 stairs and: "Killing vermin, one tower at a time." I mean, I didn't see the budget they had for this game, so maybe voicing the comics wasn't doable. But whatever. Would've helped.
So seeing how there's dlc, that basically means they've probably fixed some of this. But I will end by saying that I think I really enjoyed how cool the end credits were. No spoilers for the ending, since I did like it, but I found it to be much more inspired and cool than your usual pre-rendered mp4 file with shaky text with a montage or something. Reminded me of republic commando's cutscenes. So that's a plus.
Despite a few issues here and there, this was a surprisingly fun game. I can recommend it. Although seeing how it's a 12 year old game with DLC, you should just pirate this. I got it on a humble bundle forever ago and just never got around to playing it. But I'm glad I did. Thanks for reading.
