Real time strategy was once the king of PC games with Blizzard on its throne. LANs were dominated by Warcraft and Starcraft tournaments, second only to things like Counter Strike. The early days of pro gamer scenes were also led by RTS and I can clearly remember my first taste of a pro circuit format for eSports was the original Major League Gaming run of Starcraft 2. Today though it’s relegated to a niche after having birthed the vastly more popular MOBA format. So when I saw an opportunity to return to the genre with Age of Darkness: Final Stand I was intrigued as it seemed like an evolution of They Are Billions, something which I rather enjoyed back in the day.
Erodar was once a land ruled by nightmares, horrible creatures that stalked the night and preyed on both humans and elosans alike. Peace was achieved when the Elosans were able to craft giant magic crystals that trapped the nightmares inside, allowing prosperity to reign once again. Of course humanity’s greed for more power pushed them to war with the Elosan, led by the brutal King Ezekiel. With the Elosans now all but eradicated humanity must now deal with the nightmares themselves as the crystals that have long held back the nightmares are becoming unstable. You are the commander of those who remain, tasked with eradicating the nightmares and ensuring King Ezekiel’s long reign.
Age of Darkness’ aesthetic feels like a modern day Warcraft 3 with the muted main colour palette that’s then accentuated with the use of highly saturated lighting effects. Model detail on any individual unit, building or terrain is low, and for good reason, as the game can support up to 70,000 units on screen at any one time. You won’t have anywhere near that many units on screen with any regularity but the slowdown was certainly noticeable in some of the more epic fights that come as the game progresses. Thankfully most of the units and buildings are distinct enough visually that you won’t be spending a lot of time zoomed in trying to find that one thing you were chasing, something that I’ve struggled with in other similar titles. All in all, its visual experience is definitely on par with what I’d expect a current generation RTS to look like.
Age of Darkness is a mix of base building, tower defense and exploration. You start off by choosing a faction, which determines the types of units you have access to, and your hero which will have a specific set of abilities. Initially you’ll only have your keep, hero and a handful of soldiers. You then have to build out your economy which includes both resource gathering and population so you can continue to build out your base and army. You are free to explore with your troops which will likely net you some additional resources at the potential cost of losing some troops. The map will go through day/night cycles with the latter being the more dangerous but also more rewarding time to explore. After a number of cycles you’ll then be subjected to a “death knight” where you’ll have a large horde attack your base. This is where the tower defense aspect comes in as the AI isn’t exactly cutting edge so you can build your base to take advantage of this. If you survive this you then repeat the cycle all over again, hopefully with more troops, better weapons and better defenses.
I’ll start by saying that whilst I appreciate the game including a campaign it is unfortunately just not good. I played it for about an hour and a half and was struggling to find a reason to continue playing the game. To be sure it shows you some of the basics but it takes ages to do so, mostly just having you run around with a set number of troops and doing basically nothing to manage an actual base. I was about to drop the game completely until I figured I should at least try the survival part of the game, figuring that’s the one that they’d spent most of their early access time on developing. Boy I’m glad I did.
The game will proudly tell you that this it’s OK to fail as this is meant to be part of the experience and, true to their word, that’s probably what’s going to happen to you. Whether it’s misjudging how strong you were with your exploration force, reinforcing the wrong part of your base, failing to ramp your economy quickly enough or any of the other easy mistakes to make they will all end up with you failing the run. You can of course save with reckless abandon on the easier difficulties but that won’t save you from a bad strategy. Indeed my first attempt ended on the second death night because I simply couldn’t produce enough troops to keep up, my economy just too meagre to survive through the massive onslaughts.
The second run went a lot better as I was more confident in expanding the base beyond the small confines that I’d initially secured. This does mean that the attack surface I had to defend was much larger but the good news is that depending on how you set up your defenses you can essentially funnel most attacks to a smaller number of points. So whilst expansion is still a risk/reward trade off it might not be as bad as you first think as there aren’t that many divergent paths that the nightmares can take. I also accidentally figured out that you can tweak those paths somewhat by over-reinforcing one position (like, literally just put a wall in front of your gates) which seems to push them more towards more accessible points.
As much as I’d like to claim victory over this game by beating a final stand I unfortunately couldn’t manage that. Whilst I felt like I was doing all the right things: expanding aggressively, building only the top tier units, exploring like crazy, purchasing all the upgrades, etc. it was nowhere near enough for the final engagement. I haven’t had a good trawl through the forums and community discussions to see what the best strategies are so it’s possible the last run I did is salvageable but after a couple attempts with different strategies (stupid big army, lots of defenses, retreating to a reinforced core, etc.) none of them felt effective enough to get me all the way through.
Of course the real answer would be to start over again with the knowledge I have now which I didn’t have then. I thought only the higher tier buildings have synergies with others which is absolutely not the case. So I was unintentionally cutting myself off at the knees with resource generation by not placing houses next to resource gatherers, a simple thing to overlook if you’re just crowding them all together in a single block like I was (which is good for gold generation, but nothing else). Additionally I didn’t figure it out until really late in the piece that having light prevents nightmares from spawning in areas. If you’re so inclined then you can just blanket the whole place in torches and suddenly exploration isn’t as hard or costly. I might go and try another run one day but at that point I felt like I’d seen what I’d wanted to from this game.
Age of Darkness: Final Stand is a great reminder that the RTS genre isn’t dead, it’s evolving. It might not be anything new when compared to similar titles but what it does, it does well. The campaign is an unfortunate weak point for it and honestly is worth skipping in favour of a few trial survival runs to learn the ropes. But other than that misstep the rest of the game is solid, having that kind of community-backed polish I’ve come to expect from games that successfully graduate from early access. There’s still some areas that could use some attention but otherwise it feels like a fully realised vision of what the devs wanted to achieve.
Rating: 8.0/10
Age of Darkness: Final Stand is available on PC right now for $40.99. Total playtime was 8.8 hours with 25% of the achievements unlocked.
