Sanctum is a fun game to play solo or with friends. It is a tower defense and first person shooter. Just the right amount of FPS weapons in my opinion. You can choose from a standard automatic weapon with a grenade mode, a sniper rifle, or freeze gun with a secondary freeze wall ability all upgradable. The sniper rifle brings me back to playing MDK and MDK2 its zoom in feature is fantastic.

There are many different tower variations and, like the guns, you can upgrade them. You may be thinking “I have towers, why do I need guns?” Well, some of the enemies are only slowed by the towers, and some need to be shot in the back of the head. In the old House of the dead style you can look up the creatures weak points in an encyclopedia so you can tailor your attack. You can also sell your towers back and redesign to get the edge on upcoming enemies. This game has many facets that you wouldn’t even think of when hearing TD FPS.

Multi-player is a rush, the enemies are harder and of course more abundant from the start. Some of the enemies unlocked in the second level of the game even fly. Flying enemies were something Matt and I were not prepared for. The longer you play as a team the harder the game becomes and the greater chance for reward.

The graphics on the game were better than expected; the Unreal engine is still real and does this concept justice. It’s not stellar or something everyone should use, however it’s good enough for this application. As an independent release and in the $20 range I think this game is well worth the money. It is a steam game but in the future it will have easier multi-player connections making it even more valuable. I think it has quite a bit of replay potential too, at the different levels you experience more than just a change in difficulty. You see a wider variety of creatures to fight and you really need to change up your strategy. Though I see the dancing at the end of the level win or lose as a bit hokey they made a good game out of what seemed to be a silly concept.

This game gets 3 out of 5 potatoes.

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