Sanctum Collection review

Once you’ve built some blocks, you can upgrade them with a massive variety of weapons or structures, such as teleportation towers. You have a limited number of resource points to spend, although each wave which you successfully survive earns. Blocks are cheap, as are the starting weapon upgrades, but you’ll need to keep investing in your defences as you face wave after wave of increasingly powerful foes. You’ll also have use your precious resource points to upgrade your own weapons, which include a sniper rifle, a canon that freezes enemies in their tracks and a Gatling gun with a built-in grenade launcher.

Using blocks to slow down the enemy makes them easier to kill.

Like every tower defence title ever, the key to victory lies in creating a long and winding route that forces your enemies to spend as much time getting to core as possible, allowing your towers to inflict the maximum possible damage on your foes.

Sometimes, though, the towers aren’t enough. The aliens have a variety of special traits – some can only be harmed by a sniper shot a specific and tiny weak spot, while others become almost impossible to kill as they gather speed and must be slowed down by building complex mazes. Once the attack wave begins, you’ll need your teleport towers to dart around the map, becoming a weapon in your own right as you fight alongside your automated defences.

There’s also a co-operative multiplayer mode that allows you to team up with up to three friends to take down the invading force together. This allows even more tactical combat as each of you can adopt responsibility for a different role or section of the map.

Sanctum isn’t as much immediate fun as Orcs Must Die and its Unreal Engine-powered graphics don’t look as good, but it has the compellingly addictive quality that every good tower defence game needs. This kept us playing and going back to saved checkpoints even when the aliens breached our defences time and time again until we’d worked out the strategic moves and upgrades required to defeat the next wave.

The checkpoint based save system and ease of returning to the game also give it a low-commitment casual appeal and make it a better way of killing half an hour than trying to immerse yourself in the latest plot-heavy action RPG. If you’ve already downloaded the original, there’s not enough here to warrant buying it, but if you’re new to Sanctum, Collection gives you absolutely everything in one well-priced package.