Sanctum Review

Sanctum review

When it rains it pours. Just a week ago, I had the good fortune of reviewing Anomaly Warzone Earth, an excellent indie game with a unique twist on the tower defense genre (you’re the attacking force, not the defender). This week, I have the opportunity to release another tower defense with a twist – Sanctum.

Sanctum’s twist is that the game is played from a first person perspective. In addition to building mazes and creating automated tower defenses, you can also take part in the battle yourself and fire at the enemies directly with various guns in a typical FPS fashion. The closest game I can think of to this concept is Toy Soldiers on XBLA, but whereas that game let you possess your various units and take control of them directly for a time, in Sanctum, you actually have your own character with unique weapons to run around with.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t entirely sold on Sanctum’s concept to begin with. I’m a fan of well done tower defense games and I can enjoy a good FPS as much as the next guy, but I didn’t really see the point in merging them and was afraid that the end result would be less than the sum of its parts. After playing Sanctum for a few hours, I’m happy to see that my fears were misguided.

Adding FPS elements to a tower defense game has improved it in a few major ways. First, the action is more interactive and intense when your success depends on your direct involvement. Second, it adds another consideration for your resources – how much money should you spend on your own guns (and which ones?) versus how much money should you spend on towers. Finally, it adds another consideration for maze construction – not only do you have to consider what routes are best for tower effectiveness (a normal tower defense consideration), but also how effective your routes are for your own run & gun efforts.

The graphics are gorgeous, the levels are varied, and the enemies are creative and fun. Enemies with hard to hit weak points and enemies that speed up if your maze has too many straight lines are just a few of the challenges that help to keep the gameplay fresh and exciting. However, it’s the little touches that really elevate Sanctum to great status. Things like your own guns reloading even when they’re not equipped (encouraging the player to use their full arsenal), a map screen that lets you teleport to set nodes (allowing you to initiate multiple ambushes in a single wave instead of always chasing after the enemies), and the separation between build phase and combat phase (calm preparation and frantic action) all combine to result in a game that’s both a joy to play and full of depth.

However, there is one major flaw with Sanctum that could be a deal breaker for some people. The game doesn’t feel quite finished yet. Don’t get me wrong – what content is there is great and I didn’t run into any bugs, but there just isn’t that much content at the moment. As of the time of writing this review, the game only has three levels. These are long levels (each one should take about an hour to complete) and there are multiple difficulty levels, achievements, online leaderboards, and online co-op to encourage replay value, but it still feels like the developers should have waited until there were at least twice as many levels and a few more enemies/towers/weapons before releasing their game. Compared to other great tower defense games on Steam like Defense Grid and Anomaly Warzone Earth, Sanctum feels downright tiny. The developers are working on improving the game and adding more content, but it’s anyone’s guess how quickly those additions and improvements will come about.

It’s a shame that the game doesn’t have more content because that would make it an easy recommendation. As it is, I can highly recommend the game but only with stipulations. If you’re a big fan of tower defense games and enjoy replaying levels to improve your score (like me), then definitely pick it up. If you think Sanctum sounds like a fun idea and would like to help support the developer’s efforts to improve it, then it’s worth a purchase as well. Everyone else might want to take a wait and see approach – see if the developer makes good on their promise to expand and improve the game in the coming months. It’s currently a great game, but not necessarily a great value. Hopefully with a few more updates, it will be both.

Sanctum is currently available on Steam for $15.