Sanctum is a first-person shooter

First-person shooter

First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...

 tower defense

Tower defense

Tower defense is a subgenre of real-time strategy computer games.The goal of tower defense games is to try to stop enemies from crossing a map by building towers which shoot at them as they pass. Enemies and towers usually have varied abilities, costs, and ability costs...

 video game, developed by independent developer Coffee Stain Studios. It has been available for pre-purchase via Steam for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 since March 24, 2011.

Plot

In Sanctum, players take on the role of Skye, an elite soldier sent out to protect her home town, Elysion One, from hordes of mysterious alien creatures. To be successful in the task, the player will have to defend a "core" on each level. To accomplish this, the player builds defensive structures, and assists their structures by fending off the enemies themselves.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Sanctum can be divided into the building phase and the extermination phase. In the building phase, the player builds structures on a pre-defined grid, using the 8 'towers' chosen at the start of the level. These towers include stationary weapons, teleporters for the player's use, and pads that affect enemies moving over them. The player can also upgrade any of the 3 weapons equipped at the start. Building and upgrading both cost points, which are gained when enemies are killed.

In the extermination phase, a wave of one or more enemy types moves across the level towards the core. With each enemy that reaches the core, the condition of the core degrades from 100%; when the condition reaches 0%, the game ends. Unlike most tower defense games, the player is allowed to move about the level during this phase and attack enemies with different weapon types, much like in a typical first-person shooter. Touching enemies will result in the player being knocked back, but no damage is done.

There are 10 types of enemies in the game, 3 of which are air-borne. Because certain towers are more effective against certain enemies, and only a select few towers affect flying enemies, the player must plan for all possibilities when building defenses. To aid the player in this, information about upcoming waves is shown in the pause menu, as well as descriptions of the various enemies, towers, and weapons.

Beta

The beta was made available to all people who pre-purchased the game on Steam. The beta only allowed for players to play one level, in single- or in multiplayer.

Reception

Sanctum received mixed reviews from critics. The review aggregation website Metacritic

Metacritic

Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

 currently estimates a score of 70 out of 100, based on 21 reviews.

External links

• Sanctum Facebook page
• Developers website
• Sanctum at Wikia
  Wikia
  Wikia is a free web hosting service for wikis . It is normally free of charge for readers and editors, deriving most of its income from advertising, and publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki...