Custom buildings and tower defense in Cataclismo | Review

A dark atmosphere

Cataclismo, developed by Digital Sun and published by Hooded Horse, will be released on July 22, 2024, in early access, and will be initially available for Microsoft Windows.

It is a game focused mainly on creative construction and confrontation of hordes of monsters, with a very dark and mysterious setting due to being a world ravaged by the Cataclismo, a situation that drastically reduced the human population, putting us in the role of gathering warriors and exploring the world with the goal of building fortresses, with intense customization and discovering the best strategy to confront the numerous enemies wandering the planet.

Hogar and hope

The story of Cataclismo is quite interesting, the initial atmosphere conveys a very dark and desolate feeling, and we soon discover the reason for this, in this Realm, humans were sovereign and had dominion over everything, mainly thanks to Perlas, a kind of mage.

However, the same magic that conquered the world for humanity was the cause of its ruin, first the fog arrived and then the creatures that inhabit it, were fierce and cruel and at the same time seemed endless.

It was at this moment that the Cataclismo arrived, an event that gives its name to the project. That being said, we join Lady Iris, the leader of the resistance, on a journey full of terrors and always fueled with hope to defeat the Fog.

The city of Hogar is the last bastion of human hope to contain the horrors of the fog and the determination of humans will never allow these creatures to prevail.

With this context in mind, we have a purpose for our gameplay, the story is even denser and yields a very extensive and captivating campaign.

It is notable that Cataclismo draws from various other games such as Warcraft, Age of Empires, and especially LEGO, with one of the developers' philosophies being complete freedom in building and organizing structures.

Cataclismo has a resource and troop management system, as well as a pause system, camera changes, in other words, the game has true RTS game characteristics, adding a lot of personality and a good story.

Mechanics and combat

As I mentioned earlier, Cataclismo uses a combat system based on eliminating hordes, which makes the game difficult and at some points, the need for a good strategy to facilitate this combat is what, in my opinion, was quite complex, mainly because we build our fortresses completely from scratch, block by block, as the developers called it.

Furthermore, besides the campaign mode, there are other game modes that focus solely on combat, with practically endless stages and a very high difficulty level, with the aim of testing the player.

It is important to note that the game is not so punishing, although it is single-player, the story mode flows well, especially in the presentation of scenarios, characters, and in general contextualization, a major point that helps in the experience is the very high quality of the audio, the sound effects and dubbing are excellent.

Cataclismo is a project with a lot of personality, its theme is nothing new in the industry, but an impressive personality was possible to convey, with good mechanics, characteristic but very beautiful graphics, being, overall, an excellent game capable of generating immersion and captivating players.

The Hogardian survival

The release of Cataclismo is a very good event, since the game went through crowdfunding and fortunately, for us, it surpassed the project goal and the most impressive thing is the quality offered in the presented package.

The game, in general, is easy to play, mechanically speaking, there are plenty of tutorials to guide the player's first steps and best of all, during my experience, it was how the game manages to be intuitive when it comes to moving around the map or even building passages and accesses, since we are constantly being put into practice to advance.

The game is localized in several languages, however, it only has English dubbing and I believe it is not a completely negative point, as the voices are of quality, and subtitles are provided, facilitating understanding.

The game's audio is excellent, as I mentioned earlier, the quality of the effects is great and the soundtrack brings tense and even epic music at times.

A great RTS experience

My experience with Cataclismo was excellent, as a lover of RTS, all the resources that the game offers and its gameplay in general brought me a lot of comfort, the original key mapping is very good, the game's setting also brings a sense of tension and suspense while fueling hope, the characters are relevant and really have good dialogues and reflections, in addition to the scenarios causing good immersion, overall, it is a very immersive experience for this style of game.

The game's optimization was very good in the test build we had access to, it is indeed not a very heavy game and no graphic changes were necessary, there were no gameplay bugs, just some textures that were rendered in a few seconds, however, small bugs that eventually exist will be resolved with the official release.

The game offers a good quality of life, with a complete and quite large interface, but with pertinent tips and good menus for configuring all elements.

For this review, the game was experienced on PC, using the Steam platform. I thank Hooded Horse for providing the access key.