Against the Storm

I played played 190 hours and I love this game. I think I will soon finish the gold seal and stop at 200 hours. It is a fun game, where you get some technology / buildings and try to win a map. To do this, you can find ruins and reclaim them, find treasures, build a good settlement or fullfil requests of the queen. By fullfilling missions you can get upgrades, which allow you to have more core buildings and get more rerolls, until you (hopefully)( get the buildings you want. Pros: each city is different nice world setting with some sweet lore and visual archivements in your own house great feeling / immersive for the world a central hub city, where you can buy upgrades fitting your style fun world modifier different terrains require different strategies. like find ancient artificats or make ghosts happy Cons: More terrain types / special mission needed. there are some, but i hoped for more More lore / lore missions needed. There is some, like the mysterious queen, but more would be nice. visual smoldering city updates. You can build buildings in the hub city, but you if you upgrade them, there is no visual upgrade.

In this game, you cut your path on the game map through a hostile forest, and each stop alongs the way puts you in charge of a new settlement. Each settlement will have a different combination of resource types, population races, and the most important, different forest "curses" that become active when you exceed a forest hostility threshold. These thresholds make the game dynamic, as the conditions change during the settlement play-through, in addition to being different between settlements. Building up each settlement is where you will spend 95% of your time, and to be successful you will new to make decisions and balance multiple conflicting priorities. The road to victory is like a tightrope, and if you stray too much to one side of the other, you will fall off. Finding the right equilibrium is the heart of this game: - do you accumulate "victory points" (reputation) rapidly and advance forward, which will raise the hostility of the forest, or will you reduce your pace to buy you time to deal with what awaits along the path? - each "victory point" gives you access to a new building. Each building is useful, but you can't pick them all. Which one will you choose to help you along the way, given the conditions of this particular settlement? - the forest has glades, which hide both rewards and dangers. Some dangers are mild, others can be devastating. Will you risk opening glades? - will you accept a large number of migrants to build your city quickly (which will anger to forest), or do you keep your settlement small to not attract the forest's attention? It is all about making decisions that bring you towards victory while managing the dangers of the forest, and the impatience of your Queen. I forgot to mention the Queen. That tightrope you are carefuly walking on? She will cut it off if you take too long with your settlement, so hurry up along...

In this game you have a lot of small problems, diferent in every time you play, you don't have a full tech tree, so you need to find diferent solution the same problems, you have a few kind of workers with diferent needs and a few type of grounds. It is a revolution of city builder games. And you don't build your city per one hour and destroy your enemy per 2 hours like in The Settlers, your job is build working city, discover new areas with unknown issues and you have to do this on time, becasue the queen is looking at your efforts. A perfect game for me, I can recomed and establish a quality mark:)

This is such a quirky concept. A roguelike city builder, spending just 20-60 minutes on each settlement until the mission is over either way, victory or defeat. But, independent of which, the show must go on. You go to the next settlement spot. Each time your villagers are randomized, the map is randomized, the available buildings and orders are randomized. Successful settlements give resources that are used to advance overall upgrades and work towards reforging a seal, which is a mechanic that increases the cycle time until the entire overworld map (where you pick the next settlement) resets, because of course that is also randomized. This increased cycle time gives you access to more upgrade resources, but also to farther seals. And with that, slowly the required difficult to play at increases, giving larger rewards but also adding extra mechanics to keep in check. It's.. fascinating. I should not work! It sounds horrible! But it works, and incredibly well so. I have never seen a city builder keep my attention like this. "Just one more level"-syndrome. A lot of it!

Although it seems to be another city builder/colony simulator it actually is not. Not exactly. The one of a kind rouge-like city building with lovely fantasy-cartoonish graphic, well thought mechanics, high replayability, interesting lore/narrative. Also Beavers