Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Sanctum-onious!

The first person tower defense genre or, more broadly, the "get in the nitty gritty" tower defense genre (if we want to expand our definition to encompass titles like Orcs Must Die) is a fine little niche, distinct from its punishing older cousin, the traditional tower defense genre.  Traditional tower defense games have steep learning curves and serious penalties in place for anyone with the temerity to do things like "make a single mistake" or "try to rearrange their towers."  Nitty gritty tower defense games are known for letting players play fast and loose, sometimes encouraging them to try playing without any towers at all.  Orcs Must Die 2 has achievement for doing just that, and a set of occasional challenges that severely limit your tower building ability.

Usually, this results in a gentler, less distinctive difficulty curve that allows for a messier sort of gameplay.

Enter Sanctum 2.

Sanctum 2, from the get-go, seems like a kind, gentle tower defense game.  It rolls things out slowly, easily.  It usually gives you a nice, long, leisurely set up period that you control between rounds.  It tells you just what's coming at you.  What a lovely TD game Sanctum 2 is!

Or is it?

My relationship with Sanctum 2 began as a relaxed vector for de-stressing.  As graduate school winds to a close, I have to deal with a lot of bullshit, and Sanctum 2 let me do two of my favorite things: build shit and shoot shit.  It was a pleasant mix.  It moved at a leisurely pace, for the most part, and when small things got by, I always had a chance to shoot them.  Even when my first boss fight happened, it wasn't SO bad - it was a neat change up, something that interrupted the pattern of the game.

Then flyers came in.  Then massive tower destroyers who didn't just stomp towers, but burned entire gaps of the map down.  Then the map space started to become increasingly limited.  Then the approaches started getting more diverse.

The relaxed, chill tower defense game I'd begun playing had gone hardcore on me.  I was now forced to make real choices, about tower selection, about character selection, about tower placement and guiding enemy pathing.  To be fair, Sanctum 2 makes the last bit really, really easy with a nice, convenient dotted line arcing out from each node.  If you want to channel your foes through a single area, it's not hard to do, assuming you have enough tower bases.  In fact, the layout system is more or less error proof.

Which is particularly important in the keyboard snappingly difficult portion of the game that I find myself in now.  See, the difficulty curve flipped from hardcore, from punishing but fun, to nearly impossible in one level, setting up a series of weird engagements that have pressed me into a desperate sort of introspection each time I boot up the game.  There's no effortlessly lovely solution that I've discovered to this thought puzzle, no moment of sudden understanding to permit me to, after five or six failed attempts on one level, uncover an elegant solution.  I've tried different characters, different channel setups, different tower selections, different power selections.  It always comes down to a giant boss junking my towers and then hustling back to my base - no fun for anyone.

And yet, I'm still playing.  Still throwing myself at the game, the level, the challenge.

That's where Sanctum 2 shines.  It's a wonderful framework for encouraging you to hurl yourself at difficult or impossible situations, not by merit of a promising reward system, but because the game itself makes you feel like you can win at any moment, and even in failure, it's great fun.

The play, the shooting, the feel of the guns, almost toy-like, and the action of the towers, largely invisible but enjoyable all the same, is terrific. And the perk system is just delightful.  Combining abilities together to alter play is a nice twist, sure, but turning Sanctum into Donkey Kong/Mario with a perk, making fast guns slow and slow guns fast, and making the last hit on each enemy prompt a massive high damage explosion alters the game entirely.  It can make it a cartoony kind of metagame (can you beat every enemy by hopping on them?) and add in some severe tactical choices (by adding in splash damage and corpse explosion, a single kill can wipe out an entire wave of enemies).

Of course, all of this is rooted in a system that doesn't really present any information about enemy units at all.  I've still only got the vaguest idea of what bobbleheads are, and after ten or more hours, I can barely identify most unit types from their spawn-display.  Figuring out how towers work is kind of crazy, and the GUI for displaying purchase info, upgrade info, and general stats for towers and enemies is a fucking mess.

But the game itself permits a kind of looseness that accounts for all these things, even when it's frustrating.  While I have to admit, I'm certainly not playing now, Sanctum 2 gave me a good run, and when I feel up for it I'm gonna tackle that fucking level again.  This time, I'm bringing Simo with a sniper rifle and a bunch of scatter towers.  That'll get 'em.