Against the Storm

Wouldn't really call it a city builder. More like a RTS base builder but without the fighting. Anyway the gameplay is addictive as ****. Can hardly put it down. 10/10.

I’d give Against the Storm a solid 9/10. And just for context: besides my playtime shown on Steam, I also have around 65–70 additional hours in the game from when I played it through the Xbox App while it was still on Game Pass. What initially got me was the cozy vibe. There’s something strangely relaxing about building a settlement in an endlessly hostile forest while the storm is getting worse, three glade events are ticking down, and you’re desperately waiting for one trader to bring the exact thing that might save your run. What kept me playing, though, is how flexible the game is. Sometimes I want a relatively casual session where I just build a decent little settlement and chill. Other times I want to stare at production chains, optimize worker placement, juggle trade routes, calculate hostility thresholds, and completely reorganize my economy because I suddenly realized I can squeeze out the last two reputation points by making everyone cook meat for the harpies and lizards. And that is probably my favorite thing about Against the Storm: you do not need to build the perfect city. You need to build a city that is good enough to win. The gameplay loop works incredibly well. Everyone will naturally develop their own preferred playstyle, but the blueprint system, cornerstones, species combinations and available resources often gently force you to look outside your comfort zone. I am very much a glade-opening kind of player. I like having lots of workers, I am not particularly scared of hostility, and I will absolutely open another dangerous glade when common sense suggests that maybe I should calm down for five minutes. The risk/reward system around opening glades is top tier for me. The RNG is a big part of the experience, and most of the time I think the game handles it very well. Sometimes you really want a specific blueprint or cornerstone and simply do not get it. That can be annoying, but usually the interesting part is how you adapt. A bad random event can become a huge advantage if you react to it properly, and turning a seemingly terrible situation into a profitable one feels fantastic. There is, however, one RNG-related issue that I would really like to see improved: tools. Sometimes I end up with three, four or five crates sitting in glades, but I have absolutely no access to tools. No trader sells them. No blueprint lets me produce them. Nothing. And unlike many other bad situations in Against the Storm, there is not always a meaningful strategic response here. You cannot outplay the problem if the game simply refuses to give you any possible route toward tools. I would love to see some kind of expensive emergency fallback option: inefficient production, a guaranteed but costly trader option, a special order, something. It should not be easy or cheap, but there should ideally be a way to react strategically instead of just accepting that those crates are now forest decoration. The production chains themselves are not especially difficult to understand. Usually it is something like: raw resource → intermediate material → finished product → possibly a service building The complexity comes from scale. One finished product may require two or three other buildings, which themselves need materials from another two or three sources. At some point you look at your settlement and realize that half your population is involved in an industrial conspiracy to produce twelve coats. This is fun, but I do think the game could use more advanced production and logistics rules. For example, I would love to be able to set a condition like: “Only produce flour when stored grain is above 30.” There are many situations where rules like this would make optimization much more precise and reduce unnecessary micromanagement. For a game with such deep production systems, this feels like a natural area for further improvement. I also think the hub upgrade system becomes less interesting over time. Early on, the bonuses feel meaningful. Later, upgrading hubs starts to feel more like a mandatory checklist where you spend resources and worker time placing decorations because that is simply the efficient thing to do. I would love to see more meaningful choices here, instead of hub upgrades becoming an automatic part of every settlement. The metaprogression is generally satisfying, although personally I think unlocks could happen maybe 5–10% faster. Your actual player level can sometimes feel like it moves ahead of the things you are unlocking. The UI and UX, however, are excellent, especially considering how much information the game has to communicate. There are still small things that could be improved, but the developers clearly continue working on this, including the most recent patches. Visually, the game is fantastic. The art style is sharp, distinctive and full of personality, and the atmosphere is honestly one of the best parts of the whole experience. I cannot say the music particularly stuck with me (I genuinely had a moment where I thought, “Wait, is there music?”) but the overall mood absolutely works. Against the Storm is at its best when you are completely immersed in the settlement. When you feel the importance of the next trade route in your bones. When you are deciding whether opening one more glade is genius or stupidity. When the storm is hitting hard, everything is barely holding together, and you are nervously waiting for it to end so damage control can begin. That is when the game really gets under your skin. It can be cozy. It can be stressful. It can be a city builder, an optimization puzzle, a roguelite, or all three at once. Great game, 100% recommended!

Pros: It is a gorgeous game with excellent sound/music, and an interesting world. The gameplay feels/looks like Warcraft... without the war? A pretty reasonably deep (but not overly complex) upgrade system the controls and tools are top-notch, making gameplay intuitive and easy to pick up. Cons: The game is fundamentally flawed - at its core, because of the fact that it combines an overall vibe of relaxing builder game concepts with a fundamentally more stressful, RNG-based roguelite system of building unlocks in each map. >>> In other words, the fact that you can feel "at the mercy" of the randomness of unlocks means that you may find it more difficult to get the more relaxing aspects of a relaxing builder-style game - while the more chill vibes of the game overall mean that people who like the RNG-heavy mechanics may feel bored with the gameplay over time. Because I can only offer thumbs up or thumbs down, after having played during a free-play week for several days, I can say that this game is an excellent effort at the impossible task of combining these ideas. But if you want a relaxing game, there are better options, if you want roguelite, there are better options. If you are somehow the person who wants to experience both? You will love this game!

Interesting game, too bad the mechanics and the whole RNG nature of the game gets in the way of the game. If you like City/Colony Builder sort of games, honestly stay away from this game. The mechanics of the game make it almost impossible to have fun that way. You basically have a meter, and once it goes all blue (your meter) or all red (enemy meter), the game is over. So you can't really chill and enjoy the good bits of it (the colony/city builder with neat randomized stories involved), because you always will have to put up with said meter. Doesn't help that you have a card meta game within it, and you're limited to three cards, with one decision, and you have orders (obligations) that help fill up the blue meter, AND you have to choose between two helpful items, AND you have to chose between two to three sets of new settlers. It doesn't give you time to rest and enjoy just building out the settlement. Honestly just wished they did away with most of it outside of obligations, stories, and help, and just give levels where you unlock buildings, until you have all of them. You can just keep the blue meter, and if that maxes out, you win (like Two Point does it), where you could continue it out or go to the next level. That's the other issue, you just get random buildings flung at you. So you never understand what the buildings exactly do, I end up most of the time building the wrong building because of this. Doesn't help that each map is themed. That wouldn't be a problem if you didn't have the red meter and constant needless stress of a game over. So building the wrong buildings for the map will end up with you losing really quickly, which gets really annoying. Honestly, just a confusing mess of a game. If you can "get" this game, or can wrap your head around it's confusing nature, I'm sure it could be fun and challenging. But honestly, this game doesn't do it for me.

После 25 наигранных часов и являясь большим фанатом таких медитативных игр вдруг захотелось написать обзор. Плюсы: +очень приятная цветовая гамма и музыкальное сопровождение +множество локаций со своими механиками и путем победы +в игре несколько кардинально отличающихся рас со своими потребностями. (ящеры и бобры имба, самые простые) +одна сессия за поселение может пройти очень быстро за 15 минут, так и почти целый час на последней скорости игры. градостроительных сессионных игр не так много в стииме +есть пассивная прокачка, которую нужно с умом использовать минусы: -после того, как открываешь все расы жителей и запоминаешь их потребности становится временами скучно играть. выбрал ящеров, обеспечиваешь им пару разновидностей мясных готовых блюд, попутно выполняешь несложные квесты, и просто ЖДЕШЬ пока выиграешь, ничего не делаешь -прямо противоположная ситуация, когда я почти получил уже третью печать. я начал выполнять задания на открытия печатей, но я просто проиграл рандому. у меня не заспавнилось вообще на полянах еды, а при открытии построек мне не выпало переработчиков зерна или производства ягод. то есть, я играл 6 карт ради того, чтобы проиграть рандому и не открыть печать из-за этого. и это никак нельзя откатить, -из плюса может быть и минус. нет никакого очень длинного режима игры типа как есть в той же серии игр анно. почему я не могу в главном меню выбрать режим игры, где я могу просто чилить и строить большой город? самое смешное, что я могу за еду пассивно прокачивать основной город, а вот строить его в режиме обычной игры не могу, странно -это все-таки игра про гринд и однообразие, а не про градострой, что замечаешь не сразу вывод: если вы хотите купить игру, то купите ее по скидке. ибо после 10-15 часов игры в нее играть все скучнее и скучнее. нету никаого челенджа кроме открытия печатей, которые после пары открытий также становятся очень скучными. ибо ты тупо ждешь когда доделается очередной ящик с роскошью или придет торговец, у которого ты купишь наборы инструментов в обмен на 1500 дерева. в игре кстати склады не имеют внутреннего лимита и ты можешь тупо отправить всех на рубку дерева и у торговца покупать почти все для заданий, но это если повезет. плюс, некоторые ветки производства вообще не нужны ибо забирают слишком много рабочих и ресурсов. это проще купить. например одежду, свитки, благовония, инструменты. я за 25 часов ни разу не построил производства этих товаров и ничего не потерял. если вы любите гриндить и постоянно радоваться маленькому бафу в пару процентов ваших пешек, то игра для вас

Unfortunately, this game is just too complicated. There are so many stats, buildings, conditions, effects, upgrades, bonuses, orders, buildings, races, seasons, encounters, structures, items, tech trees, and many other things all thrown at the player at once. Something simpler and more streamlined would be much more enjoyable. The art and music are beautiful in the game, and the style reminds me of Warcraft. But the immense complexity ruins the game for me.

супер игра по всем аспектам, если вы не казуал а любите поднапрячь голову - эта игра для вас, но и для казуалычей тоже есть чем заняться потомучто тут все супер, и сеттинг, и смешение жанров, элемент рогалика и постоянное желание переодически возвращаться, разрабы гении дай бог им здоровья