I'm a known strategy-game turtler, which means that I'll spend as much time shooting arrows off the top of a great big stone wall as games like Age of Empires 4 will let me. That habit made me a big fan of 2017's They Are Billions, which condensed the RTS experience into a huge horde-defense mode, and now it's turned me towards Cataclismo, which might have the most promise of anything I've played so far in Steam Next Fest.
I've dabbled in a demo that feels relatively small as a result of the extent of its tutorialisation, but as the training wheels started to come off, I started to get a sense of just how Cataclismo would work. Each night, waves of mutated enemies known as Horrors will attack your settlements, throwing themselves mindlessly at your walls as they attempt to take down your Citadel, the central command center from which your bastion against this fallen world is run.
To stand against those Horrors, you can erect walls and train units to patrol them. But while a more traditional RTS might let you click and drag a huge stone monolith between you and your foes, Cataclismo lets you use each stone block like a Lego piece, placing it exactly where you want it to go. The higher you build your wall, the sturdier it will become, incentivising true bastions for your enemies to break themselves against.
It was a bit simplistic to start, but after my second wave, I started to get a better idea of where the strategy could really kick in. I could put my archers on top of huge wall, but if the Horrors dug a block out from underneath them, the entire structure would collapse, leaving my soldiers to tumble into the mass of foes beneath them. That led me to invest more closely into a warren of wooden balustrades behind my
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