Video Game Review - Age of Darkness: Final Stand

Rob reviews Age of Darkness: Final Stand on PC...

As a fan of the humble RTS, I fall into the "turtle" style of gameplay. Throughout many turns, I'll slowly expand my army across multiple outposts, whilst maintaining a steady flow of resources and defences. When the enemy eventually comes knocking, they'll soon be treated to a barrage of defensive positions, long-range artillery, and an army of nameless units ready to do thy bidding. 

While this may work for games such as Command & Conquer, and StarCraft 2. When it comes to PlaySide's dark fantasy Age of Darkness: Final Stand no matter how prepared you are - your fledgling township WILL crumble! While this guaranteed death may seem a little harsh, it's a journey you won't regret taking - even if the end is a constant shroud of darkness. 

This doesn't mean that the game is unwinnable. If you survive long enough there is a speck of light at the end. However, with the odds well and truly stacked against you, each round (known as days) becomes a real battle for survival. Creatures known as 'Nightmares' roam these dark lands and come in all shapes and sizes. From small quadruple scouts, right up to gargantuan lumbering big boys, these creatures mean business. Harnessing their powers from the darkness, these monstrosities mostly attack at night, and much like that Xenomorph menace - they like to "Zerg Rush"! 

What makes the Nightmare a truly dreadful foe is that they don't need powerful units to soon crumble your hard work to dust. Let a few basic units into your settlement and they'll soon demolish everything in sight, leaving broken remains and lifeless bodies in their wake. While you're also able to build various walls and tower structures, these only aim to piss these monsters off further. 

However, you're not entirely defenceless and Age of Darkness does offer you some tools to keep the Nightmare at bay. Chief of these is your settlements hero - a unique character who has a few abilities up their sleeves. These characters all fill into those fantasy archetypes, such as heroic warriors with flaming swords, maidens with magical powers, and mysterious "assassins" who wield the very power that's attacking you. While which hero you pick does come down to personal preferences, each is pretty well balanced, and I wouldn't say that any of the trio feel particularly overpowered.

Each hero can also gain experience and level up as they battle the hordes. This then allows you to unlock new active or passive abilities that will further strengthen them, and your army. However, they're not invincible and while death isn't the end, it does trigger a hefty respawn timer which will then see you relying solely on your trained units to survive. 

Much like in real life, you can only train troops, or build production facilities if you have the manpower to do so. Villagers are the literal lifeblood of Age of Darkness' economy, and you'll be providing them with food and shelter, whilst utilising their numbers to become troops, and manning defensive positions or gathering food and materials. How you build your settlement is left entirely up to you. The thing to remember is that resource gatherers have to be placed on top of said resource. As such this does require some tactical thinking, as spreading your defences too thin will often come back to haunt you. 

Another unique aspect of your troops is that they also suffer from the horrors that are going on around them. Stray too far into the darkness and the soldiers under your command will have a horror debuff inflicted on them. This will then see a status decrease applied to essentially show their diminished state. This can be "cured" by moving the affected party into the warm embrace of your town hall, or a nearby fire tower (which also reveals the nearby fog of war!). The other side to this is that troops can also be rallied up after a successful battle and as such, they'll get an increase in stats for a set amount of time. 

As the days and nights progress, to keep you from becoming complacent, Age of Darkness: Final Stand has quite a fitting trump card up its dark sleeve. Dubbed "Death Nights" these nights signal when the Nightmare is at its strongest. When a Death Night begins, a dark crystal is chosen at random on the map. This broken crystal not only acts as a Nightmare spawn point - but collecting it also offers you some tasty upgrades. Anyway, throughout the night you'll be tasked with defeating a certain amount of enemies whilst under the effect of a random debuff, and a life-draining fog. Survive them and you'll be awarded a buff to your hero or army. Survive enough of them and you'll live to see the games ending. However as the days go on, the requirement to survive the night gets tougher! 

Thankfully death nights are announced in plenty of time which gives you a few days to shore up defences and trains your troops. Each route the Nightmare will take during that night is also highlighted on the map. This is where a somewhat tower defence strategy comes into play. While you can line suspected routes with ballista towers and burning towers of flame, the game A.I. doesn't often take the most obvious way to you. Attempting to turtle during these nights will also only get you so far. As come the final night and you'll be swarmed from everywhere possible by thousands of creatures and their variants. 

With Age of Darkness: Final Stand, PlaySide and Team17 have brought a new contender to the RTS wrestling ring. While it won't knock any of the competitive titles off of their podiums - it doesn't need to. Instead of hyper-competitive multiplayer, we have a dark and moody experience that isn't for the faint of heart. The fantasy setting works wonders in bringing the horror home as swords and pikes clash with the monsters that lurk in the dark. Age of Darkness: Final Stand isn't a particularly easy game, and every mini-victory is often squashed with the tears of defeat. That being said, it's also a game that you'll return to again, and again.

 And with a pretty robust road map, this is one Early Access game you shouldn't miss out on! 

Rating 8.5/10

A code was kindly provided for this review 

Age of Darkness: Final Stand is currently part of Steam's Early Access and can be purchased here.

Like this review and want to support the blog further? You can do so by heading over to Ko-Fi.com/GeekCultureRev. Any donations will be greatly appreciated, but more so is the fact that you took the time to read this review Thank you!

Rob Lake - For more comic book and video game chat why not follow Geek Culture Reviews on Twitter and Facebook @GeekCultureRev