First things first: Cataclismo, out in Early Access last month, is already one of the Games Of The Year. An elegant blending of tower defence, real-time strategy and city-building, it’s incredible stuff. For the first 2-3 hours I spent playing it I can barely remember the specifics, because I was just sitting there, mouth agape, muttering "this is perfect, how did they make a video game so perfect" over and over into the darkness.
If you haven't been keeping up with the game's development, this launch trailer will give you all you need to know about how it works:
As you could probably tell about three seconds into that trailer, a huge part of Cataclismo is the act of building your fortifications. Sure, your city and troops and resources are important, but they're all done in support of getting big walls up and keeping them up, because they're the only things standing between an endless horde of nightmarish undead and the last remnants of humanity.
Building walls is so important that, just a few days after launching into Early Access, developer Digital Sun announced the release of a sandbox mode, so players could just spend as much time as they wanted perfecting their battlements and building some very cool shit.
That's always how these construction-based games go, right? From Minecraft to Kerbal Space Program, the original point of the game can sometimes get subsumed by people just wanting to perfect something they made and show it off to their friends and the game's wider community. That's why even just a few seconds into Cataclismo's trailer you see a fairy tale-ass castle, and why--and this is an absolute masterstroke--you can save parts of your build as a blueprint and share it via Steam Workshop.
This feature rules, because the people who came up with these elegantly minimal (or elaborately beautiful!) designs don't just get to share them with the world, but everyone else gets a practical benefit from them, because by downloading the blueprints you can instantly build these structures in your own game if you've got the resources, bypassing much of Cataclismo's construction work in the process.
Which, if you're interested in things like optimisation, will be a godsend. I, however, could not care less about optimisation. Or cosmetics. I am capable of building only the ugliest things in Cataclismo, and it's all I ever want to do.
I think--and I'm not telling you how to play the game, this is just how I want to play the game--you're supposed to play this game like shit! Consider its setting: you are the last surviving humans in a world ravaged by the apocalypse, a once-great civilization forced to the very fringes to escape an all-consuming enemy. Every resource you get hold of in this game has to be earned by scavenging, chipping it off ancient ruins, braving the hostile wilds or putting civilians to work inside fortified mines that could become their tomb at any moment.
I do not think this is a situation conducive to beautiful architectural gestures. The vibes here are closer to "shit man, just get some stone from wherever you can, pile it up as high as you can, get some archers on the top and hope for the best". There's more to Cataclismo, of course--the game itself is how you juggle your resources, units and their varying strengths and weaknesses at certain heights and against certain enemies--but the desperation is the gist.
This chaos, this flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants approach to what should be a thoughtfully-planned video game challenge, is also how I play Hitman, another game where everyone else seems so proud of their patient, meticulous approach to a kill, but where I just run around frantically swapping clothes before shooting someone in the face then legging it. And there, just like here, I don't feel bad for playing the game "wrong", I love it all the more for "wrong" being a viable option in the first place.
To those spending hours/days/weeks building fancy towers and impenetrable barricades, I salute both your creativity and your perseverance. But me, I just want to put some stone between me and the bad guys and pray for dawn. It might not be the most optimal strategy, but it's the one I think works best at the end of the world.
