Here’s the IGN review, if you haven’t heard of Sanctum before. It’s an FPS/tower defense hybrid which is pretty damn fun. So don’t be misled by my mostly negative commentary; it’s easy to criticize, and the bad things always stand out when the rest of the game is good.
The good
All five classes are unlocked at level one. It’s Christmas! It’s the honeymoon period, when you’re just getting familiarized with the game, and all the classes are potentially your favorite one, and DAYUM YOU SEE ME LIGHT DAT SUMBITCH UP?!
Actually, the honeymoon period lasts fairly long, with new towers and perks you unlock as your character levels up, and a decent variety of bad guys with individual weaknesses.
Sanctum does a decent job making classes distinctive. You’ve got your sniper with bonus critical damage, your heavy who deals more damage at closer range and has extra health, and your standard assault whose damage ramps up on consecutive hits. The other two have cool damage buffs, but don’t encourage different play styles so much.
The level loading screen doubles as the story screen, so you can choose to read the dialogue, or skip to the action immediately after loading. This clever decision caters to both types of people. I think Monaco employs this pattern too; it’s a good one.
On Interface
(If you aren’t familiar with how tower defense shooters work, you build a maze to make the bad guys double around and give your towers as much time as possible to dust ‘em)
The wall building interface, very Minecraft-esque, works well if you’re just starting to learn the game, and you want very little friction between the thought, “Put wall there”, and its reification. But when you start scaling up the levels, the complexity of the maps, and the number of things to build, it starts to get tedious real quick. I should mention that you are in FPS perspective the entire game, but you can only build towers or maze between waves. The tedium, which is also the difference between Sanctum and Minecraft, is the delay. To trigger any modification, you hold the mouse button (left for build, right for remove) for an annoyingly long time, probably 500-700 ms. And you’re under time pressure! That quickly adds up when you only have a minute between waves. I felt like I was fighting the interface, instead of the bad guys.
I would prefer a top down view for just the maze building section. That way it’s much quicker to build/rebuild a maze, which you may often want to do, since you receive more building blocks after each wave. I definitely understand the immersive value in keeping the player in FPS perspective the entire game. But Borderlands does this well, where a hologram pops up like a physical menu in front of the player character. Plus, this sort of hologram would fit in perfectly with the sci-fi aesthetic of Sanctum. On the other hand, if we weren’t to have a separate view, I would definitely get rid of the building delay.
I’d also prefer a separate global view to relate tactical info like the damage dealt by each of your towers, so you can get a sense of each tower’s value. This would also show the types of monsters in the next wave, which would be much more accessible than having to aim at the monster spawn site. Is keeping the player in FPS perspective worth sacrificing the core tower defense gameplay? Or if you really don’t want to popup another view, you just display the next wave of monsters in a HUD next to the mini-map.
On maps
Tower defense maps need to balance believability and functionality. Every level can’t just be an open field, which would be perfect for maze building, but also ridiculous. Sanctum’s maps varied; some were smart about using natural obstacles as parts of your maze, and others were frustratingly obtuse. There was one map with lava pits in the center, which would be really cool to funnel bad guys into, except it didn’t feel like the optimal strategy because of their placement in the map. Giving a brief view of the map before going into class selection would be a smart move as well, so you can adapt your class/perks to match the battlefield.
The bad
I’d like to bitch about the lack of saving/retrying between waves. If you mess up, you’re done, all your hard work was for naught, and you don’t get to try out other strategies, and learn from your mistakes. This doesn’t make the game hardcore, it makes it frustrating as hell. The difficulty of the last wave is disproportionately high, and the winning strategy is sometimes completely different from the previous waves; yea, I get that it needs to feel epic, but losing on the last wave and having to redo the entire level to get a second shot totally sucks ass. I’ve never played Dark Souls, but it definitely feels wrong to me that the one wave you’d be at greatest risk of failure is also the wave when you have the most to lose. There are some games in which this makes sense, but when each level takes 20-30 minutes to beat, it’s a different situation.
One inconsistency in the rules of the game-there are flying enemies that can bypass your carefully wrought maze, and then there are hovering enemies that still go through the maze. Games need to be consistent about the rules of the fictitious world in which the player lives.
There’s clearance. Like right there.
My biggest gripe was how non-essential and boring the player character is after building the towers or maze. The building part of the game uses all your mental resources, which are then mostly freed once the wave begins. I say mostly because shooting bad guys takes minimal concentration when you know exactly where they’re going. You don’t do much damage compared to your towers, and if you need to make up for poor tower placement, it’s often very repetitive, mindless shooting. You shoot until your clip is empty, swap to secondary weapon, and repeat.
It’s the fundamental problem of putting FPS and tower defense together. You need the enemies to be predictable for the towers to play their part, but then the FPS is soooooo boring. Sanctum puts in enemies that go aggro on players specifically, but they’re relatively easy to put down. Yea, there are vulnerable spots on each enemy to keep it interesting, but it’s not hard to hit them when you know their path. So what can you do to make it more interesting?
Suggestions
These improvements are geared towards having a more active experience when you aren’t building towers or maze.
I don’t like how the bricks you’re given are just magically granted after every wave. Very thought-free, boring resource management. Instead, you could make it a balancing act between gathering resources to make more walls, and keeping the bad guys out. You have to leave your base temporarily in order to gather the resources to make bricks. Or, since it’s more exciting to shoot stuff, you protect the NPC that goes to get the goods, which can lure away some bad guys from your base as well.
I’d also love to see more traps. There’s a tower that lets you deploy mines, which is damn cool and super effective. It’s a good way to promote strategerie in a way that is more active then creating a tower and watching it shoot shit.
Along the same vein, relegating support/utility roles to the player could also make for interesting combat. There’s a tower that slows everything in a radius. Let’s make this a spell, usable by the player, as a defense mechanism against a particularly swift foe. Or make a spell that temporarily buffs a particular tower against an armor-heavy wave.