Cataclismo Review: Possible the Best Base Building Ever in an RTS

The night is dark, and the horrors - many. Cataclismo presents a concept RTS players will know all too well. Build a town. Fortify it. Raise an army - and then defend yourself from progressively stronger hordes of enemies night after night. 

It’s an established formula, but this provides a new angle. See, all those defences, your walls, towers, parapets - they are all placed brick by brick. Think They Are Billions meets a great big box of Lego.

This splits the game down the middle. On one hand, a tense and unforgiving PVE RTS that’ll have you managing your town, resources, improvements and economy against a ramping threat. On the other, a chilled creative sandbox - where you have all the time in the world to create extravagant - or insane - structures. 

It’s a unique experience - one minute you’re thinking fast, organising your troops and exploring the land around you, but then you find a chokepoint, and the game slows right down. You hit pause, and you can build at your leisure, and with complete freedom. 

It took a while for me to get in the headspace where I’m allowed to pause and think and take my time given its an RTS - but I did come around to really enjoy this. Mechanically, it’s fun to just…sit there and build great big towers block by block - and I’d argue, even more fun when you see it all come tumbling down when the horde attacks. Each time you build, you learn a little lesson. There’s intricacies involved with height, support, defences - and remembering to not leave the door wide open.

So, a very interesting premise and a unique spin on things. But there’s a lot of other touches to really like here. There’s a fully voice acted campaign, and a few other game modes to get stuck into. The visual design is fantastic, and the world feels threatening. Lots of different parts all click together and create something that’s captivating - and unique. So let’s have a talk about it all - this is Cataclismo.

A Solid If Unspectacular Campaign

The game has a lot going on, but tying it all together is the world and story. Front and centre of the gamemodes is the Campaign, which has you guide Iris in a quest to drive back the horrors of the world, and protect her home of Ciudad Hogar. The Developers - Digital Sun - are Valencia based, and all the characters and place names have a lovely Spanish twang to them. Unfortunately, my mouth struggles to make those sounds - but I’m doing my best. 

Missions start out linear, but branch off a bit later. Most revolve around a basic objective. Build up your town, fortify your defences - and survive. It’s the bread and butter of the game, so it makes sense that this is what you’ll be doing the most of. And it’s fun. Each time the maps are different, you’ll have new units or tools to play with, and the further on you get, the greater the difficulty and higher the stakes.

Some missions are a hybrid, a bit of world exploration and some building involved, and these are a nice change of pace. In some cases, you will absolutely be put through your paces by surprise enemies. The earlier missions do start out slow, and there’s a few levels of just wandering around maps and building small structures which wasn’t that fun, but once it gets into the swing of things, the game keeps upping the ante map after map. There’s alternate objectives in each mission, and completing these rewards points to unlock new buildings and passive abilities. So a nice sense of progression to go alongside the extra buildings and units you’ll unlock each time. 

Everything’s tied together with an overarching story, little cutscenes and story beats. I won’t go into the details ‘cos I don’t want to rob you of any sort of discovery, but it’s well balanced. It didn’t feel too in my face, and the quality of the art and acting involved was very good. 

All in all, it’s a solid campaign, with a good variety in mission types, objectives, and enough extra challenges to keep you coming back. But, I know many of you aren’t that fussed about the campaign and prefer the replayability of a sandbox - and Cataclismo has a few options for you to dive into.

There's Plenty of Modes on Offer

I’m always drawn to skirmish modes in games like this. Where the campaign holds your hand and dictates what tools you’ll be using, skirmish gives you the lot and tasks you with making it through 4 increasingly difficult nights. You’ll have to manage your economy, scout the map, and find suitable chokepoints to reinforce. Your town can be levelled up to unlock new buildings - so it’s a race against the clock to jumpstart your economy - and have all the unlock all the tools you need to survive.

But like I said earlier, that rush isn’t consistent. At any time, you can pause, and start building. There’s no worry about throwing down walls as quickly as you can - you’ve all the time in the world so you can be creative. There’s currently 2 maps to choose from, and both are handmade - but that’s a double edged sword. On one hand, everything’s laid out and interesting and balanced. However, once you’ve got the lay of the land, there aren’t that many surprises coming.

If you want something a bit more unexpected, you’ll find that in the endless mode. Basically, big maps - infinite waves - each night they get a little stronger. You start with only the very basics, and each horde you beat back, you earn a point to unlock something. I love the idea of this, and I can see this probably being my go to gamemode - but it’s got some problems. In the skirmish mode, you’ve got a handful of really important things available from the get go. Stockpiles to optimise production chains. Buttresses to create defensive positions with. Different units that work best at different ranges. You’ve got none of that in Endless. They can be unlocked, but you need to get through several waves first. 

I like a slower gamemode, but currently this takes too long to get going. You have the production buildings and your economy can get into great shape very quickly, but you’re just waiting on these improvement points to trickle in. Moreover, given that the big draw of the game is building, it’s frustrating that you can’t create anything interesting at the start as you’re hamstrung by the basic building block set. You need to get through a bunch of waves before things get interesting. Again, good on paper, but this definitely needs some adjustments to make it feel engaging.

Finally, and this isn’t going to appeal to everyone, there’s an inbuilt map creator-slash-creative mode. Now, I don’t think I’ll ever actually touch this but I’m very happy it’s there. 

You can design levels for both skirmish or endless mode - whack them on the Steam Workshop and have people get stuck into them. Or on the other end, those who don’t want to create, merely play will have a constant stream of new maps and scenarios to get stuck into. 

But it goes further than that. When you’re actually in the game and you build something you’re particularly proud of. You can save it as a blueprint and keep hold of it for future use. Or put it on the workshop for other people to enjoy. On the other hand, if you’re having a hard time designing something to stop the onslaught of horrors, you can have a browse, find something suitable - and plonk it down. 

I think this is brilliant. I’m such an advocate for mods and player content in games, I think it creates such a healthy community and longevity - and the way this is implemented works for all players. The creatives get to share their designs easily, and everyone else gets a shortcut when they’re just not feeling it.

It Gets a Lot Right, and Nails the Core Gameplay Loop

That’s one of many things Cataclismo does well. These sorts of base defence PVEs are few and far between and this fills a niche within a niche. The brick-by-brick feature isn’t just a gimmick. It’s really well implemented and super smooth. I had worries it was going to be frustrating but I had no issues with it. Hotkeys could be rebound and the interface and layout were easy to navigate. Would have liked the brick select screen to be a bit bigger - but that’s a small complaint. Overall - its defining feature is well implemented and compliments the gameplay loop well. 

And that’s really important. You still feel like you’re playing an RTS. You can spend as long or as little building your town up and making your walls as extravagant as you want. At the end of a day - a big brutalist concrete slab is gonna be just as effective as an intricately designed and carefully placed wall - it just depends how far you want to go. 

It’s also just a very visually impressive game - I mentioned this earlier but I want to stress it again. The art direction is great. They've gone low poly, but it’s not the worn out low poly that’s a dime a dozen. A lot of thought has been put into everything. They go in a different direction for cutscenes but it all fits in the world and setting and aesthetic. Tell you the truth, I kept forgetting this was early access because it feels so polished and complete in 90% of areas - though when I ran into an issue I didn’t mind because it’s those messy edges that are going to be cleaned up. 

Room for Improvement 

And there are certainly areas that could use some TLC during this period. As an RTS, some aspects stuck out. Unit pathing was a bit out of whack, and enemies sometimes got stuck on terrain. You can create unit groups to hotkey select, which is great - but you can’t jump to the unit with the hotkey which is frustrating. 

Placing units at different height positions in structures is important for defence, but it’s also clunky. There’s lens options to hide building exteriors, but for larger structures you’ll find yourself navigating around quite precariously, trying to find the right spot.

I mentioned the endless mode earlier, but I just want to hammer that nail again - that could be a really interesting game mode, but as it stands, it feels too slow to be enjoyable. Now, if that had a few modifiers thrown in and it was rebalanced - I’d play that mode non stop. I mean, it’s still in active development – they can take it any which way they want.  

Despite it being early access - it is incredibly polished and satisfying. This isn’t a ‘hang around for a few years to till it’s finished’ type deal. This feels as complete as many full releases. Be wary that there’s gonna be a few i’s to dot, a few t’s to cross, and some content to fill out. There’s rough edges, but can those be sanded down and sorted out easily in the early access period? Absolutely. 

I find the base defence RTS genre somewhat underserved, so any addition is welcome - but this really goes out of the box and introduces something new to the table. The creative brick building is something that will appeal to a wider audience, and if people come in, play it calmly on low difficulties and are only there to build lovely structures - all power to you. The door is open for you.

I think hardcore RTS fans might have a bit of teething problems with the pace of the game. It goes from very fast to very slow quite often, which as I mentioned, did throw me off here and there. But at the end of the day, you’re in control of the speed of the game, and if you don’t want to spend time building and just want to fight constantly, that’s where the blueprint system will prove incredibly useful. Seriously, I love that feature.