It was the 90s, and will be again
Getting the RTS groove on with Age of Darkness: Final Stand
It was a time of great cultural change and diversity, with art being produced across a wide spectrum from moody people in flannels to angry people with goatees. We were hooked on realism and, in a direct reaction to the 1980s, aggressively opposed to consumerist pastel pop pastiche disposable music, film and tv. But also, we were incredibly cheesy. We just didn’t know it at the time, or we thought we were being cleverer about it than we probably were.
I’m only really describing a specific experience of the 1990s and a specific subset of even that experience: if you were really into guitar-based rock and kind of down a lot or at least into feeling a certain range of emotions, pre-approved by an unseen but somehow all-powerful council of 90s cool. Except don’t say cool. It’s not cool to be cool.
Why the sudden reminiscing? Well, for one thing, I’ve been teaching a class all term about the history of the world between 1986 and 2001, which really became a history of what the hell happened between the Cold War and 9/11 - which in turn often became a history of the 90s. I have been at a point for some time now where my students clearly see me as a plausible dad, but it’s more plausible than ever now. It’s also very odd to be talking about Rage Against the Machine while saying “when I was your age” and generally emoting an “I was there” vibe the whole time.
One of the things that makes this experience even weirder is that the 1990s are very much retro and, for some of the students, kind of in. It took a while, but college kids wear Nirvana t-shirts fairly regularly now. I just need to get them into some Alice in Chains and Dinosaur Jr. It has been showing up in more and more games, as well. City builders are having a moment. And, even more unexpectedly, the RTS is kind of… back?
Neither city builders or RTS’s are really 90s-exclusive genres of course, but both had a certain moment of their own in that decade. And there are things you can do to an RTS to make it feel more 90s, which for this unapologetically biased writer makes them inherently better. I’ve been playing a bunch of Age of Darkness: Final Stand, which is kind of a not-quite-grimdark take on They Are Billions, a game that took the basic RTS base-building concept and said “now what if we used modern graphics cards to throw a bunch of shit at the player? Would they like that?”
They would.
Age of Darkness brings the metal, kind of but not really. The first main hero you deal with either in campaign or survival has a sword that goes on fire for, like, reasons. You fight “nightmares”. Everyone is either really serious or being “funny” or “cocky” in a way I’ve only ever seen characters get away with in video games, and in truth is often saved only by decent voice acting. Everything looks kind of grotty but not bad, exactly. Everything is pretty dark. Literally. The game’s color palette sometimes looks like a Warhammer army with a painter who did a lot of diluted black wash.
So, aesthetically, your mileage might vary. I quite like it, or at least have been in the mood for it. It’s an odd little thing. I wanted to play the campaign first and almost returned the game as it was janky as all get out. Survival mode, clearly the developers’ focus right now, runs like butter. What I played of the campaign was engaging enough, with some interesting characters and plot points, and what looks like it might become an interesting map; but this thing is all about building a base and gearing up before the AI sends waves and waves of green things at you.
On top of all this, the game just feels very 90s (okay, and 2000s) to play. The game didn’t tell me to bind the main base building to 0 and then set up different CTRL groups in the first few minutes of playing, but it’s pretty clear you’re meant to do it. The game has hero units, but it also seems fairly reliant on that resource-management approach to RTS armies where you’ll be building huts and things to increase your population number to make it possible to replenish your guys quickly when you lose a section of wall.
That’s where the game comes alive, really. In truth I’m not really sure I’ll get back to the campaign, though I feel dirty writing that given all the work being put into it. Slogging through an RTS campaign just feels 90s in a way that’s passe, whereas setting up the base to be able to spam out a whole army in about 210 seconds feels retro in a comforting way. Also, fire swords.
There’s a lot going on here too in terms of how various modern conventions are incorporated into the game. This game works well for me when it feels like a roguelike, which is basically what its “survival” mode aspires to me. Everything feels a bit tricky, like it needs to scale up and expects you to be hanging out with a coke and some chips for half an hour as you build into a wave you can’t beat… the actual build up is gradual enough I haven’t really got to those massive infestation waves yet.
Ultimately that’s what makes me happiest about this game and games like it. We weren’t wrong in the 90s! At least not about everything. A lot about 90s gaming was too limiting, which was typically a product of the hardware or the fact that the medium as a whole still felt so new. But some things worked. Base building is a thing. Age of Darkness and games like it don’t bring back these ideas just for nostalgia, but because they were good ideas.
That, or everyone playing these games are in their 40s. Let’s not think about that, though.