Sanctum & the Indie Royal

2011-10-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

The worlds first FPS tower defence game, in an indie bundle, for less than 3 quid? How could I resist?

Sanctum - Coffee Stain Studios

So the Indie Royal has launched, a bi-weekly pay-what-you-want indie bundle in the spirit of the Humble Indie Bundles. Indie Royal bundles start off at a stupidly low price, and as more people buy, the price increases. But if you pay over the minimum price, the price for the next person drops again, so it's sort of morally blackmailing you into paying as much as you can. I'm poor... so I paid the minimum.

Now I've had my eye on Sanctum for a while, but at £12.99 for the game and it's 5 DLCs, I wasn't about to shell out for what could be a massive letdown. But bundled with A.R.E.S: Extinction Agenda, Gemini Rue and Nimbus for less than 10% of the normal value, I'm sure the missus won't yell at me too much for treating myself (high roller I know).

As an extra incentive to get the new bundle rolling, Indie Royal have announced that in a deal struck with Coffee Stain Studios, as bundle sale milestones are hit they will release one of the 5 DLCs for free to all bundle purchasers (two DLCs are already available, with the next available at 70,000 downloads).

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First and foremost, this is your run of the mill tower defence game. Despite being rendered in beautiful 3D, rather than the usual 2D isometric browser-based Facebook Flash rubbish we're used to, this is the stumbling block that will deter most hardcore gamers.
I'm pretty certain every gamer out there has played a tower defence game of some sort but, like myself, anyone who considers them self anything but a casual gamer usually get bored and give up about half way through a game.

Each level starts with a briefing screen that shows you the possible routes your enemy's can take, and where your spawns are. You then spawn in 'build mode' with a set amount of resources to build your first line of defences. As always, I started by blocking off routes to ensure the waves take as long as possible to reach the "core" (ah, so it's these buggers that are delaying SnC's half life mod then!) and equipped a few blocks with Gatling Gun towers - the bread and butter defence units.

One thing I've noticed is that in this futuristic world where kamikaze aliens march unstoppably to their death in the hope that their self=sacrifice of bio-energy will somehow overload your "core" (still not quite figured out what it's actually supposed to be - but then all games in this genre tend to be a little plot-light), is that everyone is still polite enough to wait until you're ready before beginning the assault. How kind.

Turns out 6 Gatling towers by the enemy spawn point is more than enough to deal with the first wave of rhythmically marching grunts. Making good use of the Unreal Engine and PhysEx, great lumbering aliens trip over the ever growing pile of corpses that were once their comrades in arms. (seriously, apart from shoving your player model around a bit, this seems to be the only real use of the high-end physics processing that the game has incorporated)

Once they're all delt with, you're back in build mode, with more resources with which to build some more, or upgrade your existing towers. This is all looking fairly run of the mill so far.

Sanctum's individuality comes from it's FPS twist. Basically, unlike regular tower defence games where you can upgrade your towers during the attack phase, Sanctum allows you to get down and dirty with some firepower of your own.
There are semi-automatic machine guns, long range sniper rifles, and special weapons to allow you to do things such as slow an enemy.

The combat is pretty disjointed, it seems it's only real purpose is to allow you to pick of any attackers that get through your lines of defences. The waves of enemies pose no real threat to you as a player, they either die by your hand, push you back a bit, or usually just march straight past you. The worst I encountered was being pushed off the map into the void, but all this results in is you immediately re-spawning at one of the towers dotted around the map and getting stuck back into the fight.

While Coffee Stain Studios have made a commendable attempt in re-imagining a worn out genre, it is still just a tower defence game at heart. If your someone who finds those tedious and boring, you're not going to find anything new here.
If you're looking for a cheap way to kill time, and don't mind playing what is essentially the same fight, non-stop, over and over again, then check out Sanctum, it may be for you.

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(Sanctum is currently available in the Indie Royal bundle for ~£3, for PC, Steam and Desura, or available for purchase separately on Steam & Desura for £6.99)

Welcome

2011-10-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

Welcome to 13 Shades, my new video game review blog.

Unlike sameshit.co.uk, I'm actually likely to update this one as playing video games is something I spend a lot of time doing.
Along with the guys over at Scotch & Coffee, I hope to start doing vlogs soon with play-throughs, tips and funnies from games we've been playing.

So keep your eyes peeled, and I might start surprising you ;)

13 Shades of Grey

Sanctum & the Indie Royal

Welcome