Developer(s):PlaySide
Publisher(s):PlaySide, Team17
Platform(s): PC Early Access
Release Date: Oct 7th, 2021
Price:
As PC gaming is coming along, it is established a few genres that sell super well are: Indie games, and RTS titles on PC. If you come across a developer with the strong chops to develop one, well you got yourself a smash hit. Or the works of one. With some light bumps in the road. It resembles They Are Billions, toss in the darkness element (fog of war like element). You are given your usual RTS vibe out of the gate. You are tasked of building up your town/kingdom as a last act of defense. Adding in walls, food pantries, housing, and barracks for your units. Impressively the game has the to slam down on you more then 70,000 enemies at once, so building your line of defenses and units is required timely. Making sure your units are leveled, skilled, and you prepped your time to withstand the hordes.
The game is a Rogue-lite as well, where your areas are all randomized. So things such as land resources So this plays a big part of your success. Things such as caches of loot, or monster dens are all about lurking for you to discover. You know, like Heroes of Might and Magic! With higher risk comes reward. You play through a day and night cycle. Where fighting at night you get higher risk and reward, as to do anything in the day time, its more mellow. The eye of the storm if you will. Light also plays a big part of the game, and allows you to do more and present more canvas to spread your kingdom(possibly expanding your resource gain). I found the HOMM element charming. Detaching slightly from the whole straight forward RTS elements purely. Combining the RPG elements into your Hero units is a lovely addition. Though at the moment your only allowed 1 Hero to use, with a army of soldiers, and archers at your disposal. Given with more upgrades stronger units to. The current build of the game highlights its potential use of a campaign as well. Seemingly mentioned for a future update “when its ready”.
In Closing my thoughts on it all so far:
The game does not punish you, but also gives you a firm slap in the cheek to move your ass into gear. The 5th night or as I nick-named the praise for this event “The Death Blood Moon”. My first time through wiped me out. Telling me I have to be faster to prep my units, or I just had a really bad run of it. (Insert elite player diss to me here). I then went through the paces of trying to find resources much faster, and prep better the next time through, or hoped my new play session has more resources near my Keep. Which is your main hud to select buildings, to build. Luckily as long as the area your building in has a light source, given your Hero unit or torches your safe to build. Which required me to build a good distance from my keep often to try to get faster resources (mostly Wood or Ore in the games current build). Money game from taxes or housing. I found the factor you can save manually also a great thing given the games Rogue-lite suggestion. So if you enjoy your current run, but made a light screw up you can roll back to your last save to fix your goof up. As the game is still in Development or Early Access, I came across some game freezing/crashing often. Which freezes up the game on my PC, causing me to soft log out of my desktop to fix. The soundtrack or background ambiance was fine for the most part. However I found myself putting on some metal music and diving into it that way. It did not keep my ears as pulled in however so that third party music helped. Like mentioned before the game does what They Are Billions has done. This time adding the darkness element, which adds some nice tension. As well as life draining danger to your Units. I would set routes of torches around to help my armies a fair chance to see the incoming hordes of zombies, which to have different units to contend with. Such as Spear users, spider type, axe wielders, elites, and big-bads. Overall a well done idea, with some quality of life in the works seemingly. In its current state if you have a mid-high range PC wait a little while, but do not sleep on this game. Add it to your wishlist at least for now. As much of the crashes are a concern for me to note.
