Against the Storm

City builder + roguelite = fun

best strategy

I hadn't played many city builders prior to getting this game, but I did try out more of them after. This game tops them all. Even if you don't think you like the genre, I highly suggest giving it a try.

It took me a while to get around to reviewing this game, but as my >700 hours shows I can attest that it's a great game. This is a city builder with rougelike elements. You don't spend all your time building one city: instead you try to 'complete' settlements and then move on to the next one. There's incentive to winning as fast as possible because the campaign cycle has a limit to the number of in-game years that can pass. Speaking of winning quickly, this game has strong optimization elements. Essentially you start with a small, primitive economy and gradually make it bigger and more advanced. You need to allocate your limited population appropriately, because overproduction of one resource is usually not as valuable as diversifying your economy. This aspect of the game is what makes playing it fun. Some other positive aspects I like are the seasons cycle, where each in-game year culminates in an epic Storm season where you need to be well prepared in order to lose population, and the soundtrack, which not coincidently has great Storm season music (and is great overall!) There's a few mechanics that I disliked that I'll mention briefly. First is how powerful Embarkation goods (basically bonus resources you start with) and the Trader (lets you trade resources at weak exchange rate) are. Both can be utilized to essentially jumpstart your economy from primitive to advanced very quickly. It feels very artificial, like you skipped some important steps of the game. Another aspect I was confused by was Impatience. This is a gauge that if it fills up you lose the game. So it should be a negative, but for some reason it reduces Hostility, which is a mechanic that basically makes your population less happy. So I often found myself raising Impatience on purpose: there's absolutely no penalty to doing this as long as it doesn't reach maximum, only reward. Overall it's an addicting optimization city builder that can be played in bite-sized chunks because you constantly make new settlements. I liked this aspect more than city builders where you spend all your time building one city: I usually forget where I left off when I play those games. If you like optimization games then I think the gameplay loop of AtS will really satisfy. Fantastic game.

Man, this game is really really good. I only played the base version, no DLC, but damn man.. I loved it. I had a timer set for my two hour refund window and blew past it by like 6 hours.

I've now tried to get into this game twice. I don't have a lot of time, but wanted to give this game a try as it looks genuinely fun given the type sof games I like. However, the game is information overload. In the first tutorial, it doesn't even tell me what I'm shooting for. I'm told I have 3 random races, no backstory as to why that is or why it matters, and told to build I think a farm, and then make ale? Rejecting that premise, I go and try to figure out what it is that I'm acutally supposed to be doing in the game, sifting through 10s of encylcopedia entries I finall find the win condition one, and it tells me I need to gain reputation points faster than some queen's impatience grows? Okay. Well, that's great, but what the hell is a reputation point, how do I earn it, what or who is the Queen and how does she get impatience, and moreover, why should I care?! This game seems like it's got a really good shot at being good, but it fails out of the gate for throwing too much technical details of the game without telling you WHY YOU SHOULD CARE. I'll check back in about a year and see if things improve, but this game absolutely fails in the world building IMO, and its insanely hard to invest the hours of time it seems to need to explain the basics to you, if you can't CARE for anything happening in the world.

재미있어요~