Cataclysm, an apocalyptic tale of construction and strategy

Cataclysm It is the third work of the Spanish developer Digital Sunwhich released the roguelite adventure Moonlighter in the now distant 2018 and the action-RPG The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story last year. To make sure they don’t miss anything, the talented team from Valencia thought it would be a good idea to change genre once again, trying their hand at a strategic hybrid with tower defense and city builderand framing it all in a fairytale about the end of the world and a humanity that, despite everything, still does not want to surrender to its destiny.

The game will be released in early access next July 22 on PC (via Steam), but we had the opportunity to try the first missions of the countryside.

The end of the world… Actually, no

The world of Cataclysm has come to an end: monstrous beings have invaded the earth and ravaged the human beings. A deadly fog hovers everywhere, from which aberrations seem to spring forth endlessly. Yet, a last bastion of humanity survives, stubbornly entrenched in the fortress-city of Home. Here one day it is found Irisan orphan with a pearl set in her chest, which grants her incredible powers known as Arts.

Trained in combat and educated in the magical arts by the city’s priestess, Iris sets out with a handful of men on a seemingly impossible mission: drive back the monstrosities in the fog from which they came and secure a future for the human race. To do so, he will have to reclaim the territories that have fallen into the possession of the beasts, erect strongholds, restore defensive bastions and accumulate resources useful for ensuring the supply and defense of the population. Obviously, this is easier said than done.

Cataclysm appears at first glance to be a classic RTS with a tactical pause.the aim of which is to complete each mission by repelling hordes of monsters and preventing them at all costs from reaching the Citadel, our headquarters and bulwark of humanity in the region. Unlike other titles of the same genre (see Age of Empires IV) whose objective is usually the conquest of the enemy’s base camp or its destruction, this game reverses the perspective And it transforms basically in a tower defensesince the capture of the Citadel by the monsters will decree the game over. Each mission will be divided into one or more tasks, mandatory or optional, but no one will be able to avoid withstanding the impact of a certain number of enemy waves, which will aim to destroy our infrastructures and attack our army.

We will be able to deploy a variety of warriors, from classic archers to captor (which imprison enemies by slowing them down), from grenadiers to infantry, and so on. Each unit has its pros and cons, and has abilities that can be improved. To do so – and to be able to recruit new recruits – we will have to accumulate resources of various types, from wood to stone. It is therefore necessary to explore the game map (initially darkened) to locate the extraction areas and construct the related buildings. Economy and balancing resources are fundamentalalso because we will not be able to do without the quantity of oxygen present in the air: the foggy lands are in fact contaminated, and we will have to purify the air in order to breathe.

Cataclysm features a day/night cycle where we will have to use the daylight hours to accumulate resources and build defenses, in view of the night attacks of the monsters. They have various types, but they do not stand out for intelligence, limiting themselves to attacking the infrastructures without defenses or aiming directly at the Citadel. If they do not have a clear path, they will launch an assault on the walls or any other defense structure present, attempting to demolish it.

This is where the city builder mechanics come into play: during the day we will be able to build defensive structures of all kindsfrom the classic perimeter walls to observation towers for archers, to the placement of traps on the ground or devices to strengthen our garrisons, for example producing poison for the blades of the infantry or fuel for flaming arrows. Between one night and the next our structures will suffer the wear and tear of the enemy assault, and it will be up to us to repair them during the following day, to avoid them collapsing ruinously at the next charge.

The building activities do not end here because we can also use them to create shortcuts or join sections of the map that would otherwise be divided, giving us an advantage in combat or allowing us to reach particularly succulent resources.

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The demo allowed us to try out the first 11 missions. Cataclysm is a challenging strategy gamebut it accommodates the player less accustomed to the genre thanks to 5 difficulty levels, which make it accessible to anyone. Iris’s magical abilities also translate into the possibility of rewinding time (i.e. saving the game at any time), allowing us in case of defeat to try again without starting the entire mission from the beginning. Furthermore, between one mission and another, we will have access to the war table where we can spend the skill points obtained upon completion of each level to unlock new skills.

In addition to the campaign, there are two other game modes: skirmishor missions one shot with various objectives and difficulty modifiers; and endless which, as the name suggests, will challenge you to withstand as many consecutive waves of monsters as possible. The latter in particular is very useful for practicing the game system, while the skirmish had many limitations in this version and did not differ much from the main campaign.

After this test Cataclysm it appears as a hybrid of genres that is both stimulating and challenging; if you are a fan of RTS and have appreciated the working method of Digital Sunyou should definitely keep an eye on it.