So, yeah. Coffee Stain Studios' Sanctum 2 is out next Wednesday, with a season pass to boot. Pre-orders get a free set of skins and a 2D flash-esque spinoff called Super Sanctum TD, which is a more traditional TD game than Sanctum itself is. For those who don't know, Sanctum 2 is an FPS-TD game, in other words it's a tower defence game with FPS elements. You play essentially a 'special' tower that runs around and jumps and goes "ugh!" during the enemy waves, whilst between waves building the defence system, upgrading turrets, etc., etc. So it's a mix of two game styles but it works really well. Anyone else getting it?
Depends when you played it. As they supported it they added weapons, towers, maps, etc. I'm hoping they sort out the progression. Sanctum got very hard very quick.
I will wait until the initial excitement fades before asking you for you actual opinion :V Maybe 4-5 days.
No, I'll give it now based on an hour of play. Basically the core gameplay is... very similar. Build the boxes, build the towers, shoot the enemies, win. But some levels (at least at the start) have some pre-built towers and NPC soldiers who shoot enemies within range. Enemies now also react to you, meaning certain ones will attack you at range, and if you jump into the fray yourself then you're boned because they'll punch you. There's four playable characters, each with a different style. Sanctum 1's protag is a good all-rounder due to her assault rifle, her sister has the REX launcher, there's some robot with a sniper and some other bloke who I didn't look at. New towers, too. Gatling has to be unlocked, instead your 'all-round' tower is this new cannon-y thing. You can only build a certain number of towers per map now, and you can only put down so many blocks, and you're also working on fewer resources so the player's actions are more important this time. But you can sell the pre-built ones for extra cash. You unlock secondary weapons, extra towers and 'perks' (character enhancements; e.g. greater splash damage) as you play due to the game's levelling system. Visually it's definitely improved. It's gone from functional to something a bit more stylised, but without losing its aesthetic, though S1's protag looks proper badass now. She's not even pretty anymore, and I love it. So it's not even more of the same. It genuinely feels - at this point - like they've actually made an effort to improve it. And that alone is worth the admission price.
Okay, there might be a few balance issues, and the handling of multiplayer resources hasn't gone down too well, either... Still enjoying it. Lost my first map because of a balance issue, however.
My experience with balance in the first one was basically: *Get a few levels of Sniper Rifle so you can kill the big guys (bobbleheads and whatever the lessbobbling ones were). Slow Tiles make headshots a little easier. If you miss a headshot or have a low level sniper, those things will absorb thousands of wasted tower damage. *Switch to assault rifle to charge up the swelling bubble dude. Don't really need to level the gun up much, once you sink in a clip or two you can snipe for 40000 damage or let your towers finish it. *Spam Scatter Lasers everywhere, with maybe a Aoe and a dedicated anti-air. None of the others seemed very helpful; I think the base gatling tower had something like 12% higher ground dps per dollar and was slightly better against the swellbubbles, but couldn't hit air and the non-elevated fire arc meant it had trouble hitting ground at some angles too (and had less dps per square, on levels where you filled the map). Admittedly I don't think I ever beat it on highest difficulty (did it have difficulties? been a while), but that's what I did for however long I played. They may have patched since then too. Some of my friends were considering a similar game as an indy project using UDK, and after learning Sanctum existed most of us bought it to see what had already been done with the genre. Some of us liked it, I felt it could have used a bit more "teamwork" between yourself and your towers, rather than you just cursing at them when they wasted bullets on the guys you hadn't Sniped yet. We were considering things like Oil Tower + Flame Thrower, or Water Gun + Lightning Tower; Sanctum's only combos seemed to be "Slow Tiles + Headshot, Slow Gun + Tower Shot". ...man it seems like I only post in these game threads to complain don't I? I have fun sometimes I swear!
