HomeFeaturesAge Of Darkness: Final Stand
Grimdark RTS Age of Darkness: Final Stand throws thousands against your frail wallsMerciless foes in the dark promise a punishing yet satisfying challenge
Merciless foes in the dark promise a punishing yet satisfying challenge
Leave the doormat outside long enough inAge Of Darkness: Final Standand you might not live to see the morning. If the game’s grimdark aesthetic didn’t warn you, here’s another from me directly: this game is brutal. Be mentally prepared to start over, over and over again. The “one more round” syndrome is strong with this mashup of tower defense and strategy.
The game’s premise is simple: survive. While the standard survival mode is challenging enough to warrant hours of gameplay, Age Of Darkness’s modifiers let you amp up the carnage for a nightmarish good time. See those little creatures all over your screen like bees in an unstable hive? Now picture building a settlement over them.
Age of Darkness: Final Stand | Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
Age of Darkness: Final Stand | Announcement Trailer
The towers at your disposal in Age Of Darkness: Final Stand are garden variety ones that populate most tower defense games. You’ve got your regular towers to stuff with archers, ballistae towers, and flame belchers that deal area-of-effect damage. While walls last longer than your quarries in an assault, they don’t have the staying power of walls commonly found in strategy games.
While Age Of Darkness: Final Stand gets a lot right, I wish there were more maps and biomes to duel it out with Nightmare variants. Picture beings with icy breath and creatures who can summon sand dunes; potential expansion ideas, certainly, but the vanilla experience could use some more flavor. The devs’ roadmap shows promise, with campaign and multiplayer components on their way. Perhaps they’ll do a better job explaining the lore of Age Of Darkness and the disarray of its inhabitants.
Age Of Darkness: Final Stand doesn’t go toe to toe against mainstay strategy titles, but Publisher Team17 know their fiendish crusade isn’t for the faint of heart. Death comes swiftly and often but it brings lessons as well. With solid replayability thanks to its modifiers and an unrelenting enemy, Age Of Darkness carves a place for itself in a niche long thought to be dead. For those willing to brave its Death Nights, Age of Darkness promises to meet them halfway with a ballista ballet.
