Age of Darkness: Final Stand
Age of Darkness: Final Stand is 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 is a action rts, tower defense and pve game
developed and published by PlaySide.
Released on January 15th 2025 is available only on Windows
in 8 languages: English, French, German, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish - Spain and Spanish - Latin America.
It has received 7,615 reviews of which 6,040 were positive and 1,575 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.7 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 9.44€ on Steam and has a 65% discount.
The Steam community has classified Age of Darkness: Final Stand into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Age of Darkness: Final Stand through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i5-10600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770, 4 GB or AMD Radeon R9 380, 4 GB
- Storage: 10 GB available space
- Additional Notes: 8 Mbsp (Download) / 2 Mbps (Upload) is recommended for Online play.
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
tl;dr: This is a very tentative "yes" made under the assumption that the bugs get fixed and with the recommendation of only getting it on a very deep discount like it is right now. It's not a bad game by any stretch but it costs almost as much as They Are Billions while only having a fraction of the content. Maybe for some people the multiplayer makes up for the lack of content, for me it really doesn't. The campaign while ok is very short and in a lot of places it feels like it's rushing you due to the time limits and not letting you explore at your leisure. I don't know why some are complaining about difficulty since most missions have a "gimmick" and are pretty easy to turtle in and then methodically wipe out the enemies, especially since the AI always seems to send the same attack force at you and doesn't really scale up as the mission goes on. Most of the maps are interesting but again in plenty of missions you just feel rushed and don't really get to "sit and enjoy the view" so to speak, in some you don't even really get to defeat the enemies either since they're completely optional. It's interesting that they sometimes give you choices on what path you can take but it doesn't really change anything about the final result or the story. The final boss is interesting but easily cheesed. Survival mode is the "meat" of the game, just like with TAB, but while you have new gameplay elements like Warcraft 3 style heroes, hero gear and elites to deal with it just doesn't feel like it makes up for the low choice in terms of towers and units. It feels like they could have done so much more in terms of both since it's a fantasy setting but the content and replay value just aren't there, at least for me. Bugs galore. The pathing in particular is still very bad, even after years of allegedly attempting to fix the issues, you will see your soldiers just splitting in very weird ways when given orders to engage the enemy, getting stuck in place because they can't decide who to go for or even rushing in a weird direction because they couldn't all path properly to the target or location you ordered them to. This was probably the source of most of my frustration with the game in the time i played it and it's definitely something you don't want to see in an RTS. Pathing still seems just as bad on the 1.0 version. I'm also noticing on the 1.0 a lot of times where the enemy melee creatures get stuck trying to move through your frontline to get to the archers essentially walking in place while they get stabbed to death because they're fixated on your archers. I've also had some weird issues with hero abilities not triggering correctly/not doing "what it says on the tin" and control groups breaking. Also on the 1.0 the enemy AoE markers seem to not match the actual size of the ability with the abilities sometimes hitting your units even though they're way out of the marker. I have no interest in the multiplayer so i won't give it a separate section but that also seems to be very buggy for many players and they didn't even bother having a propery lobby system, expecting people to go to their discord to find other players to match with which is a very weird decision. My final gripe is with the Alderin faction, it feels like it's only being cut to be added later as DLC despite the fact that it seems to more or less already have the prerequisites for a full faction. The excuse i've seen give was that the hero selection screens and one extra skin for the main building are very expensive to make and they don't have the extra funds for it. I'd like to focus on the part about the hero selection as i don't even understand why those animated selection screens are even a thing to begin with. This isn't a hero shooter or a moba, it's literally an element that adds nothing to the game and you only see it for a few seconds when selecting your character. Why invest so many resources in a flashy feature that has zero effect on actual gameplay? Why not give us an extra faction on the 1.0 instead?
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Took me about 280 hours to work up to 'Horrific' difficulty. I've enjoyed this game a lot, having previously played 'They Are Billions!' I wasn't sure how I'd find the fantasy setting, but it works well. If you're looking for a game to come back to every now and then to burn some time, this is a good one. My advice: PAUSE often, see what you can build, where you can expand to, and where resources might be at the edge of the fog of war. Plenty of my early runs ended in a wave because I spent too much time micro-managing my combat expansion units, and didn't build enough.
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Absolutely love this game. I have years of playing the Age of Empires, Warcraft, StarCraft, Command & Conquer, etc. franchises and this game feels like an insanely polished warcraft 3 custom.
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I have had a blast with Age of Darkness ("AOD") and can happily recommend it to any who are looking for that mix of RTS and Tower Defence that 'They are Billions' ("TAB") is famed for. This game will feel so familiar if you have played TAB before but it does enough things differently to not feel like a reskin. Before getting in to specifics of what I like or dislike, I feel I should first defend the campaign. You will see from many reviews that the campaign is almost universally reviled but I think people are expecting, perhaps, too much. The campaign does exactly what you would want it to: 1) It slowly introduces new mechanics so you get to learn as you play; and 2) It tells an interesting (enough) story that isn't winning awards but equally gives some backstory to this games' setting and world; and 3) It plays significantly differently to the main 'survival' mode that it feels refreshing. To compare the campaigns of AOD and TAB, the former smashes the latter out of the park: TAB's campaign is a series of 'normal' survival maps interspersed with small hero focused missions (that are also generally despised). AOD's campaign is an actual narrative and has you fight against humans and nightmares (the games' horde creatures) over its run time. I have enjoyed my time with the campaign and think that it makes the game stronger, not weaker. Turning to the core of the game: survival mode. Like TAB, you need to survive against increasingly difficult waves of enemies and, when you beat the 5th wave, a massive final wave attacks from all previous entry points together. You are encouraged to expand out into the map as much as possible to horde resources and continue building an elite force to defend you. Much like TAB, towers are actually a noob trap and the best defence is a vast army. Like TAB, once you realise the whole game is made trivially easy with the spamming of a single unit type, it takes something away from the magic. The game has reasonable unit variety but, no matter which faction you play, the only thing you will ever need is T3 walls and Impalers. Nothing else matters; Impalers are everything. This is where I think TAB has the balance down a bit better because, in TAB, whilst certain units are very powerful (and you can spam one unit type to win the game -snipers-) every unit is viable; even at the end of the game. In AOD, if you don't build Impalers, you will likely lose. You can try with other units but you would need thousands of them and an ungodly amount of walls to try and slow the enemy down. Impalers do all that with only tens of them. To sing some praises before concluding: 1) AOD has three factions which adds to the replay-ability (they could do with being a touch more visually distinct but that is not to take away from them) 2) You can call waves early in AOD if you feel ready which gives you more control on events. 3) You get powerful heroes in AOD that TAB doesn't have. They are EXTREMELY powerful and will be your main weapon for most of the game. 4) The voice acting is really high quality. All in all: - Extremely recommended if you loved or liked They are Billions - Recommended if you like RTS or Tower Defence
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After playing ~200 hours of They Are Billions, bought Age of Darkness to fill my RTS hoard defence itch. Was on the fence for a while; as while there are lots of similarities with TAB, the meta is quite different but very addictive once I stopped trying to play it like TAB and played AoD like its own game. Other thoughts Campaign: Goes for the Blizzard RTS vibe in terms of polished story. Very linear in terms of progression in and out of missions and the story lacks the same level of excellent writing that you'd get from Blizzard. Not sure it really taught me anything useful about survival mode outside of some unit meta (as I played through the campaign first) but it was decent enough for 10 or so hours. Stability: No issues with crashing or major bugs. A couple of minor graphical and path-finding glitches here and there but I didn't experience anything close to game breaking. The lack of proper ultra-wide support is an annoyance though, can't zoom out far enough on my 1440p ultrawide. There is a workaround of sorts (check the PC gaming wiki) but it isn't perfect. Gameplay: Was initially put off by the comments on excessive micro and a limited meta, however I feel that TAB is way more micro heavy, had no issues keeping a mix of melee and ranged units alive during map clearing. Enemy attacks are relatively slow and well-telegraphed. Compared to a large ball of units in TAB which can clear the map without me needing to pay attention, there was a need to manually map clear in AoD for most of my runs however I never found this a chore. All of my survival runs on TAB followed a very similar progression; sniper ball for map clearing + titans/executors at the end for final wave defence. I haven't played nightmare yet but the slightly different factions and heroes led me to use a few different types of unit meta playing AoD - though the base expansion progression is more or less always the same for each run. Polish/QoL: The game looks great and runs well at 1440p (3900x and 6900XT). UI works well enough though I wish it wouldn't reset my building selection after placing a single wall for example. Loading a game takes an age from striped NVMe storage, but saving and exiting the game is fast. Decent sound effects and score, unit barks never annoyed me or got too repetitive (though YMMV). Map generation, while being a single biome, is interesting and leads to lots of variation within the tileset. Though AoD is still in EA, the game feels very complete. I'm not interested in playing co-op or MP so have no issues with this not being part of the game in its current state.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 19 January 2025 00:36 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 23 January 2025 10:29 |
| Steam price | 23 January 2025 20:49 |
| Steam reviews | 23 January 2025 21:56 |
Online players
3,963
Developer
PlaySide
Publisher
PlaySide
Release
15 Jan 2025
Platforms
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