People asked multi from the start, devs ignored it, for a while. When story was near completion devs added multiplayer button as a teaser for it. Well the story is out for 3+ months now, last hotfix was on Feb. No new news, nothing. Checked their discord nothing there too. People started saying devs abandoned the game and they are just ignoring it so yeah....

Basically a cash grab situation. Will remove no recommendation if devs prove me wrong in the future, but for now, no more games from Team17 :)

Quality game from Playside! Definitely a big fan :)

After playing ~200 hours of They Are Billions, bought Age of Darkness to fill my RTS hoard defence itch. Was on the fence for a while; as while there are lots of similarities with TAB, the meta is quite different but very addictive once I stopped trying to play it like TAB and played AoD like its own game.

Other thoughts
Campaign: Goes for the Blizzard RTS vibe in terms of polished story. Very linear in terms of progression in and out of missions and the story lacks the same level of excellent writing that you'd get from Blizzard. Not sure it really taught me anything useful about survival mode outside of some unit meta (as I played through the campaign first) but it was decent enough for 10 or so hours.

Stability: No issues with crashing or major bugs. A couple of minor graphical and path-finding glitches here and there but I didn't experience anything close to game breaking. The lack of proper ultra-wide support is an annoyance though, can't zoom out far enough on my 1440p ultrawide. There is a workaround of sorts (check the PC gaming wiki) but it isn't perfect.

Gameplay: Was initially put off by the comments on excessive micro and a limited meta, however I feel that TAB is way more micro heavy, had no issues keeping a mix of melee and ranged units alive during map clearing. Enemy attacks are relatively slow and well-telegraphed. Compared to a large ball of units in TAB which can clear the map without me needing to pay attention, there was a need to manually map clear in AoD for most of my runs however I never found this a chore. All of my survival runs on TAB followed a very similar progression; sniper ball for map clearing + titans/executors at the end for final wave defence. I haven't played nightmare yet but the slightly different factions and heroes led me to use a few different types of unit meta playing AoD - though the base expansion progression is more or less always the same for each run.

Polish/QoL: The game looks great and runs well at 1440p (3900x and 6900XT). UI works well enough though I wish it wouldn't reset my building selection after placing a single wall for example. Loading a game takes an age from striped NVMe storage, but saving and exiting the game is fast. Decent sound effects and score, unit barks never annoyed me or got too repetitive (though YMMV). Map generation, while being a single biome, is interesting and leads to lots of variation within the tileset. Though AoD is still in EA, the game feels very complete. I'm not interested in playing co-op or MP so have no issues with this not being part of the game in its current state.