Against the Storm

Banger game, excellent resource/colony manager, beautiful art direction. Highly recommend if you're a fan of slightly autistic but not mega autistic map games.

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.

It's good, but not your typical city sim/colony game. Losing your "Outpost"/city after accomplishing the goal makes connecting with the game after a while quite boring. I'm at a point now where I've basically seen it all, I'm just achievement farming. Would be cool if the primary/central Smoldering City had more interaction/engagement so that I felt a greater sense of progress/development. It can be unbelievably RNG heavy at times with rolls, so sometimes higher difficulty games feel really depressing, but lower difficulty is absurdly easy. The game-play itself, when luck doesn't shaft you, is fun, and I think it's uniqueness carries it as far as the genre is considered. 8/10

Against the Storm is a deeply engaging city-building and survival strategy game that immerses players in a grim fantasy world perpetually battered by relentless storms. Developed by Eremite Games, it challenges players to manage a settlement of diverse factions as they struggle to endure the harsh, ever-changing environment of a cursed valley. Unlike traditional city builders, Against the Storm emphasizes survival against elemental forces, where strategic planning and adaptability are crucial to sustaining your people through frequent and devastating storms that reshape the landscape and threaten resources. The game’s procedurally generated maps ensure that no two playthroughs are alike, offering immense replayability as players must continually rethink their strategies to adapt to new conditions, resources, and challenges. The heart of the gameplay lies in balancing resource management, settlement expansion, and the unique needs of different inhabitant races, each with their own cultures, demands, and strengths. Players must carefully assign villagers to gather resources, craft goods, and construct buildings, all while maintaining morale and managing food supplies amid unpredictable weather. The inclusion of varied factions adds a rich layer of complexity and narrative depth, as alliances and rivalries influence gameplay, creating dynamic social interactions that impact survival chances. Decision-making feels meaningful, with moral choices and trade-offs shaping the development of the settlement and its inhabitants’ fates. Visually, Against the Storm offers a moody and atmospheric art style that complements its dark fantasy setting. The hand-painted environments are detailed and evocative, depicting a world battered by ceaseless storms, with shifting skies and weather effects that visually reinforce the game’s core survival theme. The sound design further enhances immersion, featuring a haunting and immersive soundtrack punctuated by the howling wind and thunder that constantly remind players of the perilous environment they face. One of the game’s standout features is its cyclical gameplay structure, where each day brings new challenges and storms that test the player’s ability to adapt and innovate. This constant pressure to optimize resource flow and settlement layout keeps the gameplay tense and rewarding. The crafting system is robust, allowing for the creation of a wide range of tools and structures that support survival and expansion, while exploration beyond the settlement adds another layer of strategic depth as players scavenge for rare materials and unlock secrets that can turn the tide in their favor. While Against the Storm is praised for its originality and atmospheric depth, it can sometimes feel overwhelming due to its steep learning curve and the complex interplay of systems. New players might find the initial balancing act challenging as the game demands constant attention and foresight. Additionally, the procedurally generated nature of the maps, while adding variety, can occasionally lead to uneven difficulty spikes or resource scarcity that feels punishing. However, these elements contribute to the game’s high stakes and sense of accomplishment when survival is achieved. In conclusion, Against the Storm is a compelling and richly layered city-building survival game that offers a fresh take on the genre through its dark fantasy setting and relentless environmental challenges. Its blend of strategic resource management, faction dynamics, and procedural world-building creates a tense yet rewarding experience that tests players’ adaptability and decision-making skills. For those who enjoy atmospheric, challenging strategy games with deep narrative undercurrents and emergent storytelling, Against the Storm provides a gripping and memorable journey through a storm-ravaged world where survival is a constant battle against both nature and time. Rating: 9/10

This is one of the most compelling games I’ve ever played. It’s absolutely brilliant. Just be careful because it’s incredibly hard to put down. One of those games I see myself playing for a very long time, and I’m so glad they keep adding content because there’s nothing that compares to it. Best of all, it runs like a dream on steam deck, where I’ve played all ~150 of the hours I’ve sunk in so far. I can’t recommend this game highly enough. It very well may end up being one of my favorites of all time.

[b]You'll start, but you won't finish[/b] The game opens with a wonderful, almost overwhelming experience—an avalanche of resource types, production buildings, and intricate mechanics. IT's a strong start, and I enjoyed it. The fun reaches its peak a bit later, as the full depth of these systems comes into focus. But if finishing a game matters to you, be warned: the experience starts to drag painfully around the halfway mark, which took me ~50 hours. What begins as a beautiful world full of interesting choices—some rewarding, others regrettable—eventually narrows into a rigid path of right and wrong decisions. Options dry up, min-maxing becomes mandatory, and the game starts catering exclusively to players who obsess over details like which individual trees to cut down. (See the forum’s lone sticky post on efficiency, or any of the forum for that matter, for a taste of this mindset.) It's not the experience I want from any game. This collapse of strategic variety drains the joy for anyone but the most hardcore fans. The most unfortunate design choice was to force time limitations into [i]every[/i] part of the game. There are time limits for doing tasks, for choosing goals, for completing them, for finishing each stage, and even for achieving world objectives. At no point, ever, are you allowed to simply enjoy and explore the game’s space. The pressure is constant, and the pacing is always pushing you forward, whether you're ready or not. It's as if they thought they were making a multiplayer board game and needed to keep things moving, but it's a solo experience and the pace would be more fun if it was at least somewhat within the player's control. What happens is that you're having fun one moment, but in the next you find yourself staring at spreadsheets on someone's Google drive, thinking maybe you and the author both need to touch grass. For myself, I’d much rather a game stay fun until the end—even if it leaves me wanting more—than get stuck on railroad off into the dim horizon where the only choice left is how long to put up with what used to be fun, and admit it's become a chore. Don't take my word for it - look at the achievement list for anyone who gave the game a positive review. Most didn't review the game, they gave it a sip test and reviewed it based on the early experience.

A seamless, flawless mix of roguelites and city-builders that excels in both style and substance. The twin clock of Forest Hostility and Queen's Displeasure is always ticking, which adds a great incentive to build a sufficiently efficient economy and make your citizens happy just enough to get the reputation over the finish line. Forget the usual slog of late-game citybuilding where your settlement keeps sprawling out of control for no good reason other than getting more stuff until you inevitably get bored: Against the Storm always ends at just the right time. Besides, no two games are the same because of the random blueprint pool and the diversity of biomes, available resources, Queen's orders, and Glade Events. Sometimes you get to build a perfect Pickled Goods pipeline to feed all three of your races for an easy +8 Resolve, and sometimes you struggle to make basic Planks effectively as late as Year 3. Still, however good the core gameplay loop might be, half the charm of this game is its aesthetics: the adorable anthropomorphic races with their little quirks, the nostalgic WarCraft-esque visuals, and, last but not least, a perfectly immersive and functional interface. I can name a fair few titles where the GUI achieves decent functionality at the cost of being a total eyesore, but in AtS every button and every dial feels an indelible part of the experience and adds to the overall aesthetic coherence.

This is a difficult one for me to put down. The core gameplay is great, but totally at odds with the meta game. A typical game lasts 60-90 minutes, depending on difficulty, and doesn't overstay its welcome. It's just a really satisfying builder with a small scale focus, and I really enjoy that. The meta game, though... holy cow, the grind. The grind is real, and you will not progress without sinking huge amounts of time into this game. And given the fairly tense nature of the game, I feel exhausted after one or two games in a day. I haven't bought any of the DLC because realistically I'll never see it. I have too many other games to play, and I can't commit this kind of time to a single game. I haven't been back to this in some time, and the new DLC isn't going to change that. I can't recommend this without major changes to the meta game progression.

It takes some time to understand the finer mechanics, but once you get it down it is easy to invest hundreds of hours. There's this strange mix of rogue-lite and cozy town management. Somehow it just works. Don't pass up on this if you enjoy city builders. It is, bar none, the best I've ever had the delight to play.

The basic setup of the game is good... buuuuut. And there's a huge but to that unfortunately. But... the way the difficulty scales is... annoying. It's not really so much that it's harder is the thing - yes, it gets more picky with narrower margins for error, but this basically has 3 issues: 1: You have to increase the difficulty to continue progression at all really, well past the point where the game is actually fun. 2: The tighter margins for error mean you get far less choices in what you do because it narrows further and further to only really one "right" way to play based on what you get from the random elements of the game. 3: Ever have one of those games where the tutorial forces you to make stupid decisions you would never make on your own but you have to in order to continue? Well this becomes the entire game later on and it's irritating AF. As such, I found against the storm was pretty fun early on, but after a while it just becomes... not enjoyable. The "difficulty" must be increased over and over, but what the game considers to be "difficulty" is actually just "you stop being allowed to make good decisions and are instead forced to make bad decisions" which is sort of the opposite of what I want out of a difficult game. I want to have to start making better decisions, where it penalises me for doing something stupid. Instead, the only option is to do something stupid if you want to progress, and if you don't do something stupid, then you don't get to go any further. This is not enjoyable to me. It may be enjoyable to some players, but it's antithetical to difficulty. So what do I mean by making you make stupid decisions? Well the basic premise of the game is that boom, nearly world-ending event happens, there's evil rain/storms stuff, and only one central area is safe. You try to go out to explore, build colonies, grab what you can, and then retreat back to the safe spot after the cycle reaches its peak and everything grows back in and the forest reclaims anything you built. Think of it like sunspot cycles, there's a solar maximum and minimum. During the maximum, everything is wiped out, during the minimum you can build outward and get resources, build towns and so on. There are several years in between each maximum, so you have time to get a few things done, but it's limited. As such, you have time to build a few towns, set up trade routes and so on, but it's shared time between all of them before the next solar/storm maximum. This is a great idea! It's a fun concept! You get different species with different needs and strengths, you get a variety of different things to build, and it's great... buuuut... The random aspects of the game can be... frustrating. As you unlock more buildings, it means it can be harder to get stuff you need to work together. Get something to produce one advanced resource, but bad luck can mean you just are never offered anything to make the raw materials to make that resource. You can sort of fix that with trade, but as you progress in the game, the trade becomes more restrictive and needing to trade specific things that you're forced to in order to keep the queen happy so you don't get pulled back before the game would normally end, which means you don't get to trade the things you actually want/need to. The cutting open the forest has some negative aspects as well, like difficult events such as yay you get a nice reward, but something really bad happens like you start having people dying every year unless you do something in specific, and it's random so you don't know what you will get for a negative until you are already dealing with the consequences. The risk vs reward concept is nice, but as the game difficulty increases, it starts demanding you open up dangerous parts of the forest before you're ready to, or just removing the option to make good choices in general. There are a lot of different game mechanics that all basically do the same thing - force you to do something stupid that you would never normally do because it's a dumb idea. The "difficulty" is to then deal with the fallout of having done the dumb thing. The "good" options are still there... just if you pick them, you automatically lose. You HAVE to pick the dumb decisions to continue at all. Basically you get a gradual shift towards a bait and switch of "here's how you play the game properly, yay!" and then it moves further and further into "no, you aren't allowed to play it that way though, you have to play it wrong, then the hard part is fixing the problems that showed up because you did the wrong thing you were forced to do" and I inherently just hate this at a very fundamental level. If you like building a good, organized base in strategy games? Against the storm lets you do that... early on... but as you keep being forced to ramp up the difficulty, your bases become more sloppy, more haphazard, less tidy and organized and feel worse. Your risk vs reward setup forces risky, bad decisions routinely. Your unlocked new abilities, buildings and so on, mean you have a harder time getting things you actually need from the randomized lists so you have to pick substandard choices more often. Every aspect of the game pushes continually more and more towards a gameplay loop where you are forced into making a bad decision and then cleaning up the mess. Rather than the mess happening to you and you work through it with skill, it tries ever so hard to mitigate your skill by making all the necessary decisions be the wrong ones. It actively tries at every turn and opportunity to reduce your skill by forcing your hand to make unskilled decisions, and then leaves your skill to be cleaning up after those bad decisions. Again, some people will enjoy this. Because it does take skill to fix your mistakes, but the problem is that the game is forcing you to make mistakes as part of its skill curve, and if you don't do so, then the game just stops and progression grinds to a halt entirely. You HAVE to make mistakes that you know are mistakes. So yeah, that feeling like in the first X-com reboot, where you're forced in the tutorial to run a squad out into the open, without cover, all bunched up because the tutorial doesn't let you move them anywhere else? And then they obviously all die horribly because it was a stupid thing to do so? But you didn't actually have any ability to tell them to do otherwise? Yeah. Imagine that for an entire game. That's literally the gameplay loop, is to be forced to do a horribly bad tactical or strategic decision, like the equivalent of forcing you to walk out into the open without any cover, then your difficulty is you get control back after you get shot up a bunch. Same kind of feeling. This doesn't happen immediately though. You'll be dozens of hours into the game before it starts doing this in any significant amount. But as you keep going, it'll keep forcing these bad decisions more and more, until really the only option you have is to keep screwing up because there's no other choice, and then you have to fix being a screwup all the time. If this sounds fun to you, where that's your idea of difficulty, then by all means - Against the storm is a great basic game concept! If, however, the idea of the game forcing you to screw up, and the "difficulty" comes primarily from forcing you to make mistakes, rather than from the game itself getting more difficult (it does that too, it uses both, but the primary issue is forcing bad decisions, with a healthy dose of "lawl bad luck, sucks to be you" thrown in for good measure), then you probably want to avoid against the storm. ...I'm not actually sure why anyone would prefer the former method over the latter. As such, I can't actually recommend Against the storm. I can still win at the higher difficulties, I just don't enjoy it any longer. It isn't fun. It isn't fun because it's making me do things I know are dumb as part of the "difficulty." So... I can't recommend it.

It grabbed me for hours on my first runs. It has a really nice learning curve, makes you think about the way you develop your camp and reminds me of the good old RTSs. It's been a while since a game made me play for hours like that, easy recommendation for those who like strategy and city building.

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.

Cool city builder without the slow end-game that's usually present in similar games. Games are short enough to keep my attention and not lose it.

This game is perfect, it somehow marries my love of building bases in Warcraft III with resource management. It's a little too hard for me to progress to later levels, but I still give it a 10/10.

There is a lot to love in this game but after 20 hours it does get boring/repetitive, even the devs realised that as it is an option you can talk about with an NPC. It is also super easy to lock yourself into losing by one (or a few) wrong choices with no option to save the round. Old schools graphics and classes etc. are nice to have but it is not newbie friendly and the game loop does feel really repetitive after some time. I wouldn't recommend it as it is, but I can see it being improved down the line.

I LOVE this game. This game is one of my favorite games. The devs are very active on discord, and listened to their community the WHOLE time when making the game. I love that, this is a fan made game <3

Against the Storm takes the best bits of the city-builder genre and transforms them into an endlessly replayable roguelite. If you find yourself endlessly starting over in survival sandbox games, before growing bored and starting again, then AtS cuts out the "getting bored" bit - you win once you stabilise the settlement, then jump into the next. The roguelite elements are excellent. No settlement plays the same due to the random biomes, resources, production buildings & other perks. The developers are in touch with the playerbase and continue to iterate on the game with many free updates & DLC. The first DLC was superb, expanding the replayability even further; and the second DLC arrives soon promising the same & more. [b] I cannot recommend Against the Storm highly enough. [/b]

Very entertaining! I enjoyed learning the different stats and world lore. The music is especially charming.

For whatever reason I found the game design exhausting, personally. Usually a big fan of city-builders, roguelikes, and RTS... but for some reason this game just couldn't click for me. I thought it was really slow-paced.

Of the long list of games that I suck at, this is one of my favorites. Against the Storm is one of the most well-designed games I've ever encountered. The devs took a well-established genre (city management), tied it to an overplayed model (roguelike), and made something that is much, much more than the sum of its parts. It seems like, at every turn, the answer to the question "how should we handle X" is "in the way that generates the most interesting gameplay." The central conceit of the game is that every town has random resources and a limited selection of production buildings, meaning you need to come up with a new supply chain in each settlement. I'm sure that past the 50 hour mark you get to a point where this is second-nature, and there's some meta way to progress each town, but in the time I played I found each new round to be different and exciting.

This game has completely taken over my everyday gaming. Each session is just the right length, a couple of hour depending, and consists of ups and downs in your settlement that keep you on edge. I love that there's a time limit and that the colonies you build in a cycle matter to future colonies and cycles. I highly recommend this game to any lover of management/city-building games!

Citybuilder but with a game loop behind it. A must-play if regular city builders are a little too chill for you.

Fun for hours. This game starts extremely simple, and evolves into a massively complex and intricate village builder/ resource manager. The rogue like element keeps you from being able to have a blanket approach to each level, providing challenge to even the most veteran.

I've come to realise this game is my favourite non-thinker game. As far as town builders go, this one is a gem and the creature classes and specialisations are awesome! Highly recommend!

This is the first roguelite citybuilder I have encountered or played and I've gotta say it's a perfect evolution of the citybuilder genre for me. Well-crafted and tuned mechanics that keep the core settlement-building fun while having long-term re-playable value by having the settlements be temporary by nature. Good scalability and challenge too as you get up into the higher difficulties. I would highly recommend this game.

This game is complicated and I work on distributed systems for a living Really neat game, plays out sort of like a Civ combined with a roguelike "you gotta build around what you get" vibe. I'm not entirely sure about the pacing, the games feel long and sometimes it can get into tedium

10/10 best rts indie game, artistically and mechanically a masterpiece. Really awesome team of devs that are aware if a dlc meets quality control or not and really are in touch with us the players.

One of those rare times I won't be too stressed by a city builder type of game to just enjoy it. There's enough to keep me chill and interested. Isn't so easy that it feels like no challenge and isn't so hard that I dread touching it. The reason I like this so much is the multiple profiles. It takes the stress out of it and encourages you to learn from it. Don't like something you did? Well, you can just make another profile and start from scratch.

So Chill, easy to understand, difficult to master at higher difficulties. I love the art style and the different races. A game that anyone can play and beat at their own pace.

Against the Storm is a great city building game! My favorite part of city builders is starting out and trying to balance the needs of my city with limited resources, so Against the Storm's game cycle of constantly starting new settlements to achieve a variety of goals was right up my alley. I also loved how the different biomes could lead to such a different feel game to game. Add on that cobbling together supply chains out of random building selections and the regular excitement of seeing what's in the next clearing and you have something that I found to be an almost addicting experience. If like me you really enjoy the beginning part of city builders and don't like to run a city once it gets too bloated to feel like fun, you should have a great time with Against the Storm!

Game is amazing and has only gotten better with each update. If your looking for a survival city builder to scratch that itch give it a try you won't be disappointed. There is enough customization between corner stones, glades, city inhabitants, buildings, perks, modifiers, etc that each level feels completely different than the last even if they might look the same.

I cant stop playing it. this game is so fun. if you want a game that consumes hours of your life, this is it.

One of the greats in the strategy realm. The rogue like element to the game keeps it fresh for quite awhile. Good change up from a combat/CIV game

love it, every mission feels different and fun meta progression

Essentially a rogue-like colony sim. The game play loop revolves around establishing a small colony surving in the harsh wilds. There's a tight time limit on each colony. Whether the colony ends successfully or not, you make some amount of meta progress that gives future colonies a head start. This might sound repetitive, but there is clever randomization of what buildings you are allowed to make in each new colony. This leads to a fascinating variation in which resources feel more or less constrained, and force you to make novel adaptations in every colony to over come the challenges in front of you.

If you like this stuff this game is really well designed and thought out. Not too steep a learning curve, but you will probably have to google stuff and watch tip videos to learn how to get the basics. Its crazy. I started this a few days before my 5090 Astral LC arrived, and now it's here and hooked up and have any game to play at blistering FPS, for now, all i find i wanna do is play this game!

Took me a bit to get into it, about an hour I think. But now I really like the flow and grind of the game. Recommend if you like citybuilding and resource balancing and are the kind of gamer to restart your base over and over to get it right.

An excellent game, which is challenging whilst being thoroughly enjoyable. With enough levels to provide many hours of entertainment. It has a steep learning curve but this is to be expected. Tutorials provide some insight but the encyclopaedia provides much, useful, information. Thoroughly recommended. A city builder but with a difference.

I have played many roguelikes... this is has got to be one of the best if not the best one out there. ATS keeps me coming back after long periods of time unlike other games and is a true work of art from the devs. Music is beautiful, gameplay is thoughtful and genuinely rewards you for experimenting and learning new game mechanics. No mechanic has proven useless as I have learned to use them. 10/10.

Not only is it fun and easy to learn but hard to master, but its on of the few games that can be hard enough for you to fail multiple times but be eager to try again and again until you get it. Also the tutorials are very good and introduce you to all the concepts and mechanics very effectively. Truly deserves its 95% positive.

Very enjoyable and well designed game. The slow increase in difficulty mixed with the slow progression works really well. This game can offer many hours of fun play.

I dont usually review games but wow this is such a great one. I was completely lost at first but you learn as you go. Got my first Bronze seal on Settler (EASY) difficulty. The compounding difficulty and skill tree mean that each play through is progressive I think I will put dozens more hours into this one! Try it if you love survival and city builders. The events derail your best laid plans but theres usually a silver lining, the only way to win is to venture right into the most dangerous glades and hope you can resolve them.

The game is really good at sucking you in, the atmosphere is awesome. The only thing I want to be improved is the city building aspect, right now I'm just placing things wherever there is space without thinking much and am not getting punished enough for it, nor is there much freedom to experiment with the look of the city since it's all grid based with square shapes.

Lovely ambience. the music has a slightly haunting quality to it, and the game is deep and rich. Big thumbs up.

I've been playing for about a year now and I still love this game. It's a city building game that's just setting up the city, getting it working, and then moving on to the next one, with rouge-like stuff to keep you interested over time. It is well worth a go.

Very immersive. There's a reason why you see it being called the best city builder. It has a lot of depth and strategy. Their levelling system is a great addition to the roguelike style of gameplay.

One of the greatest games I've ever played. The city building is fun and a real challenge. Managing supply lines and keeping your citizens happy, all just to finish the town and do it all again at the next. It's perfect.

Against the Storm has a great and unique concept; initially I was really hooked the rogue-lite character. It is fun to constantly improvise, wing it, go with whatever resources or obstacles the game throws at you. It did have that "one more turn" feeling for me. On top, the game is very polished. The balancing seems on point, the art style, environments, and sound design work well together. The game became very hard for me on the higher difficulties, but didn't feel completely unfair. I felt that if I had planned more, knew the mechanics better, I would stand a chance. So a great challenge, but still very accessible on easier difficulties. All that being said, after only 15 hours the game became very repetitive for me. Slightly ironically, there are soooo many random elements to the game that in the end every settlement becomes the same mish-mash. Races of your settlers, trade routes, environmental hazards, resources, available buildings, global perks, traders - all random. If you roll a dice 100 times the sum goes close to 350 even though each roll is unique. This is what this game feels like. Still, thumbs up from my side - the devs had a clear vision, went for something new, delivered a polished game and obviously really care about the community. Give it a shot!

I play intuitively with no attention given to micromanaging. It's fun, and I really enjoy it. I prefer the stumble upon approach to game play. The less I know, the more to discover.

Probably the best roguelite I've played. Immensely high skill ceiling, every run is winnable, plenty of interesting decision making to be had to figure out the best way to work with what you're given. High level play has a lot of varied strategies that all seem pretty comparably viable. My only complaint is the amount of meta progression grinding there is before you're fully ready for the highest prestige level. It's not egregious, but I don't like meta progression in any game period.