Cataclismo

[ropetight]

Played the demo of Cataclismo on Steam.
It is upcoming tower defense/castle builder hybrid with simplified lowpolly graphics with washed up pastel palette.
Not a fan of that look, but it can look epic when zoomed out - and since it has strategic elements, that is how you will play most of the time.

Cataclysm seems to be connected to the mist that is omnipresent.
Enemies seem to be swarms of vermin called "horror" - at least in the demo.
You build walls and structures by placing brick and wood pieces, with some physics (weight support) and light puzzling.

It has tech tree, too, but not much of it is seen in demo.

Developers Digital Sun previously made two pixel-art ARPGs, Moonlighter and Mageseeker, that have ok reputation.
Publisher is everpresent Hooded Horse, and release date is 16.6.2024.

 

[Galdred]

The game is out now. Does it manage to make building castles more important than funneling opponents around? For some reason, most castle games end up with tower defense being the best way to play.

 

[ropetight]

The game is out now. Does it manage to make building castles more important than funneling opponents around? For some reason, most castle games end up with tower defense being the best way to play.

They removed pre-EA demo, and I'm not still convinced to pay for it.
But from what I saw from that alpha, walls and height are very important for combat.
Your units at the beginning are very fragile, and there are many enemies.

 

[Dr1f7]

bad art direction won't play

 

[thesecret1]

The cringiest writing I've seen in a long time. got past tutorial to start campaign proper, got a two or three minute cutscene that gives you OC Donut Steel-kind of of backstory for the game's Mary Sue protag with the narrator gushing praise on her throughout. Uninstalled the game right after – I can get past bad writing, but this was just too much.

 

[JarlFrank]

The game is out now. Does it manage to make building castles more important than funneling opponents around? For some reason, most castle games end up with tower defense being the best way to play.

It's very much about building castles because the horrors will attack your gates and try to break through, they will also attack towers you build rather than going through a labyrinth ignoring everything between. High and thick walls are your best defense.

I bought this because I love castle building games, and this one delivers.
I can confirm that the writing is kinda cringe, but it doesn't stick out as particularly bad compared to other stuff in the current gaming market. The protagonist is some girl who was born with a perla in her chest, and perla are some supernatural things that give magic power, idk the game isn't very good at explaining its lore beyond throwing fantasy words at you. In that regard it's very much generic modern fantasy because everything uses super vague and generic terms for things. The enemies are just "horrors", for example. It's your typical low effort fantasy writing, but this game doesn't need anything more, the story is just an excuse for building and defending castles.
The one thing I like is that the voice actors pronounce these fantasy words and character names like normal people, not like Anglos with their weird pronunciation
So the protagonist, Lady Iris, is actually pronounced Iris and not eye-ris as ignorant anglophones would. That's a big point in the writing/voice acting's favor!

That said I don't like how there's some exploration levels where the main thing is overcoming obstacles with a limited set of building blocks, turning into basically a LEGO puzzle. I wanna build castles, not solve construction puzzles. So far only the first level, which is basically a tutorial showing you the controls, and the fourth level were like that, everything else was actual castle building.

There are some actual structural considerations when you build your walls, as when the enemies destroy the bottom pieces, the wall pieces above will collapse and your dudes will fall down.
Beyond the buildings - barracks, houses, resource production buildings, etc - there are no pre-made pieces, every wall and tower you build is made up of stone and wood blocks you can place however you want. A cool touch is that you can place blocks or entire buildings atop flat roofed buildings as long as there's enough space, so building vertically is encouraged. There's even one building (oxygen harvester) which benefits from a high position so the game expects you to build tall.

I like how there's many different elements to customize your defenses. You can add arches, windows, merlons, different types of stairs (including spiral stairs), etc. You can construct your own towers from building blocks, and then select it all and save it as a blueprint to copypaste, which is extremely useful considering how complex the architecture can become.

If you like building castles, this is a pretty great game.

 

[Borelli]

Played the demo and i must say this is the first game in this subgenre (They are billions, Diplomacy is Not an Option, Age of Darkness: Final Stand) that i really like, simply because of the wall building.
Smaller scale (max 20 units or so in the demo) means that you really have to think how to build the walls (demo is not that hard tho). Will buy the full version when i get the chance.