Against the Storm

Satisfies the itch of playing a large city-builder like factorio but in smaller doses. Each settlement presents unique challenges, but by limiting your access in any particular settlement, the game doesn't overwhelm you.

game is weird. you have the fun of building a settlement and overcoming challenges but then the moment that you get to the good part of where your community is up and running and economy is booming, the game ends and you go and start a new settlement. you can choose to continue a settlement and basically farm out the whole map which is fun to just see how big you can make your town. at the same time, you don't get anything for doing that so it feels like you're wasting time. with all of that said, it's still a fun game if you like city management games with variable win conditions.

Very charming and coordinated graphical, sound, and story/setting design. Gameplay extremely fine-tuned between simplicity and complexity to the point of perfect balance. Like twenty layers of escalating difficulty that you're never forced to choose. A steady system of progression that has you working towards something alongside the escalating difficulty. The best gameplay loop of all time. OF ALL TIME.

This game is full of good ideas! From rain punk theme to mix of rogue lite mechanics with city building - you can't deny there have been lot's of thoughts put into it. Good ideas, but so very complex and boring… If every new outpost would play the same, that would get boring, right? So you can choose what building blueprint you want from a random selection. That's not as bad as it sounds, since every building supports a few recipes for resources - they are just more or less efficient. You'll have to adapt! Well, yeah, it kinda works, but bad luck with the selection or resources in glades makes me feel stranded with little options. Regardless of the actual buildings on offer, the city building part always feels about the same: Build a lot of buildings, disable half the recipes because they are inefficient, and you don't have enough people to do everything you need to. After a few years, you still juggle jobs and recipes, but aside from having a starving population, you can fulfill enough requests from the crown to win. In between this basic arc, there are random perks, the species like different foods, random events in glades that require different resources. In between cities, there are meta-progression upgrades to buy in the smoldering city. Learning all the little bibs and bobs in this game comes with a high time investment - there are multiple rounds of tutorials, and I finished the last new mechanics after 20 hours of play. I guess you could play the game on double speed - but I don't think that makes the game any more interesting. While trying to mix things up, the game still feels the same every time, and it feels underwhelming.

its like playing Warcraft 3 + frostpunk with all the best elements of both!

The entire game, while conceptually neat, was simply a frustrating learning curve is disguise. Once the frustration over the randomness of the building selection wears off. The mechanical "move work station and wait" tedium kicks in. You'll be lagging behind on most maps hoping a chance to pick a building that makes 1 thing. When it finally pops up MAGIC HAPPENS... The genre changes into a bar-filling simulator. Just wait to win. It baffles the mind someone sat down and plotted out a rogue-like colony sim where the resources AND buildings were locked behind RNG systems. Creative and stylish concept doesn't make up for it's faults. Not recommended.

The game is outrageously good. Coming in as a fan of Banished, this game hits all those highs and several more. You consistently feel the thrill of progress, and never the lull of equilibrium. The challenges, advantages, and disadvantages you find on each colony plot vary and intersect so wildly, that you'll never quite have the game in-hand until it's over. Charming, challenging, meticulously thought-out. I can't say enough for this game. It for me does for colony sims what Stardew Valley did for Harvest Moon / farming games.

Against the Storm combines rogue-like elements with city building which sometimes works super well and other times is not fun. A lot of city builders can get stale quickly, but this game keeps things fresh because you can't rely on the same strategy to win every game. You often have to do some combination of keeping people happy, completing orders, conquering glades and doing trades. Since you can't always count on getting the same buildings and people each game, you have to pivot towards whatever types of things you're getting. This is both a positive and a negative as it keeps things interesting, but also I sometimes felt forced down a playstyle I didn't enjoy. In other rogue-likes, this is fine, but here settlements can last 1-3 hours. I can usually tell immediately if a run will go well or not just by the starting buildings I get. The progression of the game is increasing difficulty. To unlock Seals, you have to venture further and further out which forces the minimum difficulty to raise. This is my main issue with the game because I don't personally enjoy the higher difficulty levels. Was I able to complete Viceroy missions? Sure, but I wasn't having fun. I typically play city builders to relax and the rogue-like elements conflict with that for me. Am I suggesting the game be different? Definitely not. It's clearly doing what it says on the Steam Store page and doing it well. It's just not for me once it gets at the top end of difficulty. That said, I think Against the Storm is a very good game and mostly well balanced. There is a lot of fun to be had here if you enjoy city builders and adapting your strategies as conditions change.

This game is awesome, the more you play the more interesting it gets, also very challenging!

[h1]This is what you can expect playing Against the Storm:[/h1] [h3] • The weather hates [b]you[/b] personally and your neighbors are perpetually unimpressed. • Less chill urban planning. More desperate scramble to keep Harpies from revolting. • Think of this games as [i]FernGully: The Last Rainforest[/i] but you're the baddie. • The Queen is one impatient gal. • There's amber to be made from dead villagers. • One flower can end your run. • Sacrifice your villager for neat looking statue. • [i]All praise Kelpie![/i] [/h3] [h3] Fun game. 10/10 Biscuits [/h3]

I just don't get the appeal of this game. Extremely busy, unreadable UI, hard to build because you need very specific resources which are randomly seeded on the map, convoluted production tree. There's so little character to the citizens you have, they don't act all that differently or make any unique sounds. The graphics are so basic, like something that came out of the early 3D era, but without all that much character. Buildings are so difficult to tell apart. I guess it does look very replayable, but it was losing my interest after only a couple maps.

This is the most addictive game I've played in years. Takes the very best of what City builders shine at (i.e initial rush of resource collection) with the added randomness of a roguelike.

One of the greatest strategy and one of the greatest roguelite games ever made. The economy of the game is wholly proletarian. You can only make money by creating more intricate and efficient supply chains. To not lose, you overcome your Queen's impatience by doing missions or sending her "gifts" while dealing with the growing hostility of the natural world. You can't be good at everything, so you have to try and specialize. This forces you to make interesting decisions. Each run ends around the time we become unstoppable, keeping the game fresh. Haven't played the expansion(s) yet but will update when I do.

Fast paced colony builder that keeps it fresh with different biomes, etc. to keep each go around unique. Failure is part of it especially on harder difficulty, but in an engaging way.

Very well designed game and great intro and scaling.

Best city builder/management game I have ever played and one of my all-time favorite games. Each run is different and keeps you engaged the whole time. Multiple ways to victory each time and all of them are fun. One run of this game is the perfect lenght to not overstay its welcome. Performance is also great.

First rogue like game I've played. Welcomed addition to a strategy city builder resource game.

Great game, perfect atmosphere and a lot of depth

Whenever I don't know what to play, I come back to this, because it's so good and it feels like playing a different game every time.

One of a kind. I guess the best tip I read once: this is not a city builder where you need to progress towards efficiency and self sustainability. A settlement is not meant to flourish, it just has to survive before the storm hits.

Love the way they have created depth through randomness without feeling like you are a slave to the RNG gods. Great single player city builder with its own unique vibes. I think my playtime speaks to the mileage you can get out of this game. Well worth the price.

Roguelite City builder. If you are a city builder fan and want to try something different this game is absolutely for you. The art style and the gameplay loop is fantastic.

If you like city builders but always get bored before you finish anything then this game is perfect. The rogue-like element keeps gameplay fresh and fun every time you start a new settlement so each one only needs an hour or two to complete (or fail). Great game!

This game is complex and requires a weird approach to a learning curve with a timer system and round system, some roguelike mechanics and a neat building system with cute creatures. It is fun but niche in this regard. If it's on sale, it's worth it.

It's the best part of city building over and over with a fun roguelike optimization twist

Honestly one of my favourite games of the last decade. Wonderfully balanced, perfect citybuilder. Always a fun challenge.

Fun rogue-lite settlement manager. Lots of variation based on chosen difficulty, terrain, what settler types you have, and what unlocks you get.

I am not exactly sure if this game is the first of it's kind (nor do I know exactly how to categorize it) or if it is a spiritual successor to one game or many games, but I do know that I really enjoy playing it even though I am not very good at it. That is the mark of a special game. Bonus: I also like how it runs and controls on the steam deck.

If you're a lover of strategic (board) games with all kinds of different tactics and approaches to try, this is for you. There's immense depth in this game, and so many ways to accomplish the goals set. There's a skilltree to unlock, different races/creatures to master (each with its own strengths) and loads of different buildings to try and combine to build your settlement and survive the storms.

Very engaging resource management/city building game. Interesting visuals and addicting gameplay loop, one of my favourite RTSes.

Excellent city building game. Endless replayability.

several members of my family have raised the issue of how much time i have spent playing this game and whether it might be a problem

I might have more than current 65 hours in this game. It is nice to see it is still being worked on. It is one of those games you can play while you work to relax yourself (once you get good enough and after you clear first few upgrades that open basic functionalities), my favourite difficulty is Viceroy. I recommended it for the best game of the year on the last Steam survey, so let us say I do recommend it. My main wish for it would likely be for the tutorial to be entirely skippable, no checklists, for game to develop more lore, because it is very intriguing and maybe also more visual Smoldering city upgrades, but mainly to have some kind of visual representations of certain missions (art is beautiful, but if I get negative cornerstone for being too nearby giant crystal or if airship crashed, I wish I would be able to find them, it is stated they are nearby, on the map, in one of the glades, even if I couldn't interact with such elements, just to have a feeling they are really there, not just event-special game rules), it would greately aid my curriosity in special events, I regularly miss such elements.

It took me a surprisingly long time to decide if I liked this game or not, but I always kept coming back, and somewhere along the way it's become a real comfort game. The pleasant ambient music, the just-suggestive-enough world, the tactile clicks of the interface buttons...it all snaps into place. Sometimes I feel like the rhythms of how you win in runs ends up being pretty similar (trade is especially OP), but there's always lots to try, new wrinkles on the overworld map, and just enough biome and race diversity to keep things fresh. The steady dripfeed of decisions to make feels invariably satisfying every run, particularly after the semi-recent frogs patch/DLC, which really got the balance between the buildings and recipes feeling just right. Many have said it before, but if you're a fan of colony sim games but always find yourself burning out after solving the tumult of earlygame, then this one's really got that solved. The roguelike format keeps things spicy, but by the time things are beginning to feel automated, you've won the run and can move on to the next one. Beyond this, it's a very well-supported game with lots and lots of extremely thoughtful content updates. I'm definitely looking forward to the next forthcoming DLC adding bats and other things - I really think it could push the variety right into the pitch-perfect spot (it's already so close). All told, it's a wonderful comfort game with just enough challenge and intrigue to keep each run feeling pretty robust, even if some of the presumed difficulty eventually starts to feel like a bit of an illusion once you've figured things out. In a way, that's also a big part of why it works - you start understanding throughlines and searching for common solution paths among your drafts and orders, and the runs end just before that gets too boring. The way the production line in this game is laid out lends itself to a particular type of interesting lateral thinking, and before you know it you're sucked away, almost like staring into some perpetual motion machine or something. I don't really know what else to say - it's fantastic, cozy, masterful stuff. Highly recommended.

Absolutely beautiful game - It's perfect for if you find sitting and playing city builder games that last longer than an hour or two mundane. Also, the roguelike element in the game is perfect to make each run feel a little less repetitive.

A perfect blend of a roguelike and city builder. Everyone knows the first 40 turns of a 4x game are the best, and this studio has found a way to bottle that magic and center their entire game around that concept. The art direction, varying traits and balance between species alone make this game a gem. It's a 10/10 in what it tries to do. It's soundtrack has also dug its claws deep into the soul of my top 5 of all time.

an rts within a board game like turn based tile game? yes its amazing

Very much overdue positive review. Have played since early access; it was great then, even better now. Has kept me up past 2am more times than I care to admit. Has just as much never ending "just one more task before bed" drip as Satisfactory or Civilization.

Its a good RTS game, i guess it should provide one map where we have to build everything, its just so fun. but the stage usually ends before i am done exploring even half of the map

Nice game. involving mix of rogue-like approach with a economy based strategy game

believe the hype. this masterpiece is an exemplary demonstration of game design, weaving together seamlessly what feels like dozens of separate mechanics into a single harmonious flow. you will face many situations which will seem impossible to solve (or resolve to your favor) - but if you pay attention, you will quickly realize how to turn every adversity the forest offers to your advantage. even after hundreds of play-throughs (I must meet the queen!), every time you start the game it still feels like a fresh puzzle. there is no other game like this.

What an amazing game, that I just can't seem to put down. There is so much to do and manage, without feeling overwhelmed. I love the vibe and artwork. There is always something to strife for, so I keep coming back for more :) The game has a nice balance of not too much hand holding, but still gradually making you more acquainted with all the game mechanics. I felt challenged in a good way. Every time I thought I had the game figured out, it keeps making you find different solutions to certain problems. So well thought through, the game is 11/10

The content keeps coming. I couldn't be happier with a game or it's developers. Clearly a lot of love went into this.

A very fun roguelike spin on the Northgard-esque resource exploitation town builder. Really keeps the gameplay fresh.

relaxing city builder, cute world, rogue lite style keeps it interesting

A masterful mix of rougelite and city builder, can truly be challenging even with hundreds of hours of experience. Devs were putting out twice monthly updates before 1.0 always listening to player feedback and addressing balance concerns. Highly recommended for any strategy gamer

very good rogue like city builder, was fun to play over and over again and try to beat on harder difficulties

The game blends colony building and rougelite game play greatly. However, the runtime of a typical playthrough is tool long. I have over a hundred hours at time of writing and i am only a third of the way through. Definitely shouldn't be played start to finish. Also, forcing players to play on higher difficulties as they progress seems anti casual, especially since lower difficulties already reward less resources after finishing a game

Distills the core gameplay loop of a city builder down to 2 hour "runs", giving it much greater replay value.

This game hits me in the RTS vibes. I got the base game on sale and I was really really skeptical. Without direct unit control and RTS style combat, would it be as satisfying at a Warcraft 2 or a Red Alert 2? I'm still not exactly sure where it'll land in the greatest list of RTS games, but I'm 23 hours in, and I feel like I haven't even really scratched the surface of this one. I'm still on the lowest difficulty of four and haven't unlocked the last tutorial level yet. I'm going to try the DLC. It's good to see quality games scratching RTS itches in new ways.