Surviving the Aftermath

Its good for one play through, so a good 20 to 30 hours of play. There is like 4 "events" like meteor strikes, winter, ect and the same 4 traders/bandits that have the same stuff...same attacks..over and over. Then the same 10ish quests that just pop up neaby. Mostly feels like i'm waiting for a load screen after i set up 4 camps to learn how to make a doomsday bunker. like 0.5% studied each round. like ok....annnd now we wait? Every 10% ish you'll get a pop up but for the most part super obvious choices. Once you've fully explored the map you're just kinda waiting. Not worth $30 but if you can get it on sale for like $10ish its a fun little time killer but its a grinding city builder mets civ

I came to Surviving the Aftermath after playing and really enjoying Surviving Mars, and I’ve got to say—I’m loving this game too. I jumped straight into the Complete Edition, so I can’t speak for the base game on its own, but with all the DLCs included, the experience feels rich, layered, and constantly engaging. I’ve seen some negative reviews about the DLCs, but honestly, I don’t get it. Each one adds something meaningful: new systems, new challenges, and more depth to the survival and management gameplay. It feels like the game keeps evolving and pushing you to adapt, which keeps things fresh and interesting. One thing I especially like is how every decision matters. You’re constantly balancing survival, resource management, and exploration while also dealing with unpredictable events. It really captures that feeling of rebuilding from the ground up after a collapse. If you’re a fan of colony sims or survival strategy games, and especially if you liked Surviving Mars, I think Surviving the Aftermath (with all the DLCs) is absolutely worth it.

post-apocalyptic, wasteland-like setting? + * with elements of hope and recovery? ++ ** in which cooperation and community is shown to be good things? +++++ Survival elements? ++ 4X? + * with unique feeling characters? ++ Tech trees? + Settler management? + RTS and tower defense? +- Emergent story which comes amazing game play? +++ in short, if you like timberborn, the sim settler mods, 4x games, survival games, or wasteland and fallout settings type it is worth checking out.

It feels like a mobile phone game

Ну что, друзья, я выжил. Правда, не в реальном апокалипсисе (спасибо, 2020-е, что пока держитесь), а в игре Surviving the Aftermath. И вот мои впечатления: "Где еда?!" – первый вопрос моих поселенцев через 10 минут игры. А я-то думал, что после конца света люди станут проще. Ан нет! Теперь у меня толпа изголодавшихся критиков, которые недовольны, что вместо органической киноа им подсовывают жареных тараканов. Строительство. Хотел красивый город с парками и фонтанами, но в итоге получил "деревню пост-ядерного бардака". Все дома кривые, дороги ведут в никуда, а туалеты почему-то в центре площади. Видимо, чтобы все видели, кто не справился с управлением. Набеги бандитов. Эти ребята – лучшие учителя тайм-менеджмента. Ничто так не мотивирует строить стены, как орда психов с битами, которая напоминает: "Эй, мэр, ты вообще чем занят? А ну-ка собирай ополчение из трёх хромых стариков!" Наука и технологии. Оказалось, что после апокалипсиса люди не теряют любви к бюрократии. Прежде чем построить новую хижину, нужно: Изобрести колесо (ну вдруг забыли). Провести исследование "Как не умереть от дизентерии". Открыть чертёж "Палка с гвоздём" (революция!). Катастрофы. То метеорит упадёт, то радиация подскочит, то медведи-мутанты придут. Мои люди уже реагируют на это как на скучную рутину: "Опять землетрясение? Ладно, продолжим жечь мусор и ржать над трупами". Итог: Surviving the Aftermath – это как The Sims, но с более мотивирующим сюжетом: если проиграешь, тебя съедят. Игра весёлая, хоть и заставляет задуматься: "А смог бы я выжить в апокалипсисе?" Судя по тому, как я управляю колонией – нет. Но хоть повеселился! Оценка: 8/10 (потому что мои поселенцы всё ещё живы… пока что). 😅

Behind this game is a enjoyable experience... Until you install all the DLC. Then it becomes 10x more stressful. So think about things before you DLC.

I really wanted to like Surviving the Aftermath. Sadly, I can't recommend it. (Note: this is the game with all DLC.) StA has a lot of good things going for it. The UI and graphics are fine. The actual city-building part of it is pretty good; it has just enough familiar things that builds on solid stuff with just enough new stuff to keep things interesting. It has a "world map" system that's pretty cool, and the main questline goes in some pretty interesting ways that integrate nicely with the gameplay. In fact, the game is cool enough that I *really* want to recommend it. But there are two main reasons why I can't. The first is the worker assignment system. In the game, you build various buildings, and your colonists are automatically assigned to work; the game puts everyone at the best position they're suited for. In theory this is great; you don't have to micromanage getting the best output. The problem is that sometimes you *need* a worker in a specific slot, and there's no practical way to get them there. In the early and mid game, it's relatively rare to get new people, so you often have to deal with worker shortages. However, that often means many of your buildings that you need to progress will sit empty, and you just have to wait for stragglers to come in (or your specialists to find a good place to get settlers from). If, say, for some reason your lumber mill is vacant and you need lumber, there's not much you can do until you get more people, and that could easily take several in-game cycles. The problem is is that....life goes on. While you can't get wood, you can't build X, and if you can't build X you can't feed or house or cure your workers...so they die, or starve, and then you have even *more* worker shortages, and so on. Add to that the special events and your colony can *very easily* fall apart simply because you couldn't assign a worker to a lumber mill. It's not uncommon during a pandemic to have one clinician, who then promptly dies, and no one to administer the sick. (And then 2/3rd of your colony dies.) You can't just build more medical tents to meet the demand--well, you *can*, but they'll just sit uselessly empty. And all of this is on a feedback loop that you have no control over. If 2/3rds of your colony dies, bodies pile up, because there's no one to build new Dead Body Tents and no one to carry the bodies. So the remaining people become unhappy and leave. Which means the next pandemic is even worse. And so on. Now, one caveat--technically, you *can* fill that slot. You just need to painstakingly go through and fire each and every worker in your colony until the "right" one gets optimally assigned to the place you need. That's bad, because you're really just trading one problem for another, but it's worse than that because even by mid game you could easily have dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of slots you have to manually go through and "fire" to get what you need. There's no easy way to do it. It's just makework tedium to solve a very real and practical problem. The worst thing about all this is that they have a system already! There's a "build priority" system where you click on a new building and workers prioritize it. They could introduce the exact same thing for workers. Sure, it's a little more complicated (you can only have one "priority" at a time, so what happens when you need a new priority?) but it shouldn't be *that* hard to implement. A lot of colony sims have managed to have a workforce priority system that works fine; no reason they can't here. I hate this *so bad* that if they were to actually introduce it, my review would probably switch to "recommend". The other problem is scale. A lot of things in the game just don't seem like they've thought about the scale of it. Electronics and Components (and, to a lesser extent, Parts) are in VERY high demand in the late game, but there's not a whole lot on the World Map to scavenge, they don't show up as "permanent" scavenge bits, and so very quickly you run out of ways to find them. You can, however, build them in Electronics Factories and Mechanic Shops...but they are *so slow* and with such low worker slots it becomes a huge bottleneck very quickly. Even buying the finished products from other factions provides a small percentage that you ultimately need. And since Electronic Factories require Power, and Power requires--you guessed it--Electronics and Components, you very quickly hit a plateau where you have to very slowly and painstakingly wait for a bottleneck that, by definition, will never clear. And outposts on the world map are helpful in clearing this out, except that Outposts can be taken over by hostile forces. Unfortunately, many "good" slots are far away from your colony, so you have to devote a significant amount of time and resources defending them. There's no way to prevent it; while you can clear out some hostile territories to reduce the frequency a little bit, even a fully clear area gets overtaken far too often. And there's no way to otherwise prevent it; you can't rely on a nearby ally to help. You can't spend resources to shore up defenses. It just...happens. The end result is that many colonies are inoperable a third of the time, and you have to hire 4-6 Fighters for the express purpose of clearing out these hostile forces for outposts that you *need* to progress. The game gives you plenty of options, but then takes them away. And since you're capped at 10 Specialists, you're effectively capped at the number of outposts you can reasonably have. Scale is more of an annoyance, but it makes games hit *so many* bottlenecks it stops being fun and starts being tedious. It's not uncommon for a building that requires X to make more X gets damaged, and then you can't get X because the X building won't work. It's like starting over from scratch ever few days because an event you have no control over happened, and you can't become more prepared because there are so many bottlenecks that slow you down you can never get to that point. The main problem is that games should be full of interesting choices. In theory, this game should have them--it's post-apocalyptic, so there *should* be bad events and hard decisions. But the problem with the game is that you can't effectively deal with any of them. You hit so many resource bottlenecks it's hard to prepare for anything, and random events happen frequently enough that the game is two steps forward, three steps back, constantly, because any time you have even a small advantage it gets wiped away. I've finished the game, but despite the questline being surprisingly fun and interesting, I couldn't really enjoy any of it. A last-minute bottleneck/worker shortage dropped my population from 350 down to 40 for a random something I couldn't prepare for or prevent, and I limped along to the finish line. I was more relieved that the game was over than I had actually won. Solving the worker assignment issue would go a long way in solving the scale issue, but even the scale issue could easily be solved by, say, adding more worker slots in higher-end buildings. As it stands, though, this game is one of the least satisfying games I've played in a long time.

Almost no end game content. You will be engaged in never-ending manual transactions to steady the flow of resources. No way of automatically exchange or sell your surplus even with established trade partners. No distinction between different kinds of contamination / pollution - it's always radiation and a bloody outhouse will produce radiation as well and irradiate your settlers.