I love strategy games, but playing a new game is always an uphill battle for me. There is a lot of new information to get used to, and I have to get used to all the weird quirks and awkward controls. But every now and then one of them grabs me instantly and doesn’t let go. At the moment, that’s catastrophean excellent tower defense city building game that uses the cool aspects of Lego to take a strategy game from good to great.
Out on steam And Humble Bundle in Early Access on July 22 catastrophe is published by Hooded Horse and is the third game from Digital Sun, the indie team behind Merchant RPG Illegal workers And League of Legends Action thugs The Magic Seeker. In that respect, it’s a radical departure, swapping the action RPG’s dungeon-crawling structure for a horde mode management sim about building air purifiers. I’ve played about five hours of campaign mode so far (there are skirmish and endless modes too), and it’s currently the game I check before bed, only to look up and find it’s already midnight by the time I’ve finished.
catastrophe is set in a post-apocalyptic gothic-punk world where armies of enemies called Horrors crawl out of seas of mist to lay siege to surviving outposts and kingdoms. During the day, you and your troops explore the map, killing nearby enemies and salvaging resources, while also building up your settlement and preparing for the onslaught of Horrors at night. Balanced development means you have the resources you need to build strong defenses, while the nighttime battles are mostly about sitting back and watching your best laid plans groan and crumble under the stress of the hordes.
This will sound familiar to anyone who has ever played. There are billionsthe successful tower defense real-time strategy game from Numantian Games from 2019. What is the difference catastrophe apart is not necessarily what you build, but How You build it. While buildings like houses and barracks are standard, prefabricated units, walls, towers, and bridges for traversing the game’s fractured world are all constructed individually, block by block. And because the maps are so dense, the most efficient way to build a settlement while also securing it is to expand upwards rather than outwards. The result often looks like a grim fantasy shanty town supported by a maze of stone walls and wooden scaffolding. Maybe that sounds tedious to you. I promise it isn’t.
I have already mentioned air purifiers. Clean air is an important resource in catastrophe. Buildings need it. Soldiers need it. And researching upgrades takes a big chunk, too. To conquer it, you need to build an air purifier high enough off the ground so you can harvest as much air as possible per minute. To build it high off the ground, you need to build a tall block of wood, and since all buildings need to be accessible to environment workers, which are automatically controlled by your settlement to produce resources, you also need a staircase that goes all the way to the top. You control all of this by connecting each individual piece together, which click into place with a satisfying precision (most of the time) and a sound not unlike real Lego.
That’s the simplest example, but stone walls follow a similar logic. It’s not enough to just build them thick and tall, you also need places for your archers to stand, places for battlements, flags, and other castle accoutrements to decorate and strengthen your armies. Build stone windows and you can stack multiple rows of archers on top of each other. But then you also need to build the stairs for them to get up there, and make sure they’re not so close to the action that they’ll fall and plummet to their deaths if the Horrors start eating through the outer layers of your defenses.
The third part is to make the most of the available space by stacking everything as close together as possible. Houses and barracks have stone roofs that you can build on. Using wooden and stone arches, you can turn your base into mini-cathedrals that feel like King Arthur meets Blade Runner. And the myriad other buildings, technologies, and unit types (which I only began to explore in the later stages of my playthroughs) build on that imagination and the satisfaction of piecing together short-term and cumbersome medieval city planning solutions into a community that, against all odds, manages to stave off the darkness each night.
It’s a solid formula that I would highly recommend to anyone who likes strategy games, and even some people who don’t. But catastrophe is also tailor-made to sneak into my head and make me obsessed. As a child, before game of Thrones When it even existed, I built massive walls in my bedroom, guarded by soldiers who hoisted them up in an elevator from my construction kit. At the beach, I not only built giant sandcastles surrounded by seawalls, but also divided them into districts and dug sewers for drainage. I spent many hours with my children stacking Duplo bricks into Jenga-like towers supported by rickety stairs and stilts, searching for the invisible point between something that breaks and something strong enough to survive.
catastrophe channels a bit of each of those experiences into a balanced strategy game where planning and building is often even more rewarding than watching the battles you spent so much time fighting. It takes a lot of what worked so well in There are billions and adds a whole new level of verticality to the action. This shift makes for more aesthetically interesting city building, where creativity and self-expression play as big a role in decision-making as trying to maximize resources and defensive capabilities.
I am not sure if catastrophe will ultimately have the same chances as this game in terms of combat and tactics in the later stages. But for now, the Early Access journey is off to a great start.
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