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.