Real-time strategy games have two types of player base: competitive multiplayer fans who dedicate hundreds and thousands of hours to mastering the mechanics and gameplay of a game, and casual players who enjoy the campaign’s story and the more relaxed gameplay of a sandbox mode. Most popular RTS games throughout history have catered to the former type of players, so it’s considered a risky move to develop a more casual single-player experience in the genre.
Cataclismo, developed by Digital Sun and published by Hooded Horse, is a single-player RTS base-building game with a focus on base defence and resource management. After an Early Access launch a few months ago, the final version of the game offers a more polished and balanced experience, so let’s examine all the aspects of Cataclismo in its official release.
Cataclismo offers four distinct game modes: Campaign, Skirmishes, Survival, and Sandbox. Each of these offers enough unique gameplay experience that examining each of them can give us a good idea of the overall quality of the game. So let’s start with the campaign, where the game’s story and resource management shine.
Cataclismo, as the name suggests, is set in a post-apocalyptic world covered by a mysterious mist and horrors that lurk within it. Humanity’s last surviving bastion, Hogard, is a large city atop a mountain, but the rising threat of the monsters’ attacks forces our protagonist, Iris, to go out in search of a powerful artifact, the Arta Perl, that legends say has the power to restore the world.
The story is engaging enough with its reveals and twists to keep the player motivated throughout the campaign. Even side quests and objectives often have a decent lore reason for them to add to the experience. My favorite part of Cataclismo‘s lore is how the act of saving and loading the game is explained as part of Iris’s innate magical powers to “fold time”. It’s just a simple addition, but it makes the game more immersive and I wouldn’t feel bad when I save and load multiple times to get the perfect results, as it’s now just a game mechanic and part of the story I’m experiencing.
The campaign has over a dozen missions, some of them are what the main gameplay of Cataclismo is like. You have a base with resource nodes around it, and you have to build an economy, train troops, and defend your base against multiple waves of enemies. The resource management is on the more complicated side when it comes to the RTS genre. There is oxygen, which is needed to maintain your settlement’s population and buildings, and is also used for most upgrades in the game. There are wood, stone, and minerals for building and training units. There is mist for training special troops. You have to build shacks to bring more citizens to your settlement, and you also need a special upgrade from your citadel to increase the capacity for your military troops. The amount of juggling and balancing between different resources and tasks can be intimidating, especially during the later missions of the campaign, where you have access to all troops and buildings. But the ability to pause the game lets you make decisions or change course much more easily.
Some missions are familiar to the fans of the RTS genre, where you don’t necessarily have a base to build and defend, but just a group of units to control, explore the map, and finish objectives. While in the base defence missions, our troops are mostly sitting behind well-fortified walls and defenses, these exploration sections showcase how effective unit control can be in the game. Techniques such as stutter stepping (moving back your units and then stopping to shoot), separating damaged units from your group, or using high ground spots in the natural terrain let us defeat larger swarms than we would be able to if we just stand and fight.
There are also tower defense-style side missions that give us limited supplies and units to defend against multiple waves of attacks. The combination of these different types of gameplay, the slow but steady progression of acquiring talents and unlocking new buildings and troops, and the learning curve that is present throughout the campaign, makes Cataclismo‘s story mode into one of the most challenging and satisfying RTS campaigns I have played even in medium difficulty, and I can’t wait to go back and try higher difficulties.
The second game mode is skirmishes. These are short scenarios in which you have to survive a certain number of nights against the enemy waves. The core gameplay here is very similar to the campaign, but without the limitations of story and progression we find in the earlier missions of the campaign.
The third game mode is survival. This is an endless mode with roguelike elements. You unlock new powers and gain points for unlocking new powers after each night, and can play for as long as you survive against harder and harder enemy waves. Playing in a single survival mode game for multiple hours, building a large settlement with dozens of troops, is the only time I experienced any performance issues with Cataclismo. And this was such a disappointment, as this was by far my favorite way to play the game, but if performance gets worse the longer I survive in this mode, it can get quite frustrating.
And finally, let’s talk about the sandbox mode, the map maker, and the amazing modular base building. Sandbox mode lets us freely explore and build, without needing resources or upgrades. While the lack of challenge might be demotivating at first, Cataclismo‘s modular build mode allows for really creative structures and can be quite fun to play with, and quite impressive to look at, thanks to the stylized art style and design of the game. There’s also a feature called blueprints, where you can create and save a structure, and you can use them in other game modes, and even share through Steam workshop. There are already some really useful items in the workshop that you can easily download and use in your game through the Steam overlay, and it is well integrated within the game.
And finally, the map maker is a tool missing from most modern strategy games, but Cataclismo offers it and lets us build terrain, set rally points for enemies, and create our unique maps. I had not played around with the tool that much, but with the already active Steam Workshop for the game, I imagine we can see some interesting map designs shared by the community.
After about 20 hours of gameplay, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Cataclismo. The game is well polished, deep, challenging, and quite satisfying in all the game modes it offers. With the artistic look and a soothing soundtrack, I would easily lose track of time trying to create the perfect defensive position against the coming horrors, and I can’t wait to go back.
Nima played Cataclismo on PC with a provided review copy.
