Against the Storm Review (MasterBlaster)
I'm coming at this as a person who has been obsessed with city-building and economy-based games my entire life. I've tried just about all of them, from more normal city-builders to 4X games to factory simulators. I've seen a lot of novel game designs. Normally they're interesting for about a couple weeks, then you get kinda bored once you've mastered the gameplay mechanics and move on to the next one.
Not this game. That's why I've come to spread the word, my friends.
Eremite games have created a real masterpiece here. Not just because the game is so well designed, but because they've essentially invented a new genre: the Rogue-like (randomized) City-Builder.
Now some of you are probably thinking: "Isn't that what Frostpunk did?" Well, not really. There's aspects of this game that are definitely very inspired by Frostpunk (the storm cycle, for one), but other than that, it's quite different. Frostpunk had a randomized story generator laid over the game. But Against the Storm is something else - the randomization is built into the very core of the gameplay itself, which essentially means every game you have different buildings, buffs, and supply chains. I'd almost describe Against the Storm as "What if Frostpunk and the Anno series had a baby?" If this sounds interesting to you, let me explain a bit.
If you're into Rogue-like games at all, you know that they're designed to be infinitely replayable. Every round is different than the last because you start mostly blank, and develop all your skills and powers as the game progresses through a randomly generated map. And then in addition there's generally a difficulty level that can be raised continuously (Hard 1, Hard 2, Hard 3.. etc) so that a pro player can continue to make the game more and more difficult as they get better.
This game follows the same design philosophy. I'm not gonna go way into detail about how the randomness works exactly - It uses standard Rogue-like methods (choose 1 of 3 randomly selected buffs, etc). But the point of my review is to convey the point of this. A lot of people seem to be skeptical of playing a randomized city-builder where you don't have total control over what buildings you have on any given round. And I want to alleviate that concern by stating why that actually makes it way more fun.
It's the replayability factor. It's knowing that every game I jump in is gonna present new challenges that are different from the previous game. That I'm gonna be given a different set of buildings to work with, and that I have to figure out a way to make a strong economy using the hand I was dealt, with a completely different set of negative effects on my villagers, with a completely different set of passive bonuses that interact with my buildings or my workers. Exploring the maps is actually both fun and stressful because I haven't even discovered all the "dangerous events" that you find out in the woods as you chop down trees, and if you don't deal with them as you find them they can take your village down.
In many ways I view this game as being like the Yin to Anno 1800's Yang - where that game is a "Macro" game, and revolves around maintaining many, many different supply chains at the same time across numerous cities, Against the Storm is a "micro" game that takes place in fast, completely randomized rounds. The base concept is somewhat similar - create products through increasingly complex supply chains that make your villagers happy. But here, the game has a Micro feel that's a lot more similar to Frostpunk - It's punishing, there's randomization of what buildings and passive buffs you have available, and it's a constant struggle to figure out what goods and services you're going to be able to provide to your villagers.
Even if you're a bit skeptical at first, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. If you're already familiar with rogue-likes at all, I think you'll find the combination is quite natural. For me, I know I'm gonna be slowly cranking up the difficulty on this game for the conceivable future. Oh, and with the steady stream of updates that these devs are putting out, it doesn't look like there's gonna be a lack of new content, either.