Artificial Extinction is a tower defense/FPS hybrid game by 100 Hr Games where you have to defend yourself from an evil AI while setting up your colony.
The game has a backstory that’s all too familiar. Humans build super complex AI, AI goes rogue, now humans are on the run. You know, fairly standard stuff. You play the role of a colonist who is looking to set up a safe place for his family.
You have to defend yourself for 9 days from an onslaught of AI-controlled drones, by setting up turrets and carefully managing your resources. Every time you dropped to a new location, you will have to set up miners and start gathering metal, energy, and fuel.
You are assisted by your own AI bot that oddly sounds like the dictate option on my laptop. This nifty little companion gives you advice and more importantly repairs your turrets.
There’s a lot of strategies that you can apply to survive the waves of drones, and you have a wide arsenal of turrets to help you do so. From the simple yet effective Sniper turret to the devastating but limited ammo capabilities of the MLRS. Each turret has its weaknesses and spamming one type of turret will earn you a quick game over, you have to plan and set up a proper layout of drones if you want to survive for more than a day.
Since it’s also an FPS game, you can attack the enemy drones with your sniper rifle, but it isn’t very effective. You are also very slow and have limited mobility. So if the drones start focusing on you, you better have a good reason to draw their attention.
Visually the game looks good enough, there’s not a lot of variety to anything. The lands are mostly barren and the turrets look okay. The textures are well done though and the game is well optimized despite the ton of particles and explosions going around. There’s also a nice soundtrack that really sets the mood for some good old fashioned robot slaughter.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Artificial Extinction is a fun game and challenging game that kept me entertained for the 8 or so hours it took for me to see and play through almost everything, and I still have the survival mode to play through. There are some bugs here and there, but the gameplay is deceitfully simple. For this price, I highly recommend anyone who loves Tower Defense games.