Hooded Horse, a PC video game publisher that rose to fame earlier this year for backing real-time strategy (RTS) game hit Manor Lords, will release another excellent game into early access next week. The game in question is Cataclismo, the latest effort from Moonlighter and The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story developer Digital Sun Games. It mixes real-time strategy and tower defense mechanics, and players have a lot of freedom in terms of how they build up the defense around their bases in order to ward off the “horrors” that attack them each night.
Although Cataclismo will still be in early access when it launches next week, fans of the RTS genre, base-building games, and tower defense titles will want to keep their eye on Hooded Horse’s latest. With Manor Lords and Cataclismo, Hooded Horse is cementing itself as the PC game publisher to watch.
Cataclismo follows some of the last vestiges of humanity after the titular event corrupted much of humanity and turned them into vicious horrors. Lady Iris is on a quest to find a MacGuffin called the Atla Perl and must fight off horrors each night as her crew hops from citadel to citadel in search of it. From a gameplay perspective, this all plays out through RTS mechanics reminiscent of titles like Age of Empires, albeit with systems that place a greater emphasis on tower defense and base building.
Players will instantly fail missions if Iris is killed or the central building in their fortress falls, so it is up to players to build ample defense and deftly command combat units to ensure that does not happen. During the daytime, I have to build structures within the confines of my citadel to spawn new units and collect important resources like wood, stone, and oxygen. Building up my citadel’s defense was equally important, and the game let me put up a wall, stone brick by stone brick.
Although I’m definitely not the best at creating pretty-looking structures, I appreciate the modularity of its base-building mechanics. It has even more depth than something like Minecraft Legends, which is based on a franchise all about building. Gathering resources and building all of those things took up all of the limited time I had each day, and at night, I then had to defend against the horrors.
Proper base-building during the day is essential to surviving the night, but it’s also possible to command units, most of which use ranged attacks early on, individually, to be effective during combat. Even on medium difficulty, I found Cataclismo tough early on, as these horrors do a fantastic job of discovering the smallest weak points in my defense that I had overlooked. From there, it becomes a more active, combat-focused RTS as I do all I can to prevent them from destroying the central building in my base before the night ends.
I repeat that cycle over the course of several in-game days as I complete other level-specific main and bonus objectives. In that time, Cataclismo quickly asserted itself as an entertaining RTS that always kept me on my toes as I balanced base design, fortifying my base properly, and fighting off hordes of enemies.
On top of all that in the main campaign, Cataclismo already has several modes and gameplay systems in place to ensure its longevity. Steam Workshop support is built right into its building menu, so players will be able to import blueprints for community-made creations. Endless and Skirmish modes allow players to test their base building and defense skills in different contexts, and a level editor mode already gives players all the needed tools to create their own scenarios. This feels a bit more complete and engaging than many other early access titles, including Manor Lords, so I can’t wait to see how this RTS evolves even more over time.
Cataclismo will enter early access on Steam on July 22. According to the early access details on its Steam page, Digital Sun Games and Hooded Horse plan on keeping Cataclismo in early access “for around a year.”
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