Cataclismo review: "Early Access will probably do it a ton of favors"

Video games are comfortable at the end of the world, and they're also happy to let you build things to your heart's content. Cataclismo offers both apocalypse and the infinite tinkering of buildable worlds in bulk. Your enjoyment of the game will be dependent on how much joy you can extract from these two well-worn concepts.

Releasing into Steam Early Access on July 22, Cataclismo is the newest offering from developer Digital Sun – most famous for 2018's shopkeeping roguelike Moonlighter. Billed as equal parts city builder and tower defense, Cataclismo continues Digital Sun's reputation for welding game mechanics from different systems into one another to make something new. 

What shakes out is a unique combination of tower defense, tactical strategy, and light city building. Each of these game types are difficult to accomplish on their own. Tower defense games often play like elaborate math problems where the player has to construct interesting mazes and obstacles to keep the hordes at bay. Tactical games require careful placement of troops and the management of where they are at certain times. City builders ask you to think about the problems of right now whilst mitigating what might arise in the future, spreading you thin across time and the scale of your city. Smashing these elements together, and making it interesting, is a challenge.

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Strong foundations

Cataclismo puts these disparate elements together like this: you have a little magic citadel that you need to protect from the horrors out in the mist. You need to chop wood, mine stone, build houses, and generally manage a little town in order to get resources to construct your protective edifices. Those will probably be big walls. You'll turn citizens into soldiers, and you will put archers, cannoneers, and other troops on top of those walls to fight off the horrors, who will come at night and in waves. Where you put those troops matters a lot – archers fight better from atop a wall, while bomb throwers do better while they're low and close to the enemy.

The system for creating the little village, and building your walls, is delightful in spirit. You have stone and wood to work with. Stone has more structural integrity and can build higher, but wood is lighter, and creating structures for your soldiers does require some patient architecture. Learning how to make stone archways, which you can then hang scaffolding off of, is a real delight. Learning how to make multiple layers of fighting platforms to stand your troops on, so that they can rain arrowfire down on monstrous enemies, scratches the brain in a real intriguing way.

In the Early Access build that I had access to, there are a few ways to experience these systems. There are Skirmishes, small self-contained levels where you can slowly build your citadel against the monsters every night, and there is Endless mode, which is similar-but-eternal mode. Both of these are interesting, but failed to hold my attention for long.

I spent the most time with Campaign mode, which took me about seven hours to complete. It tells the story of a last bastion city and the decimation that surrounds it. The city is controlled by a magical sect centered on the mysterious Perla, a big pearl orb that can be harnessed to drive away the Horrors that have destroyed the world. The campaign itself follows Lady Iris, a young woman with Perla powers, who sets off on an expedition to fix the world. 

Early Access refinement

Things get weird – there's time travel powers – but the beat by beat of the plot is standard apocalypse fare. The story is most interesting when it is being conceptual and provoking the big questions (Where do the Perla come from? Who killed the world that came before? Why is this the last city?) The campaign is currently incomplete, but there are a handful of meaty missions that propelled me through the game and kept me interested in solving more and bigger problems with larger and larger fortress walls.

However, I think that is a flaw with Cataclismo in its current form. Tower defense games, city builders, and tactical games tend to be systems-driven. These are genres that excel at being fun at a baseline level: building, managing, and battling are fun video game activities. I think that Cataclismo is narratively very interesting and that its fantasy apocalypse setting is something I am willing to eat up. 

The basic operations of building walls, fortresses, rooms, and buildings leaves a lot to be desired, though. I found the menus difficult to navigate, often leaving me scrolling through a lot of options to find the specific thing I wanted. The actual placement mechanics are also a struggle, given that rotating, placing, and deleting are all I have access to. I would not be shocked if a full 20% of my playtime was spent deleting things I had made because I was off by a single space or I misjudged the distance between two things in 3D space.

This comes with the territory, and there's a learning curve to everything, but this is not an issue I have had in the dozens of games and thousands of hours I have put into games in the genres that Cataclismo is playing in. The modes beyond the Campaign failed to grab me because I felt that the basic operations of the game were more trouble than they were worth, especially given that the tools in my toolbox mostly consisted of building big walls with as many soldiers as I could fit onto them. This tended to take care of most problems that came my way.

There is something in Cataclismo, and I think this is a game that is going to go from middling to exceptional through the Early Access process. What exists currently is a great skeleton that doesn't quite resolve into the gripping, "one more turn" gameplay that others in its genres are known for, and that's ok. It's doing something that no one has really accomplished before, and it takes time to get things right. Cataclismo is doing a lot of the right things, and it's already excelling at a few of them, and I'm eager to see where a few months of narrowed development time will take the game.

Cataclismo was reviewed in Early Access on PC, with code provided by the publisher.