Game Review | Age of Darkness - this ain’t no one night stand

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I’m going to start this out with a little honesty, I feel like we all need to be real with each other before we plunge ourselves in to the depths of the Nightmare Fog and probably die… I had no idea RTS, mass-wave-of-doom, survive-until-you-die, mega-super-tower-defence, or RTSMWODSUYDMSTD, was even a genre. I mean sure, I’d heard about They are Billions, but I’d never seen any gameplay or heard of what it really was, and I thoroughly enjoyed Frostpunk, which is basically an RTS survival game, but I didn’t know it was A THING. So, when I saw the screenshots for Age of Darkness, I got them bazoonga eyes! You know, those ones that shoot out of your head like some sort of animated wolf man.

If you too are unaware of the RTSMWODSUYDMSTD genre, it’s where you need to build up your base camp, upgrade its structures, farm certain resources, train up your army and slap up some defences before a seemingly unstoppable wave of mutant ghoulies come knocking at your door ready to consume all your beverage after a certain amount of time. The longer you survive, the more menacing the ghoulies become and more than likely, there are just a butt-ton more of them.

I’m going to start this out with a little honesty, I feel like we all need to be real with each other before we plunge ourselves in to the depths of the Nightmare Fog and probably die… I had no idea RTS, mass-wave-of-doom, survive-until-you-die, mega-super-tower-defence, or RTSMWODSUYDMSTD, was even a genre. I mean sure, I’d heard about They are Billions, but I’d never seen any gameplay or heard of what it really was, and I thoroughly enjoyed Frostpunk, which is basically an RTS survival game, but I didn’t know it was A THING. So, when I saw the screenshots for Age of Darkness, I got them bazoonga eyes! You know, those ones that shoot out of your head like some sort of animated wolf man.

If you too are unaware of the RTSMWODSUYDMSTD genre, it’s where you need to build up your base camp, upgrade its structures, farm certain resources, train up your army and slap up some defences before a seemingly unstoppable wave of mutant ghoulies come knocking at your door ready to consume all your beverage after a certain amount of time. The longer you survive, the more menacing the ghoulies become and more than likely, there are just a butt-ton more of them.

Seems simple enough, but this is when the strategy part of RTSMWODSUYDMSTD kicks in. You need to be able to juggle your resources so that you can efficiently keep building up your army, all while upgrading and building your structures, but then running out of space for farms, meaning you need to expand the base, meaning you run into more enemies, meaning you need more army and defences. It’s a vicious circle that Age of Darkness just made pretty addictive.

Since Age of Darkness is still in Early Access, it’s not a complete game just yet. When you first boot it up, there are a few gameplay options that are currently greyed out. For instance, PlaySide, the team behind the game, are currently focusing on the Survival game mode for Age of Darkness, where the goal is to survive increasingly difficult waves of enemies up until the final “Death Night”. The Scenario gameplay mode has been disabled, but this shows that the team hopes to put in scenarios, possibly story-driven, into the game which means there’s a probability for some cool lore. The game gives off strong Warcraft vibes, with its graphical aesthetic and its ability to pick a hero before you plunge into the depths of your own nightmares (currently we’re restricted to only picking Edwin, a flaming-sword wielding, beast of a man, whose mother was obviously a butcher, ‘cuz this boy cleaves baby!) so having some lore behind it would just make it that much more gripping.

I also hung out in the Age of Darkness Discord, to see how interested the devs were in the community’s feedback and overall, it seems positive. The pros of getting hooked on a game by a “small” studio is that the team behind the game usually listens and updates regularly, meaning that the Early Access negatives that come with most games almost fall to the wayside, I think.

Ok ok, enough hype, how does it play? There are a few quality-of-life changes that could be made and a few things to fix in terms of balancing and exploits, but, to me, the game feels polished. It runs smoothly and plays as an RTS should. All the old quick button presses I’ve picked up from my old days of RTS gaming work the same here and it feels comfortable.

I could spend hours on end, bolstering defences and training up a large army only to be defeated on my third death night, then to hop right back in and try out a new strategy I’d thought of while watching my not-so-perfectly planned base get mercilessly walked all over by the Nightmares in their boots.

What makes it more interesting is that each time you start up a new Survival game the map is procedurally generated, meaning that you may have picked up a few new ideas from your last defeat, but they may or may not work this time around because your chokepoints are completely different. They’ve also put in a few new mechanics, like horror and emboldening, causing your units to slow or get damaged if they are scared and to slowly become more courageous the longer they fight for you.

Each military unit also gets given its own name, which I felt was a nice touch and gave me chest pains each time I lost Campbell or Atari. They took Covid to heart as well and threw some thiccccccc Death Fog that rolls over the whole map each Death Night wherever you haven’t placed your buildings, causing you to be unaware of what’s coming next.

Age of Darkness has been the Hades of RTS survival games for me. I’m now scouring the web for more games like it, but I will always return to the dark. I can’t wait to see what comes out the other end of its early access.