First person shooters seem to be coming out almost every week, trying to stand out in an already saturated marketplace. It’s tough at times to find some originality in the genre, so when I tried Sanctum 2, which combines FPS action with tower defense gameplay, my interest piqued. I should mention I never played or even heard of the first game, which came out in 2011 by Coffee Stain Studios. It must have slipped under my radar somehow, yet after experiencing this sequel I may have to go looking for it.
To start things off, the game introduces you to its standard first person mechanics of running and jumping, how to use the first gun that you pick up, and the two modes of fire that it has. From what I can tell from the story is that your planet just fought off an alien invasion, but the aliens have returned again and you must fend them off once more.
After making your way through the FPS tutorial, you enter another map where you are introduced to the tower defense side of things. You are instructed on how to build, upgrade, and recycle buildings. You start off with only a couple of building options (a gun turret and walls), but before you can do any building you must pick up the resources to do so. A readily available map shows everything you need to know about the level, from where resources spawned, where you can build, and the entry points and paths the invaders will take. Your primary goal on each level is to make sure the aliens never make it to their goal, which is a power core located somewhere on the map. I really liked how clearly everything is laid out. It even shows you what kind and how many aliens you will be dealing with in each wave.
Building is rather easy. By merely selecting what you want to build with the directional pad, you move a ghost image of the object onto the ground, and pull the trigger on your gamepad to erect it. After you finish building using the resources you have, you can start the alien wave with a simple press of a button. Your character has free range of the map as the aliens pour out of their entrances and make their way to the core through the maze of walls and guns you have set up. You do have the advantage though of jumping over walls to attack the aliens better as well as letting you get to different areas faster. The aliens themselves cannot jump from what I have seen so far. Each level will have a certain amount of waves of aliens trying to get to your core, which has a health meter, so you need to keep an eye on it at all times.
Enemies can be distracted from their path and will run after you if you get close enough to them. This can be a good tactic from time to time, but don’t take too many hits or you will be knocked out and have to wait a few seconds before you respawn somewhere on the map. If you do take damage there are no health packs for yourself, but at least you do slowly heal. Your weapons stay the same throughout the level and they have unlimited ammo; however, they do take a bit of time to reload, during which time I found it better to switch to your secondary weapon.
Between waves you will have time to build with resources that spawn. Usually you have an unlimited amount of time to plan what and where to build, but occasionally you will have to race against the clock to get everything done, during which I found myself scrambling!
After you are done with the final tutorial you move onto the next part of the game, where you are given a choice between four different classes of character. The four classes are Squad leader, Grenadier, Marksman, and Pointman – each with their own custom weapons like assault rifles, sniper rifles, and shotguns. They also have unique abilities such as being able to double jump, move faster, having more health, etc.
At the end of each level you gain experience points and level up. After leveling up you will unlock extra slots that allow you to carry more weapons as well as allows new buildings to build and other perks. Perks are interesting and can really affect the gameplay. They can do things like add a certain amount of health back to you core at the end of a wave, cause enemies a certain amount of consistent damage if they are attacking your core, or make you do more damage to certain enemy types. There were a few occasions where an enemy would just stop and not react to anything I did to it so it made it an easy target but for the most part the enemies put up a tough fight.
I did find myself having to grind a bit, playing a few levels over and over to level up my character, because some levels are really tough. However, I didn’t really mind because I found the gameplay rather interesting and enjoyable. It’s not too often where a FPS makes you plan ahead to make sure what you laid out will work. There are a good number of areas to unlock and progress through, enough to keep you busy for a while.
Wanting to get the full experience from Sanctum 2, I recruited a friend who normally doesn’t play FPS games to join me in co-op play. He took to it right away, and invited me to join one of his games. Co-op works the same way as the single player experience, except you are still given the same amount of resources as in a single player game so you will need to strategize as a team where to build what, and which areas each will cover. You can recycle other players’ buildings, relocate them, and upgrade them if need be. I did not notice if the game added more enemies or not as it was still pretty chaotic, but playing with others really added something extra to the gameplay. Regardless if you successfully complete the levels or not, all players still collect experience points. You can communicate by typing, and your words are relayed to the other players via text-to-speech.
The overall look of the game is a mixture of a semi-serious cartoon style with anime influences. It all has a very future-tech vibe in the way the maps and characters look. The levels have a good variety, some having large open spaces inviting you to explore areas you see in the distance, while others are more claustrophobic, with tighter corridors. Alien designs reminded me a lot of Starship Troopers, as they all seem to be insect-like, but well-designed and varied. The aliens all seem to have a weak point you can exploit, which adds another element of strategy to the mix.
The structures in the game are well designed and definitely look menacing when you build them. They don’t just suddenly materialise, but instead drop from the sky with such force you can almost feel them. Just don’t drop them on your teammates or the NPCs that sometimes inhabit the map – they don’t appreciate it!  I did wish that after upgrading a structure it would show more of a difference than before. Sometimes they only way you can tell the structure has been upgraded is by walking up to it or pulling up your map – however, this might be enhanced over time.
The gameplay is accompanied by spacey, techno tunes which reminded me a little of Phantasy Star Online games. It suits the game well, particularly when you’re building and planning for the next wave of Aliens. During battle the tunes become faster-paced to fit the action. The aliens themselves don’t make much noise other than some skittering and shuffling as they make their way towards the core, but they do get a tad more vocal if you get in their way. Weapons fire from your structures sounds very satisfying to experience. Overall the audio is done very well and I enjoyed it all.
Despite not playing the first Sanctum game, I was impressed by this sequel. Sanctum 2 is something I believe fans of FPS and tower defence lovers will enjoy. It throws you right into the action and you get to experience something that a traditional game in either genre can’t offer. So grab a friend and check it out when it is released!
