Don't sleep on Cataclismo, building up fortresses like LEGO to defend against hordes is great

Cataclismo is a game where you design and build a fortress to face off against waves of enemy hordes. The LEGO-like building system is a lot of fun, really letting your creativity shine. That is, until all your beautiful staircases and walls inevitably come crumbling down. Note: key via the publisher.

It was in Early Access and just in March hit the 1.0 release and I've been having a lot of fun with this. The story campaign isn't really what sells this one at all. I mean, it's a nice way to play-through it, but all I want to do is sit and build awesome looking castles in a LEGO-like fashion until the sun goes down. Just to watch all my archers reign down hell on the approaching horrors.

The gameplay loop here is just endlessly satisfying. As you build up your defences with each individual brick, and there's many different types of bricks and different materials for quick or strong builds, watching it all come together is seriously slick. Even when things go wrong, and everything comes crumbling down (which it will, eventually), that's also just pure satisfaction to watch. So many stairs though, everything needs stairs. So you're going to end up with lots of them and it's a bit chaotic when those come crashing down and you're trying to reroute your people around to ensure the rest of it doesn't go with it.

Elevation is the key here, with different troops needing different levels, which is again where your block placing design will come into it to make full use of everyone you have.

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An incredibly atmospheric game, with a simple yet inviting style that lets you focus on what it does best. You can get a lot of hours of building and tower defence out of this one spread across the campaign, the skirmish battle mode across different maps and the endless mode to see just how far you can go.

Easily one of the best horde defence games out there thanks to the modular building system. A real gem you shouldn't skip over. It works great on Desktop Linux with Proton. Valve also rated it Steam Deck Playable but doesn't really seem like a good fit on the handheld.