Attempting to come back to this game brought forth a surge of awful repressed memories that I had forgotten for some time but it's all back now. I liked Sanctum a lot, but I cannot stand playing this for too long. This is simply NOT a singleplayer game. I haven't even played coop, and yet I already know it was balanced for it because of how useless towers feel in this game. The only one with any firepower is you, and while that should mean there's more for you to do, there isn't. In fact, you only get two weapons so there's even less creativity and skill when it comes to killing things in this game compared to the last one. All you do is empty one gun, switch to the next, empty, repeat. The first Sanctum is like this in a way, but certain waves would make you focus more on a specific weapon over the other and the effect that would have in the long run matters. It was always interesting choosing which weapon to upgrade, or maybe which tower to upgrade, but not anymore. Now you can ONLY upgrade towers, and you have a maximum limit of them. Look, I get the design choices of this game, but none of it is fun, or interesting, or engaging. It's designed to have you shoot a bunch of ♥♥♥♥ with your friends rather than intelligently design mazes or make cool synergies with your towers/weapons.
So, that was about the crux of this game sucking, which btw, if you read any other reviews they all agree including a bunch of positive ones. Most of which you'll find they played coop and not solo. Now I'll list off a bunch of miscellaneous (yet still pretty important) problems I've had.
Enemy types are far more obnoxious and not fun to deal with here, and since your towers suck really hard already even against normal mobs you'll not be seeing much help from them against things they cannot damage at all. Also enemies go after you, so again, in coop, this matters a lot. Whereas in solo, that will only happen in one area of the map, so if there are multiple paths the enemies will just be walking along without a care in the world eating bullets from towers like they're raindrops.
There's a stupid progression system so you'll be even more limited from the get-go. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some broken tower or perk later on which dominates everything else, but I'm not wasting my time to find that. Not that I would even enjoy the game any more if there was such a thing.
Speaking of which, perks. They essentially replaced being able to upgrade weapons and they're as lousy and boring as it possibly gets. If you didn't think the game was almost solely about shooting your guns then you haven't looked at these things yet. Most of them don't even affect your towers, and are usually as simple as "do more damage" or "stand near enemy and have this happen."
Positioning. In Sanctum 1, you can build televators which will bring you atop your maze for easier shooting and surveillance, but more importantly you could teleport to them at any moment. The idea is that you can build them for more convenient positioning, but at the cost of a tower slot. That was too good, of course, so there aren't such things here. Instead you're supposed to clone yourself so you can be in the right spots at the right time to actually deal with anything on maps where you cannot merge the enemy paths on. This is probably the most egregious thing this game does that heavily favors it toward coop.
So being in the right place matters, how about actually knowing wtf is going on in a map? Well we got you covered here with this minimap that shows a bunch of red dots and the player cursor being the same color as the background. Have fun trying to even find yourself in the first place. Pressing tab doesn't help, all it does is enlarge the already terrible minimap. In Sanctum 1, you press tab and instantly get a top-down overview of the map, as if you teleported high above the map and can see everything below in real time. The televators are very prominent, and the actual good enemy designs let you know exactly where the big threats are. So you press tab and you can piece together which enemy should be taken out and which televator is the most convenient for carrying that out.
Another thing that's sort of in-line with the last complaint is visual clarity. Sanctum 1 was very... white. The enemies are black, and the maps are well lit so you can make things out much easier. If there's a darker map on 2, even the old top-down map perspective wouldn't help much, and because the enemies aren't visually distinct they end up blending together. Doesn't help there would be a whole bunch of garbage in the way because the maps have to look cooler or whatever.
Why the hell is there sometimes a timer forcing you to move your ass to build things out of nowhere? Seriously, why? It's as if the game knows it can take an eternity to move from one side of the map to the other thanks to there being no televators. It also knows towers are damn near useless anyways so who cares? Just rush the player because they should probably stop thinking and instead be shooting at things.
I have no desire to even "get good" at this game because it's not fun to experiment, it's not fun to shoot stuff, it's not fun to play. Unless you have a friend, or a robot, or maybe even a dog. I'm sure a dog playing this game could accomplish a higher dps than the most optimal tower setup in this game.
