Preview: Sanctum

“Sanctum is the worlds first first-person shooter tower defense game and is set in a beautiful science fiction world.” As per the description, we had the opportunity with Coffee Stain Studios to play a preview build of the game before its release April 15, 2011 on Steam. Our PC freelancer, Brian, took a look at the world’s first first person tower defense game. – Will

These days it’s all too easy to find a decent tower defense game on any platform. Building towers from a top-down perspective to eliminate waves of enemies yields quick satisfaction and is an incredibly successful formula. Consequently, the experience of any one title ends up almost entirely indistinguishable from another. A recent trend to fight this repetition has been to develop defense titles around existing game engines to bring in new gameplay mechanics. The community-developed Starcraft mods repurposing the RTS engine for tower defense was one of my favorite examples. Coffee Stain Studios has chosen this path with Sanctum, a tower defense title based on mods to the Unreal Tournament 3 engine.

Sanctum plays almost entirely as an FPS. This means that tower construction and upgrades must take place in the player’s line of sight. To add or change towers elsewhere in the map, the character must move to those areas. Fortunately, the developers mitigate the tediousness of running across the map by allowing the player to instantly zoom out to an overhead view at any time. From here, players get the traditional bird’s-eye perspective of the map but can’t interact with the environment. They can check the ranges of existing towers and reappear in first person/ground level at special towers located throughout the map. Transitioning between ground level and overhead perspectives becomes crucial and players with a good sense of spatial orientation will have an easier time recognizing their character’s location and the build square they want to modify.

Sanctum’s other unique component shows when the waves begin. The player is equipped from the beginning with three upgradable weapons with infinite ammo but varying recharge rates. Using FPS gameplay here gives the player a surprisingly personal connection to the strategy and allows for some interesting scenarios like following packs of enemies on foot and defending an area with no turrets. It also allows players to target enemies at weak spots which the turrets can’t do. Unlike an FPS, however, the enemies don’t fire back and the player has no health besides preserving the “core” at the end of the map.

Beyond these elements, Sanctum follows the staples of the tower defense genre fairly closely: Towers can be upgraded for range and power as well as sold, Kills yield credits usable only between waves, certain enemies are vulnerable to certain towers and so forth. While infusing the everyday tower defense title with FPS gameplay is refreshing, Sanctum doesn’t feel like a title casual gamers can pick up and jump into; the exact quality that makes traditional tower defense games so popular. Regardless, players should look forward to where Coffee Stain Studio takes this forthcoming sub-genre.