izigame.me

Age Of Darkness has all the pieces needed for it to be one of the best games ever made. Sadly, these pieces are scattered all-over, like a child's play-ground.
I'll cover what I mean by discussing a few noteworthy topics.
# Concept
An asymmetrical RTS against a computer opponent, focusing on infinite replay-value and much longer, deeper matches than the usual Starcraft and Age Of Empires 20 minutes? That's literally dream-game material for me.
Add a pinch of MOBA with multiple heroes to pick, each with pre-set abilities; and some Warcraft 3-style RPG with map exploration? Count me in!
Procedural maps and mutators that make every run unique; and further customization options; without meta-progression? Stop, now you're just spoiling me!
# Engine
The user-interface, controls and performance are world-class. Absolutely nothing to complain about here from what I've seen so far.
Visuals and music are also good and fitting. Not best-in-class or anything but will satisfy everyone except those only interested in state-of-the-art graphics.
# Macro
At a surface level, building and progression seem to be pretty much the standard fare, "inspired" by some of the all-time-best RTS titles out there. Upon a closer inspection though, there are many changes here and all of them for the worse.
Population: a minor road-block meant to reward thoughtful players and be a resource- and APM-sink, has been doubled with both food and housing serving the same function. As such, what is by design a minor annoyance with no satisfying gameplay attached to it has now become a big annoyance with no up-sides to it other than building placement (not why anyone is playing this game for).
Another self-own is the resource limit, a terrible idea Age Of Darkness introduced to a formula that didn't need to be changed.
You will be maxed out on resources basically all the time unless you are constantly producing buildings and units - which is impossible to do since you can't build where you don't have vision; vision is extremely limited if you don't have units right there; there is limited space to build on the map (even more so when resources are required); and similar buildings cannot be placed anywhere near each other!
On top of that, you also should be playing the game, right, not just producing stuff? So even spending half of your play-time trying to use your resources before you max-out is not viable.
So, you decide to construct a warehouse to extend your limit. Well you need wood and stone so you build a few resource-generating buildings except for each of those you will also need to build multiple houses and farms… but remember that you have a resource cap! (Is why we're building the warehouse, right)? So, just getting this out of the way is going to take multiple days in-game. Next, you need more farms and houses for the warehouse itself - another day or two maybe.
By the time you get the warehouse built, you will be at your maximum resource storage again in a matter of minutes. It's ludicrous. Get ready to spend the next several days repeating the process because you're gonna need those warehouses to amass enough resources to be able to pay for more expensive buildings and upgrades later on!
Have you noticed what you haven't been building during all this time? Cool units; cool defenses; getting interesting upgrades or support structures...
Speaking of upgrades, guess what? Upgrades for your units use the same resources as the buildings do. So good luck deciding between whether to run laps around the arbitrary limits the game imposed upon you or actually spending your resources on cool stuff that will actually affect the gameplay and battle-field of the video game you're playing.
Why not properly balance the game rather than add a hard resource cap? Would it hurt to have the upgrades require experience to be spent instead (a mechanic that already is in the game, by the way)?
I honestly think that Age of Darkness would be better off just deleting the entire resource system it has and replacing it with a deck-building mini-game where you draw cards to play as buildings at the start of each day. The current system is entirely arbitrary; anti-fun; not intuitive or flexible; and an objective down-grade from decades of established strategy game design.
# Micro
Exploring and engaging in battles with your units is pretty shallow. I guess it's the kind of game where building your armies’ composition is more important than actually maneuvering them in combat.
Having a hero unit, with its 4 abilities, is what the game offers as a APM-sink to make up for it. Even compared to MOBAs though, the action here is pretty bare-bones.
Guess what? That's perfectly fine.
While shallow, Age Of Darkness hits a sweet-spot of brain-less clicking around and reacting - every so often interrupted by the day-night cycle; a certain enemy; or a special location being found. It's not deep or brilliant but it works. Even on higher difficulties and using the pause button a lot, I don’t think there’d be a whole lot of tactical depth here.
What brings the entire house down is that you are only allowed to play the game for 5 minutes at a time before needing to go back and baby-sit your base - and then do that shallow-but-entertaining-enough loop again 30 times in a row for 5 minutes each.
It absolutely destroys the nice mix of brainless fun the game has and turns it into an incredibly shallow and repetitive slog instead. Why not have 5 cycles of 30 minutes?! Maybe the designers all suffer from heavy ADHD?
Think of your most precious RTS memory. Was it winning an 40-minute-long campaign in AOE2 where you kept encroaching on your enemy’s territory by building castles deeper and deeper? Was it a 15-minute fight over a choke-point in Dawn Of War before you broke the enemy then over-ran his bases with the momentum of victory?
Well, now imagine these same memories except they all had to fit into a series of Tik Tok videos instead. Doesn’t hit the same way now, does it?
This is not what RTS is or should be about - let alone one that mandates a fixed time-frame of 2-3 hours per run!
On top of that, even on these 5-minute windows, there is nothing exciting to find on the map other than grind zombies for experience. A nightmare mob that is harder than all the zombies in the map combined? OK. A capture point that gives me resources I can't even pick up because I'm always at resource-cap anyway? Yawn.
Age Of Darkness would be better without the day-night cycle (or with it heavily modified) and having instead a more sandbox approach to its maps like in Warcraft 3. Why not take some of the buildings away from the player and place it on the map instead, letting the player buy units from a mercenary guild or food from farmers?
# Conclusion
As I said at the beginning, all the pieces are there to make Age of Darkness one of the best games in history. It's only how they are currently organized that warrants this negative review.
So hey, good thing the game's in early-access right? They'll surely fix things before a full release!
No, they won't.
After building an entire single-player campaign designed and balanced with the current state of things in mind, there is a 0% chance that this game will get the overhaul it deserves and so needs.
The best we can hope for at this point is that they'll open-source the game engine and let the community take it from there. I don't think that's happening either.
Age Of Darkness aimed for the stars and you can see what they were going for clearly while playing the game - sadly it somehow ended up shooting itself a couple times too many on the foot instead and I sadly cannot recommend it over now-ancient, traditional RTS titles or more modern, adjacent games like War-hammer Gladius.
Not only that but the fact that it's going to take you 3 hours or more to play an entire run is also a tough sell. Some people will have enough time to sink into that but most won’t.