Cataclismo Steam Charts & Stats

Reminds me of old school Stronghold with a dark twist. Really enjoying this game so far for the $20 I paid. Tutorial is very well done explaining new things step by step. Runs great on Steam Deck.

TL:DR - I cannot recommend it in it's current form because the game will easily consume a lot more time than it should, simply because the devs either knowingly or unknowingly made it a chore if you want to play it. The game is an artsy combination of Stronghold and They Are Billions/Age of Darkness, but it fumbles the formula that made those games great. The castle building and defending against waves of attackers is not as good as it was in Stronghold, there's no oil for you to set on fire and watch it spread, and the wave mechanic of horrors from TAB/AoD isn't well executed. Balance in the game is all over the place, some things are too hard for no particular reason, some things are too easy for no particular reason and somethings are annoying for no particular reason. I did the final mission and it took me 7-8 hours FOR THAT ONE MISSION and it is just tedious to play the game in it's current form. ===Story/Campaign=== It's a decent story but not too special. The main character isn't memorable. No one is going to be like "Hey, that's Iris from Cataclismo!" in a few years time. It did make me have certain feelings during cutscenes but all of that is kind of ruined by the gameplay experience. ===Gameplay=== The game follows the formula of They Are Billions/Age of Darkness, with a few things adjusted here and there. On the surface, the game looks good because you can build walls and castles and defend against hordes of monsters. Who doesn't love that? However, once you start playing you will figure out the problems by around the 3-5 hour mark and by that time you can't really get a refund. So what exactly is wrong? ===Pause Mode=== Firstly, the biggest issue I have is that you basically play the game whilst it is paused during which nothing is happening because the game is "frozen" except for you and your ability to place down defenses instantly or start construction on buildings (that only progress once it is unpaused). The time you are given until night comes is very limited, and so you are forced to pause to pay attention to everything, but while it is paused nothing happens. So these 2 things are in opposition to each other. You either pause and build defenses or you unpause and let things happen but time is very limited. Around 60-80% of your time in the game will be in pause mode and you want to make things good or perfect during this time, but that pursuit of "good" is ruined by the UI and how building works. ===Building Menu/UI=== Which brings me to my second issue, the Building menu UI. The Building menu UI is made in a minimalist art style, but it is designed poorly, and this becomes incredibly annoying when you spend SO MUCH OF YOUR TIME in paused mode building your stuff. The problem is how they organized the categories of buildings. Wood and Stone blocks are 95% identical to each other, but instead of it being there being a single section showing all those pieces, with a button to toggle between Wood or Stone mode, it is for some reason put into a list with ALL of your other structures, which is a giant scrollable list. Yes, they added some shortcuts to jump between sections i.e Wood section, Stone section, Resource section, etc. but they are still located in that giant scrollable list and even when you arrive at the wood section via shortcut, what it shows to you is NOT all the wood blocks so you still HAVE to scroll down in this giant list that has 4 columns, but it feels like it is 1 column. I swear to god if the Building UI/UX was better designed, it would have shaved at least 10 hours off of my play time. It is not fun to endure badly designed UI/UX and it was clearly done to look pretty and be good enough, but not to be effective or enjoyable to use. ===Castle/Wall building=== To make things worse, let's talk about Castle/Wall building which is what you will do MOST of the time in pause mode where you will spend MOST of your playtime. Clearly the developers used Stronghold as an inspiration but they messed up. All they had to do was to take the wall building formula that Stronghold had, tweak it a bit to fit it into the game and it would have been golden. HOWEVER, the problem is that they made it too modular. Stone walls come in pieces like a single block, a pillar of 2 blocks or a pillar of 3 blocks. In addition to this, you have those 2 pillars but on their sides. We now have 5 pieces of Stone which could have been a single block that you click and drag either vertically or horizontally to lines or pillars. If it had a similar system to what Scrap Mechanic has in terms of block placement, it would have been way better. But because you have these different pieces, the devs gave them different properties like price, durability, etc. The problem is that players will meta game the best piece and use that for wall building, which it turns out is the 3 block pillar as it has the most HP, so all the walls are now built with that piece as the foundation and then they either continue stacking pillars or use smaller pieces to fill the gaps. Why does this system need to exist? I understand there are other blocks like windows, supports, roofs, buff providers, lanterns and merlons, each with their own tactical use and requirement, but surely this Stone block system could have been simplified and it would have worked out way better. It is much easier to place a 7-block height pillar with a single click and drag, remove block #5 in that pillar and place a lantern block there (why does the Lantern block EVEN NEED TO BE A BLOCK? It can just be a piece that sticks on the side of a Wood block.) AS OPPOSED TO going to the build menu, select the 3-block pillar, place it down, go to the menu again, select a 1 block piece, place it on top of the 3 block pillar, go the menu again, select the lantern block, place it on top of the 1 block piece, go to the menu, select the 1 block piece again and place it on top of the lantern block. And imagine doing this for EVERYTHING when it comes to wall building. See what I mean? You can drag a piece and it will place those pieces along a line, but it is not enough. I could have saved another 10 hours of play time if this was done properly. ===Annoyances=== I will applaud the devs though, they added a "history" section of your most recently placed blocks/buildings to make things easier. However, they messed up again by making this section only show 3 pieces at one time, with an option to click and turn the page to see ANOTHER 3 pieces in your history list. I suppose they did it this way because it didn't fit within their artsy UI, they seem to follow form over function when it comes to these sorts of things. They also have a Blueprint system where you can save your builds and share them with others, but it is poorly implemented, not explained to you by the game and doesn't serve much of a purpose. Due to this, it is a nightmare to make stairs. The amount of times you have to click on screen, click on the build menu and click on screen again is TOO MUCH! Also some blocks or pieces don't fit together well when they should (merlons should just merge with other merlons next to it). Some pieces don't need to exist (you don't need a corner window piece, just convert a window block into a corner piece if it's place in a corner next to 2 window blocks). It will only change it's appearance visually and doesn't have to be a different block. During the campaign, you get some free units in missions. These units are 99% identical to their regular counterparts, but the game treats them as different units. If you double click on Archers for example, it will select all Archers on the screen, except these free Archers. The economy is whack, you start off way too slow and by the end game you have way too much and the game time is limited, so you advance very slowly towards higher tech but the nights keep coming. By the end, 7 hours later, you are overpowered. All of these should be fixed.

I dunno, I don't hate this game, but I have some gripes with it. * Story mode is pretty meh - this is that style of hack writing where the writer doesn't know how to write unique fantasy so they just replace generic fantasy terms/ideas with unique ones: replace "zombie" with "horror"; replace "spell" with "arte"; replace "magic gem" with "palido"; etc etc. It's trying too hard to not just be Tolkien but in the end, it still is. * The voice acting is strangely stilted, is it the accents? Is it just amateurish? Hard to tell. * GOD I wish you could have a hotbar for building parts. The quick switcher (Shift+Mousewheel) is NOT helpful. I just want to flip quickly between 2x1 stone blocks, 1x1 stone blocks, and various wooden platforms, but you'll be fumbling through the building menu for hours just to get anything accomplished. Building isn't THAT clunky but for how much building you do, it's clunky enough to be annoying. Why can't I just copy+paste walls without having to save it as a blueprint? Speaking of, * The blueprint mode, allowing you to save designs, is great - if it worked. When trying to place a blueprint, it doesn't show you if the terrain is uneven and unsupported - so what happens is the building is half-created, and you have to demolish it all and start over, trying desperately to find the one or two uneven squares you're missing. Oh, and while the game pretends that you can half-build a blueprint now, then just replace the blueprint on top of it to finish the rest later, it never works. You can't align the new blueprint with the existing structures just right and it'll try and build the entire blueprint on top of the existing buildings instead of replacing them. It's a great feature that's just broken and doesn't work. * On a lot of the skirmish maps I never made it to tier 4 upgrades since the game only lasts a fixed number of days - there's a lot of upgrades I just couldn't get because the map ended before it. Weird. * There's only a small handful of units without a ton of variety. * Some of the maps in skirmish mode are frustrating, where waves of horrors come from too many angles to defend at once. Some others have stone and wood locations that are impossible to defend if you place your walls in the optimal spot, leading to awkward situations where it feels like the game is expecting you to sacrifice buildings each night. * You can see vaguely where the horrors are coming from in the upcoming night, but you can't see their actual routes. You have to wait until dusk and THEN the game shows you the monster pathing. Why? Why can't I just see it all the time so I can plan my defenses now instead of waiting until the last second? * The Survival Mode is just the Skirmish mode but waaaay slower, with a bigger map and each night is way, way weaker than Skirmish mode, making maps on this mode take 5x longer to get anything accomplished. The small rogue-like addons are cute but not good enough and this is yet another mode that could've been super cool with more iteration and feedback. I appreciate that this game is more focused on base building than They Are Billions (which disappointingly, the meta of that game was more about creeping the map with your archers than actually building walls), but man... I think this game needed a few more months of iteration based on player feedback. I don't regret my purchase, but I don't think I can recommend it.

Would prefer that for campaign missions, after the 4th Night, give an option to continue playing it as Endless.

Despite other reviewers calling this a Tower Defense game, its more like RTS art of defense formula known from [i]They Are Bilions[/i], [i]Age of Darkness[/i] or [i]Diplomacy Is Not An Option[/i]. You will be doing the same things like in those games (build base, expand to gain resources, clear some mobs during day and build walls to defend against waves at night). The twist to this formula, that Cataclismo offers, is terrain elevation and emphasis on wall construction. Terrain you build on is not a plain, but instead have many different heights and you need to build stairs for your people. Like a lot of stairs. Instead building simple wall like in other RTS's, you have bricks that you stack on each other (like LEGO) to make this wall. And then build a stairs (again) to get your archers on those walls. Its puzzle game mixed with RTS (art of defense style). The puzzle part is my main criticism. In first few hours you may be drawn to it because of novelty factor (it allows a lot of customization), but after that it becomes tedious and annoying. Even to build a simple wall, you have to jump between 3 different brick shapes and rotate them a lot. It takes a lot of time and the puzzle isn't satisfactory. In the end you learn, that shape doesn't matter, just how high the wall is. That's just walls. Other buildings also have some puzzle aspect to it - like one have to be build high, so you need to make high stairs to it (stairs, again). At some point, building every building in this game feels like chore. I felt like I was spending so much time on annoying work, just to get to small fun part, when I could see how my defensive construction works during the wave. Games should be fun at all parts. I hate to give this game negative review because it looks like it is made with love, but the fun just isn't there for me, despite being the fan of the genre.

Not a bad game, but nowhere near worth $30. I'd pay $10 at most. It seems like a really cool RTS/Tower Defense game, but there is ZERO depth. The progression is incredibly linear and there is no real strategy to utilize here. Each time you play it's just "build tall base and stick archers on top then wait". There is the occasional upgrade to use but they are very, very few and far between and linear themselves.

I got this game on the first day of early access and got it refunded due to the poor game play and lack of any real game for the price. However after seeing the updates and how much they've expanded I bought it again and really enjoying it. I'd say get it in a sale atm but I can see that in a few months time that it will be a game worth the price tag.

my GOTY 2025 This is the passion-filled logical conclusion to the They Are Billions genre of tower defense rts base survival, with entertainingly complicated structure defense mechanics and an awesome theme on top that's executed perfectly.

What an engaging and fun game. It's an initially strange but ultimately satisfying blend of Age of Empires settlement management, Frostpunk presentation and a unique Tower Defense approach where you build your defenses by the tile. I love the style of the game as well. It ticks a lot of things right and takes the best of what it blends to craft something truly unique and fun to experience. Highly recommend!

Not feeling it, sadly. It's plain to see that Cataclismo is well-crafted and not even remotely shabby, but while it felt promising at first, something just doesn't click in the end. Convincing myself to keep going, having reached the 10th campaign level, has become quite a tall order. Maybe it's the unexciting units that are the problem, uninspiring in general and not all that satisfying to watch in action. Yes, basic archers are nothing like cannoneers with their slow, but positively destructive attacks, yet neither are a joy to behold once the horrors start attacking. The story isn't what I'd describe as gripping, but at the same time it does little to offend, and ultimately it's a perfectly passable backdrop. There's voice acting, which is *almost* commendable, but every once in a while I couldn't help but feel that certain lines weren't landing the right way, which was tough to ignore. But the main issue definitely turned out to be the game's key feature, the ability to build defenses element by element. This approach to building felt delightful at first, but the magic didn't stick around for long. The way it all works, you get to design fortifications with utmost precision and full creative freedom, which are definitely great things. But as fantastic as this prospect sounds, it's not actually all that enjoyable, and above all, it's an overkill. Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer, as the saying goes. Cataclismo offers a reverse scenario: you have a wide array of tools at your disposal, but all you are building are walls and towers. It's a waste, and what's initially a satisfying process doesn't really have a whole lot of staying power in my experience. And this is not to mention a rather strange decision to offer durability boosts to walls the taller they become. Shame, really, given how lovely Cataclismo seemed. But this is how it all played out for me.