Surviving the Aftermath

Surviving the Aftermath is a pretty standard city builder. The genre sprawls a lot so whether this one will do it for you or not is hard to say. I did a single playthrough over about 70 hours on 75% difficulty with its three content DLC. The startup gives you a lot of customization options for difficulty which is nice. The good: - Easy navigation of the space - Minimal minutia; you don’t need to worry about separate layers for pipes or anything, you set something up, its there and done. - Good sound design - Good art design - Lots of content and events to keep you interested for a long time. I spent 90% of my play time on normal speed since there was regularly something to do, take care of or improve and only once I was basically at the end did I just want time to speed by to complete goals (more on that below). - Lots of meaningful choices The not so good: - The game is split into colony view and a sort of overworld map view. The overworld feels a little out of place but is a necessary component to the game so you'll be regularly pausing what feels like the 'main game' to jump into this, like, side quest management map. I had a bit of a bell curve with it where I disliked it in the beginning, found it interesting in the middle and then got tired of it again near the end of the game. - The game drags on a bit too long. About 30 hours in, once the colony was fully stable and self-sufficient, everything after was more akin to just going through the motions. Plenty of choices and touch and go situations up to that point felt good but once I could reliably produce or trade for everything the colony needed, there was nothing that posed a threat or challenge. After that it was just a bit of fun cleaning up and 'beautifying' the town while waiting for the completion percentages to go up. - The vehicle mechanic is not at all well explained. You can get and find vehicles before you have a garage building but if you bring them back to your colony, they just 'disappear' with no indication of what to do or why. They feel like one time use items until you get the garage building. They have a 'durability' stat that depletes as you use them but is 'repaired' with fuel(?) instead of just having a fuel stat. And to get someone out of a car, you click on the vehicle to cycle through each person in the vehicle you want to take out BUT you can't right click on an activity in the world to have them get out and go directly to it, you have to click somewhere else and then select the activity. Its all just not very well thought out. - The alliance system is a little clunky. If you explore the world and find other colonies, they'll ask you for things you can't possibly have access to until mid to late game and failing those requests reduces your reputation for some reason. So, the best thing to do is just let all of the first requests time out and not clear them so you don’t get new requests and just wait until you've unlocked all of the alliance-specific research before clearing one or two to take on a few requests at a time (so you don’t over tax your own resources trying to fulfill their request). If the game didn’t punish you for not fulfilling the request it'd be a different story. But, as it is, it's just very game-y and feels bad at the start. Still. I thoroughly enjoyed a good 50 hours of gameplay. I don’t think I'll do another run as I don’t feel it being harder would make it any more satisfying but, even still, well worth the price IMO.