Review: Sanctum (PC)

Sanctum

Remember that “Make Something Unreal” contest that Epic Games threw a while back? Well, while we have yet to actually see anything of the grand prize winner, that hasn’t stopped other fledgling developers from taking their Unreal Engine 3 based mods and blowing them up into full-sized games.

One such entry is Sanctum, a game with a premise so painfully obvious that its inclusion in a PC indie download borders on skullduggery.


Sanctum is a blend of first-person shooting and tower defense… defending. As the main characters Skye, the player makes use of just about every staple tower type that the genre has to offer; from machine guns to mortars to dampeners, it’s all here.

Oddly enough, while the tower defense half of the game seems to hold up its end of the bargain in terms of variety (at least after the super-massive list of updates made to the game since its release) there is very little variety in terms of personal weaponry. At the outset of every level, the player is equipped with a powerful sniper rifle, a quick-fire machine pistol and a ‘freeze gun’ which basically acts as a portable dampener.

While every gun has an alt-fire option (the machine gun, for instance, can fire grenades) I still found the lack of variety disturbing. When the entire premise of the game is to blend two wildly popular genres, it’s very disappointing to see that one gameplay style feels more like an afterthought.

Thankfully, a nice variety of unique enemy types, such as the hyper-aggravating ‘Bobble Heads’ which cannot be damaged by towers, instead requiring to the player to hit them in their soft, wobbly craniums, encourage the player to use their limited options conceive of a plethora of crazy strategies.

My biggest concerns with the game aren’t really apparent at first blush. Balancing is really the most vital component to any tower defense title and this is where Sanctum stumbles. Certain towers feel completely useless against all but one or two enemy types, making their constructing them seem like a bad idea at the time. Then, when you’re finally hit with a wave of those specific enemies, you’ll find yourself completely impotent as they trudge toward your core. Honestly, if Sanctum had been released on disc, I may have chucked it out of the most convenient four-story window after about the third of fourth wave of ‘Soakers’ walked right past my most powerful guns.

This issue with useless turrets might have been more forgivable, if I simply had the currency to create as many of every type as I needed. Unfortunately, every turret and weapon in the game quickly becomes next to useless without ever more expensive upgrades that will drain you dry. Need the cash to build some anti-air turrets for dealing with those pesky fliers? Well, too bad, since old Lightning Turret Plainview just drank your whole milkshake right up.

Like the hope-filled ray of a lighthouse in a sea of frustration, the up to four-player cooperative mode certainly makes the game easier and takes a lot of the strain off of each player to build an air-tight, multi-purpose defense. If you’ve got a couple of friends on Steam with copies, it’s really the absolute best way to experience the game.

I know that it sounds like I’m really down on Sanctum and I suppose that’s because I am. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. The co-op smoothes out the difficulty curve and once you get to smashing monsters with a few buddies you’ll probably forget all about the game’s non-existent story.

I would recommend Sanctum to fans of Defense Grid: The Awakening and other ‘hardcore’ tower defense games. It may be a bare-bones affair but it’s still a novel concept worthy of the attention of fans of the genre.