REVIEW – I’ve waged war against over 50,000 enemies in a survival strategy game designed to drive me insane. After nearly four years of continuous updates, PlaySide’s game has finally exited early access, but it’s not for everyone.

There exists an underrepresented yet inspiring subgenre: horde-based survival strategy games. While Spain contributed the highly addictive Cataclysm, there was another project that entered early access years ago with the intention of making waves later: Age of Darkness: Final Stand. Now, four years after I first tested PlaySide Studios’ early access version, I’ve returned to the full release to face more than 50,000 enemies once again – and endure suffering like never before.

But isn’t that what these games are all about? Yes, but PlaySide Studios possesses a rare talent that few have managed to replicate. The concept, built around pushing survival to the extreme, places you in the role of a ruler tasked with developing a city, overseeing its growth, and, most importantly, surviving the monstrous sieges that come each night. All of this is powered by their proprietary SwarmTech engine, which can render more than 70,000 enemies simultaneously on-screen – making your CPU sweat as if it were trapped in a scorching Mediterranean afternoon.

When Night Falls, Your Castle Must Hold

In the fantasy world of Age of Darkness, daylight is peaceful. Birds chirp, the sun shines warmly, and citizens are ready to expand. But beyond the city’s borders, a lurking evil waits: monsters. The game’s format heavily resembles They Are Billions, especially given their similar foundations. Age of Darkness delivers exactly what it promises: survival and a city’s endurance through endless nights.

By day, your goal is to fortify defenses and gather resources, but it also involves constructing walls, deploying new units, and upgrading existing buildings. The gameplay structure clearly draws inspiration from Age of Empires. The city’s daytime routine must follow a logical order: food, shelter, and work are necessary, ensured by residential buildings, production zones, and a multitude of blazing pyres – all in preparation for the night.

However, when the sun sets, Age of Darkness reveals its true strength: the hordes. Thanks to the previously mentioned physics and unit engine, the first few nights serve as a light warm-up – a few monsters knocking at your gates, hoping you might lend them a limb or a child for dinner. But as the days pass, the nightmare hordes swell in size. The goal is to engage in a constant tug-of-war with the game’s own system: how long can you hold out? While the AI prepares the next wave, your job is to brace yourself and endure.

Final Stand in the World of Age of Darkness

Strategic city planning is key in this game, and while Age of Darkness doesn’t revolutionize city-building mechanics, it remains consistent in what it aims to achieve. The monsters don’t always attack from the same spot, but there are patterns that hint at their likely approach, forcing you to strategically place your units and structures. For instance, if the right flank has been targeted multiple times, there’s a higher chance that future waves will strike there before shifting their focus elsewhere. Adapting accordingly is crucial.

The problem is that, in theory, this all sounds simple, but in practice, your own city often becomes your greatest obstacle. Resources are finite, stone quarries and logging camps drift further from inhabited zones, and sometimes you must choose the lesser evil: sacrificing certain areas and risking resource loss to rebuild elsewhere. However, the SwarmTech system isn’t designed to make things easy – as the waves intensify, so too does the variety and tactical intelligence of the monsters.

The nightmares react intelligently to your decisions and exploit the surrounding fog, which only clears near fire, to cripple your soldiers. Compared to the early access version, I was pleased to see that PlaySide did their homework in the art of frustrating players, introducing a fear and morale system that plays a crucial role in battles. The troops and heroes – a total of six, divided into two factions – who possess higher health and special abilities, now react to battle situations. This isn’t a Darkest Dungeon-style mechanic, but more akin to Total War: if your troops lose ground or are forced to fight in darkness, their energy and morale will deteriorate.

Fight, Win, Repeat Until the End

Even if you manage to maintain control, your city will inevitably expand to the point where it collides with enemy spawn zones, ensuring that in this battle of endurance, you’ll eventually be the one to crack. And since failure is a completely ordinary occurrence in Age of Darkness, PlaySide has implemented certain safety nets to prevent absolute frustration and wasted effort. With the alternating day-night cycle and the minimal monster presence during the day, the game grants you a chance to send out expeditions with soldiers or your chosen hero into the surrounding regions.

These expeditions aren’t just useful for clearing fog and determining optimal building locations; they also allow you to gather valuable resources from elite-guarded areas or launch preemptive strikes against the nightmare nests. And while the enemy outnumbers you massively, you can weaken them by targeting key points – but it’s always a race against time, where managing your city and ensuring your troops return safely becomes increasingly complex with each wave.

All of this makes Age of Darkness an incredibly entertaining project. But where’s the downside I mentioned earlier? You might ask. The truth is, the biggest drawback of a survival RTS is ingrained in the genre’s DNA: repetition. Age of Darkness does its best to make this enjoyable, but after a while, the illusion fades. A full playthrough takes around eight hours if you manage to eradicate the darkness, but most of the gameplay boils down to doing the same thing over and over again. The SwarmTech runs flawlessly on PC, and seeing 50,000 enemies on screen is genuinely breathtaking, yet the project remains confined within its own limitations and never truly breaks free of them.

You Against the World

Despite the game’s challenging nature and steep learning curve, it provides an engrossing experience that rewards patience and planning. Every defeat becomes a lesson for the next run, and the sense of survival is both satisfying and exhausting. It’s not for the faint of heart, but for those who love strategy and high-stakes challenges, Age of Darkness: Final Stand is a solid choice.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-

Publisher: PlaySide

Developer: PlaySide

Style: Strategy

Release Date: January 15, 2025