I first played Age of Darkness: Final Stand when it came out on Steam’s Early Access, in 2021. At the time, it looked and felt like a proper successor to They Are Billions, one of the best, and most underrated RTS ever made, it looked nice, gameplay and unit control were tight, and had a cool concept. I couldn’t wait to see how it would end up. Well, about that…
- Genre: Real-Time Strategy
- Developer: Playside
- Publisher: Playside
- Release Date: 15th January, 2025
- Price: $27.99/ 26,99€/ £22.99
- Buy at: Steam
- Reviewed On: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.70 GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 2080
Let’s start with the basic premise of the game: Age of Darkness: Final Stand is a real-time strategy title that very much follows in the vein of the 2019 They Are Billions. This means that you’ll be tasked with building up your town, gathering resources, recruiting military units, constructing ridiculously intricate defences, and every so often defending against the massive hordes of whatever Lovecraftian creature the game throws at you.
Instead of hordes of the undead, Age of Darkness: Final Stand enemies are less meaty and more ghostly. The all-consuming nightmares come from “The veil”, and their design is very otherworldly: skeletons-like mobs, haunting spectral, disfigured multi-legged creatures, massive hulking beasts, all coloured in bright spectral greens, invoking sentiments of madness and despair. However, their end goal ends up being the same: a massive horde of threats that rushes your defences and tries to overwhelm them. Despite a flavoursome design, these units don’t feel like a very different threat from those in They Are Billions or any other zombie game for that matter.
That point leads me to my main point of complaint in this review: I love the unit design, even if it comes off a bit tacky, I still love them, but there just aren’t there a whole lot of enemy variety, and those that exist, are not that interesting to fight and the game’s premise suffers a lot because of it. Horde games should rely on two things- I think- to put pressure on the player and keep them on their toes: an increasing number of enemies, and an increasing number of enemy types to deal with. Age of Darkness: Final Stand delivers on that first aspect in spaces, rendering thousands of enemies at once, making hordes seem like… well, hordes. The problem is, with the lack of enemy variety to keep things interesting with new mechanics and new challenges, after a while, every horde feels the same, but with more enemies. This isn’t bad in and of itself, it’s just not that interesting. And when you can pull from something as esoteric as the “nightmares”, this feels like a wasted opportunity to design scary, interesting and menacing creatures that don’t feel boring to fight against. Flying units, ghostly siege engines, more animal-inspired creatures (the sewer centipede from Dark Souls 3 would be a perfect fit), and more Crusher-like units with unique attack patterns, instead of having it being just a massive health bar. Almost every enemy aside from the more basic ones ends up feeling too beefed-up, with no interesting mechanics to fight against.
Fortunately, this problem doesn’t extend to the game’s human counterparts. There are three playable factions: The Order, The Rebellion, and the Volatist. Each one of these factions has two exclusive heroes. These six hero units play massively differently from one another, each with their own skills. Edwin is your typical area-of-effect knight with a massive claymore, cleaving dozens of enemies with every swing. Merek is a musclehead, axe-wielding knight. Aelis summons her loyal guards and buffs them in combat, and Vizargo and Aurelia draw their powers from The Veil, with Aurelia even using Dark Essence as a currency to activate some powers. The more regular units are what you would expect: swordsmen, spearmen, archers, healers, crossbowmen, and knights. There are also some faction-exclusive units like the cultist (fast, dual-blade-wielding lunatics), and the hunter (a better archer, with traps), amongst a couple of others. Unlike the enemies, the good thing about each one of these units is that they’re fun to use, and each one has its tactical use on the battlefield. The same goes for the siege units, even though there are just three of them: a catapult, an impaler (a ballista), and a flamer, these are extremely powerful, with a price point to match. If you ask me, I think there could have been more human units, like arquebusiers, and cavalry, just for good measure.
Now, let’s talk about the part I have enjoyed the most: the campaign. I went into it with zero expectations, expecting to get bored with it just after a couple of missions. Colour me surprised when I went out of my way to find time to play it across several busy weekends. Now, its plot is predictable, and some basic generic fantasy, but it feels like a good comfort meal: you know what you’re getting, and you’re having a good time with it. I’m not going to spoil the story for you, but if you’re the kind of guy who loves fantasy, you’ll probably have fun. However, the best part of the whole campaign is how the team managed to keep it interesting by rotating the factions you play as. In some missions you’re The Order, attempting to keep the World from falling into disarray, on other missions you’ll lead The Rebellion, and in a couple, you’ll play as The Volatists. The mission variety is here, and you’ll have desperate last stands, sneaky escapes, all-out battles, struggle for resources, and all that good stuff.
I just have one major issue with the campaign, and that is that it feels like it ends very abruptly, with no proper build-up until the final mission. You know that sense of crescendo when you’re reading an epic book, or watching a movie? Well, This campaign doesn’t have that. You arrive at the last mission and you’re there, and that’s it. It doesn’t feel all that great or glorious, and the reason for that, I think, is because the ending of the campaign is teasing future content expansions. I’m curious to play those, and I will, but it was a missed opportunity to wrap up this story in a better way.
The overall presentation of Age of Darkness is rather decent. There’s nothing special in here, or mind-blowing, but it would be unfair to say it has a bad presentation, it’s just average. Graphics are okay, with units and buildings packing some detail and good textures, the sound is serviceable, as it gets the job done, but there’s nothing memorable in here, no instant classic unit barks, no incredible music score, and no outstanding sound effects. The animations are a bit wonky, even if some of the units, especially the hero ones, can feel a bit floaty, and I’ve come across several funny moments with units pushing each other out of the way, forcing the enemies units to just start gliding, it’s weird. I had some technical issues, such as frame drops and some stutter, and I’m not sure if those are because of my system, or if it’s because of the game’s optimization. From the comments I read on Steam, it looks like the problem is in the game, but in any case, you have my systems specs at the start of this review if you want to check them out. The UI is good, and minimalistic, with every information easily accessible. Overall, you won’t be forcefully closing your jaw from awe, but you won’t be displeased either. As a side note, I saw some Steam reviews saying that the game had bugs, but in my 50 hours with it, I don’t remember seeing anything that broke my experience with the game. The only complaint I have might, is about the way units stack behind each other, and if you’re not constantly adjusting them, they’ll pile on a line and the ones on the back, who should be surrounding the enemies, just do nothing, so maybe pathfinding is a bit rough.
To start wrapping this review out, have in mind that this, being mostly a horde-defence RTS, gameplay can become quite repetitive after a while, but the fun in it is figuring out how you can adapt the randomly generated maps to your advantage, creating chokepoints, building extremely impractical walls and defences, with redundancy, after redundancy, in case your redundancies have failed the other redundancies in place. If you enjoy this kind of gameplay loop, I think you’ll have fun with Age of Darkness: Final Stand, and if you enjoy a decent, if tacky campaign, this could be a cool choice for your next game. If you’re looking for a more classic RTS experience, this isn’t it.
Final Score: 6/10
Coming from me, a person who’s usually very positive about the games I review, giving it a 6 out of 10 might come out as a bit harsh, especially given the amount of praise I bestowed upon certain parts of the game during this review. While I loved the campaign and had a blast with it, the limited enemy variety, the technical issues, and the lack of strategy variety make it very difficult to place it above that mark. Maybe I just had high expectations for Age of Darkness: Final Stand, and came out a bit underwhelmed, or maybe, the game just didn’t live up to its full potential. With that said, I still think that Age of Darkness: Final Stand, is still worth a go if you love a good single-player campaign, but I’m failing to see its staying power. Hopefully, I’m wrong about that.
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