Recent reviews by Centron

First impressions after the demo and an hour in the full game:

Mirrors Edge and Hotline Miami had a baby that grew up on synth music. It's difficult and unforgiving, but dying isn't punished heavily with frequent checkpoints and when you clear a room, it is a perfect symphony of violence that has you hitting a flow state and feeling totally awesome.

Great budget game that you can sink tons of hours into (be sure to try out the mods too!)

Servers barely work, and you can grind for hours just to get raided or have a character bricked

TL;DR: Massive improvement over Sanctum 1. Leveling system doesn't feel grindy, and helps to introduce old and new sanctum players into the new towers and features. Multiplayer can be annoying sometimes with trolls public play, but overall the community is helpful and welcoming. Playing with friends is very rewarding and fun.

Let's start from the top. If it is not obvious already, Sanctum 2 is the sequel to Sanctum, the Unreal Engine-based game that came on the scene slow at first before it made a big breakout on Steam, prompting this sequel.

First impressions from a Sanctum 1 player: WOW, this game has fixed a lot of gameplay annoyances that the first Sanctum had. Sanctum 2 has trashed the high, inaccessible walls of its predecessor with more sensible barriers that the player can actually mantle. Also, towers can now be partially upgraded in between the proper "levels" so no more sitting on 99 credits that can't do anything because you are one short of the upgrade. All of your towers maxed out? You can now OVERCHARGE them with excess money, with diminishing returns of course.

Next up, the UI. Another massive improvement. Sanctum 1 didn't really give great descriptions of each tower, and the stats of towers were not as easy to read, so knowing the proper abilities of a tower (essential for a Tower Defense game) couldn't be done at a glance. Now, a simple mouse over on the tower tells the player everything they need to know, and range is displayed in a helpful holographic overlay.

Now, the new progression system, at first it may trigger the eyeroll of shoving grindy RPG elements where they don't belong, but the implementation is solid. The player isn't hamstrung from completing levels due to being a lower level. Grinding simply doesn't happen, in the since that you don't find yourself needing to repeat levels endlessly. You can however, enable "Feats of Strength" when you replay old levels to substantially increase difficulty (and your XP reward) if you find yourself wanting to level faster. Being low level also doesn't exclude you from playing with higher level players. Because each player is limited to a certain number of tower and perk slots, you can always find a niche to fill in multiplayer (I enjoy playing the rocket launcher character and managing airborne minions).

Overall, I can't see a reason not to get this game if you enjoy Tower Defense or Action Shooters for that matter. Sanctum offers short, replayable fun for a very low price. Buy this game!