Reseñas

• gamedeal user

  Nov 1, 2022

  While it is a city builder it's not a one where you build your perfect city for several days, like Anno or Simcity. No, instead you will be racing against the time (queen's impatience, ramping difficulty and dwindling resources), making sacrifices, compromising just to make ends meet. I know it may sound horrible to some people, and I am one of those who hate building on a timer as well, but somehow it is not a problem for me here (just grab the demo and see for yourself, you can keep progress from the demo). You can start on a lower difficulty to learn the ropes, and then just keep optimising to finally try on a harder difficulty. And then harder and harder to challenge yourself. Adaptation is the key here - adapting to what resources the map has for you, to what buildings are available to you, to random events, to the random tasks imposed by the queen. Your settlement will not be perfect, you will never have all the tools for that, but it will thrive and survive until you reach your goal. And then you will start another settlement, and another, and so on. And each time it will be different. There are several different biomes, with different resources and mechanics. Almost every crafted good can be made in various buildings with different level of efficiency, using different materials (so often you can find an alternative for what you're missing). Most buildings can produce several different goods. So depending on resources available on the map and your choice of the buildings your settlement will be good at producing some goods, some others will be more rare and some available only from a trader or not at all. And you will still make it work - there is always some way. While you will repeatedly be building settlements with the same goal - filling that score bar - the paths to it may differ greatly. You can either keep your citizens happy, or fullfill queen's tasks or explore the land and discover treasures. And after winning a settlement you get to keep some bonuses from it and improve your base at the mountain giving bonuses to your future settlements - classic roguelike metaprogress. And this game loop is incredibly addicting - get some more bonuses, try different things, get better next time. I also like the setting very much - it is a fantasy game, but with rather exotic races. Plus the esthetics, music and constant rainfall give it this melancholic feeling.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 2, 2022

  Disclaimer: played game for many hundreds of hours on Epic Game Store. Are you one of those people who finds themselves "strangely" addicted to city builders, yet weirdly can't stick to a single city for long past the opening days? Do you have "new-game-itis" in management games where you can't help restarting the game again and again because you understand a little bit more about the systems than last time and now believe you can "start properly this time?" You're not a freak. You've just been waiting for Against the Storm. Against the Storm takes all the elements normally found at the start of a builder/resource management game, then expands and enriches those concepts into a full game of their very own. The Queen will assign you a basic allotment of villagers and a bare minimum of resources, and then you'll find you and your chosen few huddled around an Ancient Hearth for warmth. From this start with little more than rags, it's your duty as a Viceroy, "one who acts with the authority of the royal throne", to guide your villagers to riches before the dangers of the forests take you, or the Queen grows too impatient with your tardiness and condemns your stillborn settlement. Do well, and victory comes with your settlement declared a success: now stable enough to fend for itself without your continued supervision, freeing your administrative genius to nurture another settlement to fruition. The game allows for a variety of "scoring methods" adding up to a total (based on difficulty) you reach to win before your effective time limit runs out. Exactly which methods you'll focus on and to what degree, however, will depend on what you reveal in the forest glades and what blueprints you're able to gain access to. Every single resource and product has multiple ways of being produced, but at varying levels of efficiency from varying buildings. You'll be forced to make compromises and hard decisions, because you simply won't have the blueprints nor resources to have a "best method" for everything needed to win. Figure out what your settlement is capable of doing well, then use the surplus from that to trade for or even entirely circumvent what it will have trouble doing; anything to secure victory before the rising threat from the woods causes your fragile balance to collapse. Victory at higher difficulties is often won by the skin of your teeth, snatching a win from the jaws of defeat. Multiple different biomes, infinite permutations of build orders in response to revealed glades, and potential run modifiers ranging from quirky to headache-inducingly difficult to "just how over the top can this run get?" allow for endless styles of play. Yet the game isn't all stress and pressure. The game has an exquisite aesthetic and soundtrack, wrapped up in a "rainpunk" world filled with mystique. Despite having achieved mastery over the game's highest currently offered difficulty, I regularly find myself intentionally flipping the difficulty down a few notches for a more relaxed experience to cease sweating over every scrap of wood and bite of food and instead focus more on appreciating the world presented. The rain and storm washing through the trees accompanied by hauntingly beautiful melodies is a core part of the ATS experience and I would never suggest playing this game muted or with your own choice of music blaring over everything; the soundscape of this game is incredibly finely tuned down to the UI elements and notifications themselves being musical in nature; marimba arpeggios, strums of harp strings, windchimes, and more. The game has been in early access on EGS for a long while now and during that time the game evolved quite dramatically, responding extremely well to feedback ranging from the finest QOL details to full rebuilds of fundamental game mechanics in order to improve the player experience. The devs have a roadmap and I fully expect them to follow through on it; but the game already being good enough to be worth hundreds of hours of runs should earn them your purchase. I fully expect ATS's innovations to spawn a wave of copycat roguelike builders some time from now, much like Slay the Spire did for singleplayer deck builders and Vampire Survivors did for "bullet heavens". Play the original, here and now, so you can say you were there where the latest indie game fad started.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2022

  Unquestionably the best city builder that doesnt have combat in it, imo. The developers understood that the most fun part of these city builders is the early phase of building your city up from nothing, getting key production online, being able to feed/house/heat your people, etc. Once you get to a certain point in most city builders, and you get a big sprawling city with all your needs taken care of, it usually gets dull. Unless there is some endgame in sight or some big challenge, like fending off a huge hoard in They are Billions or something, i tend to get bored after a few hours in these sort of games. So they made a game where you play the beginning of a city builder, you are in a race against time to achieve enough goals, fulfill needs, etc. And then you win in a couple hours. And you do it again. But this time, you get different random buildings, resources, quests, abilities, etc, so you have to find a totally new build order to handle things this time, so its never the same. And there are good reasons, both for gameplay and for theme, why you are going to build cities again and again. I think this is the perfect city builder for people who love to play the early part of your city, who want efficiency to matter a lot, to be racing against time, and who want to have to adapt to completely different setups and building availability and create a new build order for each game.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 4, 2022

  Its a great city builder with a ton of replayability. My issue with these types of games usually is that you get to a point where your city is up and running and self sufficient and you're kinda left with nothing to do. In this you have a win condition and you have to do slightly different stuff to get there each time , and by the time your city would get a bit dull to continue you've won and you get to start over and do it different next time (though you can continue to build your city if you like, for aesthetic purposes or just for fun as well) I've also been following this while it was in early access on EGS and the devs updat constantly and have improved it MASSIVELY , so i look forward to see what they continue to add , especially the 5th race!
• RichyZ

  Nov 4, 2022

  Had this game two days Spent 24h playing Fml
• gamedeal user

  Nov 4, 2022

  Amazing game, roguelite elements work very well with city builders, apparantly. The main feature is being able to restart from scratch again and again. Each time you play with different modifiers and buildings. One game you might get +2 to your wood production, the next you may gain bonus points for establishing trade routes. Think of it as Slay the Spire like artifacts. This means your town will look different every time and you can try different strategies.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 6, 2022

  If you're anything like me, you love city builder games, but don't love when the game enters the late-game state. That initial rush of excitement and creativity as you explore the map and figure out where you're going to place everything, the challenge of securing food and lodging for your colonists, the mystery of the unknown. But then, as you explore more and more of the map and secure yourself... Things just kinda stagnate. Not in this game. In this game, every single run inhabits that early game exploration phase. You're always exploring, always in a hurry to secure food and new residents to assist in running things, always having to plot and plan and react to emergencies. It's fantastic.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 6, 2022

  This game is a gem, a marvel of game design. I can clearly see the studio behind it has experience not only as programmers, but as gamers; they have a seasoned understanding for what does—and does not—make a game fun. There exists challenge without headache nor gimmick, the learning curve is moderate and well-paced, the UI hides no information from you whatsoever, and the game respects your time. At it's core, this is a logistics game. Closer cousin to Factorio or Tycoons than to SimCity or Skylines. The rogue-like elements are the buildings and resources available to you each run. You start each map with basic resource gatherers and must choose your available production buildings via card draw as you progress. Risk/reward comes into play- taking a bakery is a gamble if you cannot yet make flour, and moreso if you cannot yet grow wheat. Your main antagonist is the force of nature; as you explore and grow in population, so do the debuffs the forest weighs upon you. These negative effects are re-rolled for every map, and you are informed of the full extent of their effect at the start of each run, allowing you to plan and prepare for them. Let it be known that i did NOT ONCE have to leave the game to find information on something. Whether via the tutorial, tool-tips, or atlas, this game's informational resources are *thorough*. And here's a short list of specific game design choices i must rave about: -You can highlight all buildings by production or workers, AND FAST-INTERACT WITH THEM while highlighted! -Unassigned villagers == builders by default -Simple/starter/resource buildings can be moved instantly, freely, forever -Every choice-making menu can be closed and later re-opened without consequence -Each map provides a limited variety of resources, yet most recipes offer multiple possible ingredients -You can search any ingredient/product to show all currently-available options within your settlement -The condition for victory is direct and obvious, however the roads to getting there are many, and the detours can be treacherous. -(From my experience so far..) Luck has been balanced to help and hurt, but not make nor break.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 7, 2022

  Finally, I can achieve my dream of building cities of harpies and nothing but harpies. ...Okay, I guess the beavers can stay too. And I suppose I need the humans to farm. And we're going to eventually run out of protein if we can't have the lizards go ranching for us. BUT EVERYONE ELSE IS BANNED. That means you, fishmen, and also you, horrible rainflesh abomination. Okay, but let's take this review seriously for a bit. In a world where questionable experimentation with the rain cycle (the word 'rainpunk' shows up a lot) has resulted in the world being constantly covered by an all-consuming storm, only the burning eye of Sauron (who has rebranded into a turtle kaijuu queen) can keep the people safe while they slowly try to re-civilize the world, even as everyone has to go back to the Queen's castle every 40 years or so as the storm escalates. As for your place in all this? You work for the Queen, charged with taking charge of expeditions attempting to build settlements and use the resources they earn to upgrade the Queen's castle. As for how this works, you... Build a town! Unfortunately, because the Queen doesn't believe in just letting ANYONE have whatever blueprints they could possibly want, you instead only get a handful of "essential" blueprints that get your economy started and nothing else. Anything else has to be earned, and even then you only get to choose one of several randomly selected buildings that may not be useful or relevant to you. That's you get for working for Sauron, I suppose. The actual focus of the city-building is building your "reputation" bar. Increasing the reputation bar brings you closer to victory, and periodically gets you more blueprints, giving you more options. Increasing the reputation bar is done in three main ways: Completing orders from the Queen, Solving "Glade Events", and just making your people really happy. On that note, let's talk about your people! In this game, whenever you set out an expedition, 3 of the 4 races are assigned to your expedition: Beavers, who are basically wood-themed dwarves, Humans, who are good at farming and drinking, Lizards, who are good at working with meat and fire, and Harpies, who are harpies and therefore perfect in every way. ...Okay, but let's be real here: The big advantage of harpies is mostly that they're flighty. No, I don't mean they move fast, though they DO move (out) faster than anyone else. No, their advantage is that once you get them happy, they get really happy, really quickly, which lets them give you reputation faster than the other races as long as you can appeal to them. Appealing to them is done by helping them achieve their 8 (actually 6, since 2 of those 8 are "has a house" and "has a race-specific house") needs: 2-4 "Complex Food" needs, which are basically just "food that has been cooked", an optional "clothing" need, but only beavers and humans care about clothes, and 2-4 "Service" needs, which are advanced needs at the final tier of production that need specialised buildings to use even if you have the stuff needed for the need. When needs are satisfied, your people become happier. When they get happy enough, they give you reputation. At the same time, the more the forest is trying to kill them, the less happy they become, and if they reach the state of having 0 happiness, they will begin to pack their bags and leave, which in turn will anger the Queen. Which is actually one of my favourite mechanics in the game, actually: While the Queen's anger gauge is your "time limit", and it maxing out is your lose condition, it's also a resource of sorts by itself. Because you see, the forest is rightfully afraid of the Queen, what with the Queen being Sauron and Sauron being a metaphor for unchecked industrialisation and deforestation. The angrier the Queen gets, the less the forest tries to kill you, so you can in fact use the queen's anger as a way to keep the forest in check, and you can always reduce it by getting more reputation anyways. Anyways. uh. I like this game? Quite a bit? I mean, it's a Roguelite City Builder, it's fun, it lets you have harpy cities, what more do you need?
• gamedeal user

  Nov 7, 2022

  If your favorite parts of a city builder are the first few hours, where you struggle to set up needs and economy, then this game is for you. It has a good progression system and the individual runs end just before it gets boring. You can always continue your run if you like what you've done with any given settlement as well. The devs are also constantly updating this game, so don't fear the Early Access title. It has more content than some of the "finished" games out there.