Against the Storm Review (OnettMan)
Do you ever find yourself quitting a clearly won run of a citybuilder or 4X game halfway through? Ever get bored of those last grueling hours before you meet your win condition despite the fact that your settlement is outproducing the others by a factor of 10? This game might be the answer to all your unspoken prayers.
Against the Storm is a simple and brilliant concept. What if you took a citybuilder and made it into an incomplete information roguelite that uses those first fun, challenging hours of getting your settlement online as the main gameplay loop? It breaks the mold of citybuilders and roguelites alike. It adds real challenge (not just souped up AI), randomisation and creative thinking to the really appealing central conceit of citybuilders while also finally being a challenging roguelite that isn't a deckbuilder for once. It's an idea so great, it's kind of crazy no one ever thought to do it before.
While this might seem like a challenging idea to implement, it's executed with excellent precision and forethought. Almost every game design decision made here is just elegant. All fundamental parts of the game flow together in a way consistent enough that the game's difficulty remains consistently challenging, while also being fair and rewarding Almost every run requires creative problem solving and careful micromanagement of both resources and time. For example, estimating the amount of time it might take your villagers to get to a glade event, take materials to it and start work on it on top of the amount of time it takes to actually complete the event and for the villagers to take rewards back to the hearth. This might seem like needless micromanagement but it's a skill you become better at as you play and may make the difference between a losing and winning run at the higher difficulty levels.
On top of that, the randomisation keeps things fresh and encourages proactive preparation against the unknown. As with any similar roguelite, you will occasionally just roll poorly and lose despite making the optimal choice. However, a single bad roll of the dice or a flat out mistake is rarely a game ender, you just have to consider how you can solve this new and unexpected problem with what you have. As you climb difficulty rankings, you'll start doing things like stockpiling certain resources before going into glade events so you can be sure you're not caught with your pants down when it comes to finishing the event on time. You'll be pulling villagers off farmlands into a cooking building as soon as they're finished gathering the limited amount of crops on the farm. Furthermore, the perk system is generally well balanced and offers a very strong and diverse set of options that affect the run you're on in a ton of different ways. Very few perks are outright useless or terrible and there's only a couple that are so good they always need to be taken. No single perk feels like a won run and not getting a big lineup of amazing perks doesn't mean you lose.
The vast amount of win conditions and ways to eke out wins is insane. Many citybuilder games end up leaning towards repetitive meta play like 'X faction builds towards Y win condition' 99% of the time unless you just wanna be silly. Plenty of roguelite games end up feeling like this too, with certain items/cards/upgrades being so game defining that they warp any run they appear in because their long-term value is simply always just too good. This isn't a bad thing, and it's hard to avoid, but AtS miraculously does. There are a limited amount of win conditions in the game, but your ideal win condition and how you get there will vary greatly depending on the resources given to you on a given run. Maybe you have the resources to aggressively take glade events and caches and end the game quickly because your settlement can't survive long . Maybe your civilisation isn't good at much but your amber supply is limitless and you need to literally buy your way to a win. Maybe your settlement is terrible at providing amenities but great at developing different varieties of complex foods and that's your win condition that run. Figuring out what your win condition is with the given resources you get and figuring out your path to it is unique for every run and is always satisfying and fun to figure out.
This is all built upon the considerable amount of redundancy built into the game. This is the fundamental bedrock of the game that keeps it from feeling unfair or too reliant on RNG to feel like there's genuine skill expression. The way this works is elegant and simple: There are basic resources which are combined in different ways into more efficient and valuable resources that enable you to win. This is true for literally every single thing in the game. Every resource in the game, whether it's food, fuel, money or something else falls into this.
If you fail to get basic resources, you starve. If you fail to combine them into more complex resources, you'll spin your wheels until the Queen gets tired of you. Fail to make those complex resources into winnable things (money, resolve gain, glade event completion) and you'll still lose even if your production is insane. What makes this system brilliant is that the redundancy built into different buildings (i.e. many buildings can produce the same things) and into the basic resources means that you really need to get good at using what you get every run rather than making a beeline for the same things every time. Every run has a different plan and a different thought process.. In some runs you won't find any stone or clay at all, or you might not find anything that makes meat-based foods, but you'll inevitably have *some* resources that allow you to do something strong and compensate for the stuff you didn't get. This also tones down the potential unfairness of blueprints being random and limited. Sure, you won't get the Kiln every single time, but having to make use of what you get is what makes this game so replayable and stimulating. Buildings are also very well balanced, too. Some are amazing but none are outright bad and there are situations where a usually shabby building is the star of the run.
As amazingly designed as this game is, it does run into some problems. Certain Prestige levels get a bit restrictive and make the game feel a bit more constrained. This is especially prominent when RNG doesn't favour you. These runs are miserable and tough, albeit rewarding in their own way, but the game could probably augment difficulty in a way that encourages more creativity and choice. I also think complaining about difficulty is a bit stupid, but the fact that rainwater is so accessible makes Porridge exceptionally good as a complex food.Every other complex food takes the synthesis of anywhere between 2-4 simple resources to make, but Porridge really only takes one, making it very easy to get online. I don't think this is really a bad thing but it's a downside in my book as it interrupts the 'rules' of complex resource production in the game that make it so unique every run. Now if you get porridge, you make porridge.
My least favourite thing is the amount of time and tedium it takes to get through the early metaprogression. A lot of very vital resources and fundamental buildings that are key to runs are hidden behind metaprogression. At around level 13, it becomes less annoying and starts feeling more like a reward than a lifting of a restriction, which is good. However, the initial progression feels very unrewarding and annoying. That being said, this is all easily fixable.
I can't recommend this game highly enough. If you're a fan of tough, incomplete information roguelites like Slay the Spire or of objective-based citybuilders like Civ, you'll probably find something to love here. The dev team is also very responsive and passionate and the content pipeline and communication around game updates is incredible!