Against the Storm (2023)

Grabbed on gamepass cause I saw the cute woodland creatures...there's a lot going on here! I'll probably play a few games to see if higher level play gets more interesting. This ends up being a production line/resource management game, but it's hard to track everything that's happening and I'm not sure I have it in me to go through and read all the encyclopedia entries.

On the plus side, I think it adds a nice twist to city builders which is stretching my typical way of playing. The fact that your settlements essentially get destroyed mean it's important to focus on speed and efficiency rather than building a mega city with all the most advanced stuff.

Its been some time since I added up all my steam purchases. Why I would want to do this to myself, with the weekend ahead.

Mainly, I'm curious to plot the data and see number of purchases over time etc. It might be a good exercise to compare on life events or open the door to purchase more in celebration of restraint. I sound like an addict.

Against The Storm is 70% off...

Playtime: 5h45m (2x2 tutorial missions, 1 normal mission)

Intro

AtS is a resource management game in which you build a small settlement while exploring a randomly generated map. The overal campaign involves doing a bunch of missions to get permanent unlocks, unlock nodes to extend the campaign and somehow eventually win.

First impression

A roguelike city-builder is a novel idea and initally i enjoyed it. The game randomly generates resources, buildings, missions and events. Completing missions gives you buildings and resources, unveiling new areas on the map (by cutting a path through the forest) reveals new resources and an event like items to gather, a trader, or some sort of crisis.

Randomness and shallowness

Ok, now look up at my playtime again. Doing just one mission took about 4 hours. And you have to do a ton of these, and each time you will get more and more events you have already seen, and you also have to deal with the randomness. If you don't get the right building or resource and you can't complete a mission and things can go very badly. A normal strategy game would have curated content and allow you to load savegames if something goes wrong. AtS does not. It also lacks combat, diplomacy, mechanical depth, characters, an actual story, et cetera.

Conclusion

AtS requires an investment of seemingly many, many hours while offering fairly simplistic, repetitive gameplay and very little control over what happens. It's interesting at first but i would rather just replay Tropico or something.