Age of Darkness: Final Stand Preview (Steam Early Access)

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For our Age of Darkness: Final Stand Preview, Where we play a dark fantasy survival RTS where you must illuminate, build and defend humanity’s last bastion against hordes of Nightmares. Set in the remnants of a kingdom consumed by a deadly fog, you decide. Will you hide in the light? Or take back your world.

Age of Darkness: Final Stand Preview Pros:

  • Decent graphics.
  • 12.17GB Download size.
  • Graphics settings – target display, resolution, v-sync, lock cursor, window mode, ui scaling slider, dynamic resolution, brightness, contrast, gamma, textures, shadows, post-processing, ambient occlusion, bloom, anti-aliasing, and environment detail.
  • Can rebind controls.
  • Tutorial tip pop-ups as you play.
  • The gameplay tips menu gives you a refresher on all the controls and mechanics.
  • ARPG gameplay.
  • Two game modes – survival, and campaign.
  • Hand-drawn style cutscenes along with in-game.
  • Fully voiced and narrated.
  • Plays like an RTS in terms of selecting and moving with characters.
  • You can drag over a bunch of characters at once and create units then assign macros to quickly change between them.
  • Characters can have their own set of abilities.
  • Simple click left to move and right to attack controls.
  • Enemies are stronger and in greater numbers at night but give more exp and rewards.
  • Day and night cycle.
  • Powerful story and voice performances.
  • Impactful soundtrack.
  • Each mission shows how many objectives there are and also how many you have done.
  • The map for level select is a normal size in 3D with your characters larger.
  • Create units and have them Patrol an area or have overwatch.
  • Earn EXP and level up characters for new abilities and unlocks.
  • At all times you can only see so far around your units.
  • Fog of war whereby the map uncovers as you explore.
  • Click anywhere on the mini-map to go straight there.
  • All abilities have cooldowns.
  • Play how you want within a level.
  • Building structures requires resources and workers to make.
  • The handy building grid system shows green for safe to build and red for unsafe.
  • You can see enemy health bars.
  • Uses a system called Swarmtech that allows 70,000 swarming Ai units on screen at once.
  • Living fog that moves in and around light and dark.
  • Skill trees for the leaders and higher-up characters that allow you to customize.
  • Scratches the Wow classic and Starcraft itch.
  • Does a good job of seamlessly transitioning between combat/gameplay and cutscenes.

Age of Darkness: Final Stand Preview Cons:

  • Doesn’t support controllers.
  • No Steam achievements.
  • Cannot skip the cutscenes.
  • No benchmark test.
  • It feels like cutscenes and interactions can just hang in silence for a short time.
  • Bits of placeholder text on loading screens.
  • No difficulty settings at the start.
  • Combat is very sluggish at the start.
  • Dealing with many upgrades and individuals is a lot of hard work.
  • No multiplayer as of yet but there is a menu option greyed out.
  • Pathfinding is a bit hit-and-miss.
  • You cannot just right-click on the mini-map to send troops somewhere, instead, you have to click on the map the right click on the land in the game.
  • Tutorial pop-ups are very basic.

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Age of Darkness: Final Stand:

Official website.

Developer: PlaySide Studios 

Publisher: Team17 

Store Links –

Steam Early Access

Jim Smale

Gaming since the Atari 2600, I enjoy the weirdness in games counting Densha De Go and RC De Go as my favourite titles of all time. I prefer gaming of old where buying games from a shop was a thing, Being social in person was a thing. Join me as I attempt to adapt to this new digital age!