Age of Darkness: Final Stand has recently been released out of early access with multiplayer being added. In this RTS I'm going to be looking at the campaign and survival mode.

You don’t have to play the campaign mode first to get a general understanding of how to play this RTS. I found it to be a little more in-depth and more focused on unit control of using your hero. There were also elements in the campaign where you had to build up a city and defend it as well.

One thing I rather liked about the campaign is that while it had a main hero you started to play as. During different campaign scenarios, you would be given access to the other heroes you can play in survival mode. Sometimes you would even go from playing the good side to the evil side from scenario to scenario. Adding quite a twist as the game gets progressively darker and darker.

In the campaign, each scenario has a main and side objective. Usually, the main objective is for no heroes to get killed and if you are expected to build any buildings the keep also needs to survive as well.

From the outside this game boats that when it becomes night in the game you will be dealing with a deadly massive wave of nightmares. This thankfully is not a constant thing you need to worry about dealing with every single night.

It is true when it turns night any creatures you end up fighting are tougher and provide more experience for your hero. The massive waves of creatures however are either something that gets triggered during specific moments in the campaign or every so many days while playing in survival mode.

I would sometimes even wait for it to become daylight again. Before making any big push on the map toward an objective like taking out an enemy stronghold. If your hero gets killed during the campaign the mission you are on is a failure. If the hero gets killed during survival mode you just have to wait some time for that hero to respawn again.

Once you do beat a mission in campaign mode you even have the option to replay it again if you like. This can be great for when you did not complete all objectives your first time around while learning about all the twists and turns a certain mission would end up tossing your way.

This is however something I felt was not needed. If I end up playing the same hero through multiple missions there would be a point where that hero ends up hitting max level anyways. So, unless you are struggling that is not quite needed.

After you unlock all abilities, a hero has from leveling up. They become quite powerful enough that I'll often send them out early into a mission to do a bunch of solo killing and to explore the map a bit.

Until something like a point of interest is found for either getting bonus resources or finding an enemy's town. The hero can more or less crush anything he runs into. Saving you some resources from having to replace troops that can easily get killed in combat even if you have healers with you.

I would also wait for any major hero abilities to come off cooldown before making a major push into situations where I'd expect troop casualties. The right hero ability at the right time will change the tide of war and was often the reason for an attack to be successful or a failed one.

In the end, playing the campaign, I felt gave me great knowledge of the basics of things like building. It however gave me an excellent understanding of how to micromanage my hero as well as finding the one I enjoyed playing the most.

In the survival mode, the macro part of the game comes into play around building out a town for gathering resources and defending it every so many days from massive nighttime attacks by the nightmares.

I rather enjoyed the freedom of getting to play the hero I enjoyed the most. Along with expected outcomes of when the next major attack was, and how long the day and night cycle would take as well.

The campaign would end up tossing a lot of curved balls at you. In survival mode, you can be focused on the building element of the game and come up with a plan to hopefully defend against increasing challenges.

In the building aspect of the game, you tend to have resources you would expect from a dark fantasy game like gold, wood, wheat, stone, and iron. The first four would end up being major building blocks to getting a decent town going.

No matter how busy things might feel like they get in this game. If you are playing single-player, you always have the option to pause the game. I found this to be quite needed to manage my troops that were out exploring the map and managing my main town.

The game somewhat lacks more advanced key binding you might expect from an RTS. That would allow you to quickly move the map and manage a lot of things quickly. So, pausing the game is often needed.

Pausing is also just a great way to deal with the large waves when it’s time for the nightmares to come and raid your town. This makes it easier to plan the perfect hero skill attack. Move damaged units out of harm's way. Even escape areas of effect damage from tougher enemies.

Another big element in survival is staying on top of upgrading buildings and doing research. In campaign mode, you would sometimes start with some rather advanced buildings or research buildings already in place. In survival, it’s all up to you if you manage your resources and decide what is more critical for your play style.

In the chokepoints, I would end up blocking off in survival. More times than not the nightmare waves would end up hitting walls instead of gates. So that was often my biggest upgrade I'd go first.

A big struggle for me was always trying to have enough people to create units and further expand. There would end up just being a point where I'd spend every resource, I'd have on upgrading all my farms for wheat so I could then build further upgraded houses.

This is decently one of those games where it feels like just having a single town on a map is not going to be good enough. I would often have many unprotected resource buildings in key locations around the map making it harder to find resources like metal.

Along with just expanding my farm-building areas since they take up a lot of room to get maximum yield. These would also be things I'd just consider the cost of having to rebuild depending on what side of the map ends up getting attacked during the next nightmare attack.

Final Thoughts

For both the campaign and survival mode I ended up having a blast. It’s great they have multiplayer mode as well for those who enjoy that sort of thing. I prefer the single-player aspects of the game as that suits more what I'm looking for in any RTS these days.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Age of Darkness: Final Stand.

Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.