What went wrong

Ok let's just say that the concept was pretty neat being a FPS mixed with tower defence strategy for those who didn't like the third person view of orcs must die (as an example). But it was missing something. I have 180+ hours on this game and I do love it but at the same time I feel that it's broken in a way that I can't quite grasp. Have any of you Aron's played it? If so what is your opinion not just on the game but the concept behind it.

Saw it on steam, looked atrocious.

I think I played it for an hour before I got bored. Interesting idea but doesn't work IMO.

The p2p servers.
Last update was in what, 2015?
The Devs have moved on.

I remember picking this up after my gaming bro and I binged out on Orcs Must Die! 2 and Dungeon Defenders.

We have about 100+ hours in OMD2 and DD, and we put Sanctum 2 down after about 15. Haven't bothered to play it in about 3 years, but here's what I remember:


It's probably one of the blandest games I've ever played. Everything about that game has been done before, and done better by more competent devs.

Op here. I agree it has it's downfalls, but what game doesn't. I love OMD2 except for the fact there is no lobby to randomly join others in and the random disconnection that plagues the community. Hopefully the new unchained game doesn't disappoint.

Every game has its downfalls, but the big factor is having fun despite them, as opposed to trying to find fun because of them. That was ultimately my takeaway with Sanctum 2.


You're railing against an aspect of the game that it was never designed for. It's not an MMO, it doesn't need a "community". It's literally a game to be played with two people, and only two people.

As far as OMD: Unchained goes: It's pretty awful. It's been in Open Beta for over a year, and the population is dead. Chances are that it will never make it out of beta due to its mediocrity. They tried to make an ASSFAGGOTS/MOBAshit cashgrab game, and then retrofitted it later to try and salvage it being an OMD game - in a very halfassed way.


Unchained is the exact result of what happens when you chase trends instead of playing to your development strengths. It's like watching the development of Firefall on a smaller scale.

It falls very heavily into the "fun with friends" category but mainly because the text chat has moonbase alpha-tier text to speech by default. The game itself is very boring because it puts too much emphasis on the fps part but keeps the tower defense style AI for the enemies making fighting them boring as shit. Watching a massive horde get slaughtered by your meat grinder and setting said meat grinder up with autistic levels of optimisation has always been the appeal of tower defense and the appeal of fps is defeating smart and complex enemies with emergent gameplay. The two genres simply do not mix.

I think what is broken about it is that it uses maze defense mechanics instead of more realistic defense mechanics, and this rigid nonsensical stupidity clashes with the FPS mechanics. Instead it should be something like Serious Sam or EDF with tower building, or Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation defense maps from first person commander perspective.

This is what killed it for me. The weapon you had felt almost useless, so it was depressing to play.

Wish there were more good tower defence games, but the concept seems to be cheap enough that it ends up getting nothing but shovelware.

I just loathe tower defence as a concept.
It is the most un-fun thing possible, literally one rung up from MOBA on my scale of not-fun genres.

Same, but this is the shit nu/v/ play while pretending to hate on the mainstream.

Aren't you the special snowflake

Sorry if I don't eat shit like all you cool kids, bub. Mobas, survival and shit like Overwatch should be banned for the normalfags they are.

I can feel the edge from here.

Sanctum was pretty neat, Sanctum 2 is fucking awful, especially at launch it was.

The lack of self-awareness in this post.

Post what games you think are good if your taste is so great.

I think there's three problems with the game:

1. The Tower Limit
2. Devs abandoned it
3. Isn't as surprisingly charming as the first game

Tower limit is the real killer honestly. If they kept that away, I honestly feel the game would have been way better off for it, especially since its the only TD/_PS to realize that the enemies should fight you rather than just ram past you. Would also be nice if it felt remotely rewarding.

what do you mean what went wrong? thats a great game.

I haven't played Sanctum 2 for some time, but I can summarize some issues it has.

For starters, the visual design is just a lot worse than Sanctum. Sanctum goes for clean and slick, where-as Sanctum 2 has added a lot of unnecessary detail, making it harder on the eyes.
There's plenty of ways you can argue this, but instead I'll just post two screenshots and would like you to ask yourself the question: Which one allows you to more easily identify everything at a glance?
I think this is one of Sanctum 2's biggest flaws, as Sanctum 2 simply does not manage the same levels of comfy that Sanctum has.

Secondly, Sanctum was a game designed to have both FPS and base building mechanics. One of the choices presented here is whether you want to upgrade your weapon or your towers. Although its true that upgrading your weapon in Sanctum was insanely overpowered, the lack of ability to upgrade it in Sanctum 2 makes it fall off and completely useless fairly quick. Well, aside from the enemies that you are flatout required to hit with weapons to kill, and possibly to inflate soakers.
This wouldn't be too much of a problem if the base building mechanic was improved, but it really hasn't seen any. At the current time, Sanctum 2 has 19 buildings, opposed to Sanctum's 16 buildings. Both games have some of those locked behind DLC. (Although Sanctum has made the tower DLC free at a later point.)
The building lineup hasn't seen any interesting changes.
The only improvement to the game is the changes to upgrading. Instead of upgrading from 1 to 6 into whole steps, towers can now be partially upgraded into a next level for a partial bonus. In addition, after a tower reaches level, you can continue to endlessly upgrade it into the overcharge level, although the gains of this have been pretty shit and seems to mostly exist for survival modes.

Sanctum 2 mostly got shit because its launch was really poor.
Just like Sanctum 1, it suffered from a very small tower lineup. Tower defenses aren't exactly interesting, and the FPS element means that the player can actively cover for their chosen structures' weaknesses. The solution to this is to introduce towers with unique functionality, but neither Sanctum nor Sanctum 2 has really done a great job at that.
Sanctum 2 limits your towers to 15, which a lot of people are rightfully upset about. This is even worse when you take into account that some enemies, like Soakers, are best countered by spamming towers. Why not actually make the tradeoff between upgrading towers at prime positions vs building more towers at poor positions meaningful? This limitation seems to be in place because Sanctum 2 was also made for consoles, and dumbing down your PC release because consoles can't run your poorly optimized game is something that of course makes people pissed.
Lastly, for some fucking reason the developers decided to end the game on a cliffhanger and release the next bits of story as DLC. This is of course another retarded decision that pissed people off.

Almost 100% with all 5 feat of strength, here are my observations:

Pros

Cons

They really needed to give the whole thing another balance pass. There are some interesting perks and towers that can change gameplay that just don't see use because they end up under performing.

Still not that bad of a game.

ACP/AMP/Gatling/Drones(/RangeAMP)
Best and only setup

I hate how the difficulty in sanctum essentially boils down to "this enemy has more health than a warframe boss".

I love the Phantasy star online ruins style enemies

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