14 DAY TRIAL // 
There are never enough points for all the weapons I want and never enough building blocks to make sure that enemies have a hard time reaching my core.
The paragraph above sums up my feelings before starting each new wave battle in Sanctum 2 and also explains why the game is an interesting mix of tower defense and first person-shooter that should appeal to fans of both genres.
The development team at Coffee Stain Studios pioneered the idea of mixing the two core mechanics and Sanctum 2 refines the features and expands the options that gamers can use, making the entire experience feel superior to the first title in the series.
The core structure of a level in the game is based on waves of enemies that are aiming to reach and destroy a player’s core and which have to be stopped using both clever placements of structures and automated turrets and solid first-person shooter action.
There’s a thin layer of fiction that Coffee Stain Studios introduces and the graphics style of the briefings is beautiful, but the game needs to be played for the gameplay and not for the narrative payoff.
Once a level is loaded, players need to carefully consider where the enemies will be coming in from and how to best block their path and how to create killing fields where the latter are exposed to as much weapon fire as possible.
The initial one or two waves of enemies tend to be easy to deal with, but as the final assault approaches, the difficulty increases and players will tend to move hectically from one area to another, boosting defenses, upgrading turrets or modifying their entire plan on the fly.
I sometimes use my character to go up ahead and hold up monsters as they stay in range of my towers and at other times, I hang back, snipping at them while they approach the core.
There’s no one winning strategy in Sanctum 2 and the game encourages players to think on their feet and quickly adapt to all the challenges that the developers throw at them.
I have often had nail-biting final battles in the levels I played, with monsters just slipping by my defenses, forcing me to backtrack to the core and mount a final stand in order to make sure that I avoided its destruction.
The fact that there are four characters and the newly introduced feats of strength (which make the levels more difficult to complete) also bring a lot of replayability to Sanctum 2 and fans of the concept will probably play through it at least four times.
Coffee Stain Studios understands the importance of graphics to the modern player and creates a solid if a little unspectacular graphics style for Sanctum 2, making it easy for players to understand how to build structures and how to modify their defenses while also delivering a constant frame rate for the first-person shooter sections.
Sanctum 2 makes it easy to get other players to join in the action by making a game public and those who have a tight four-man squad ready from other games can also send invites to a private experience.
The game is somewhat easier as long as the players can coordinate their moves a little and focus on the biggest threats to the core.
Sanctum 2 is a good game that bridges genres that are separated in the mind of many players and it should offer hours of shooter and tower defense fun to anyone who’s ready to accept its core ideas.
