Age of Darkness: Final Stand is a dark fantasy RTS game set in a mysterious kingdom enveloped by Lethal Fog. The game follows humanity’s last stand against the army of Nightmares, dark creatures suddenly unleashed into the world. Your objective is to build, light up and secure humanity’s last bastion against hordes of monsters.

As expected, the story has a very dark tone and atmosphere that sees humans fighting against elves and monsters. In this world, you lead a group of heroes who fight against corruption in order to save humanity from extinction.

Currently in Early Access on Steam, Age of Darkness features two game modes: Campaign and Survival. The Campaign recently received a huge update with Act III, which includes three new missions and cinematics, a unique boss, a brand-new hero (Aurelia) and several fixes.

Despite still being in early access and not including any Steam achievement yet, the game looks really polished and this might be a good time to play it.

Build and gather resources by day, survive by night

The first levels of the Campaign work as a tutorial, which explains the basic needs for survival. You need to recruit villagers, gather resource, build defenses and fight against waves of enemies. One weird thing I noticed, compared to other RTS, is that you never see the villagers work, instead they immediately teleport at the building site (which makes construction faster, at least).

The game has a slow learning curve, it needs time to get used to all the different mechanics, so I suggest beating the Campaign first because it’s a good starting point for RTS beginners and allows to dive deeply into the lore.

As the title says, Survival mode requires you to endlessly resist against waves of enemies through procedurally generated maps, but you can select the difficulty level which also changes the number of saves at your disposal.

The game features a day and night cycle that directly affects gameplay. During the day, you must build your outpost and make your heroes scout the area covered by the fog of war, fighting against enemies and leveling up.

At night, enemies become more aggressive and they attack your settlement in massive numbers. Battles are powered by a new technology called “SwarmTech” that allows to render over 70.000 enemy units at one time.

The Death Night also brings random curses called Malices that negatively impact your heroes, but if you survive until dawn you can choose one of three Blessings as a reward, which will greatly boost your army. Heroes also have unique abilities that can change the fate of the battle, but they can die just like any other unit and then you must wait for them to respawn.

Age of Darkness: Survival is the recommended mode for streamers

Age of Darkness: Final Stand can be a very challenging game for newcomers. Those who played Warcraft, The Riftbreaker and Age of Empires will quickly adapt to its difficulty. The development of the game is still in progress and I would suggest streamers to wait for the final version before deciding to stream the Campaign.

Survival mode, on the other hand, is perfect for streaming because it offers randomly generated maps, so each run includes unexpected gameplay elements and plenty of replayability.

It’s also fun for streamers to test themselves in front of their audience and see how long they can survive against waves of monsters of increasing difficulty.

The PC version runs smoothly, with no bugs or performance issues, not even when there are thousands of enemies in one screen. The game is also translated in 8 languages, so can be experienced by a wide audience and streamers from different countries.

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marcoleo

I’m a passionate guy who loves videogames, movies, anime and comics. I like to talk about videogames and share my opinion with the world.