Against the Storm Review (Nerresand)
This isn't an RTS; it's a thematic supply chain manager. An RTS skips to the end of a lot of things because the intermediate steps are too cumbersome. Against the Storm is like "whoa there ya little goober, you think you can just teleport that piece of wood from the tree into some disembodied universal resource pool, and then teleport it from there to the construction site of whatever building needs it? sorry but that worker needs to carry that piece of wood to a short term storage nearby, and when that storage is full they need to carry it over to a warehouse, then another worker needs to walk to the warehouse and pick up that piece of wood and carry it to the building site before anything happens. Also everything you want is made in a building you don't have, and requires three other ingredients you also don't have, and each of those ingredients needs to be harvested or assembled using buildings you also don't have and probably secondary ingredients you don't have either, and they appear somewhere on the map except when they don't. But don't worry, you'll be given objectives that are functionally impossible but at least they give you rewards that don't apply to your situation at all. Enjoy looking at all the cool stuff you can't do." Anyway once you get used to that it's great
Also I'm a sucker for soundtrack/sound design and while some of it is really good, some of it is very hit or miss, especially in the soundtrack. The storm music is great for example, as is a lot of the ambient sound design, but then plenty of it just strikes me as a series of bizarre choices that don't land well (in a forest themed fantasy game where ambience is king, you went with plucky electric guitar sounds?).
Parts of it feel a bit unfinished, like the blightstorm arriving and they sort of start to do a cool cinematic moment, except it's two seconds long and interrupted by a random black screen or two and just feels like a placeholder. And some things that are weirdly balanced, like citadel resources.
And while we're communicating, did you really take that walrus thing that you farm for meat and feature it as the game's art on Steam, can we reconsider the marketing angle here
All that said once I got the hang of what the game called for I had a blast and have been sinking a lot of time into it lately. I'd love to see some polish and balance passes. I'd prefer if the roguelike elements were a bit more dynamic (if I'm given two choices and one of them is all but impossible or inapplicable then it might as well not have come up and I didn't really have a choice), but I love that the roguelike elements are there in the first place.
TLDR I both hate and love it and want my friends to play it so I can talk about it