Surviving the Aftermath

As a lover of the post-apocaliptic theme (from Fallout series) plus building games, like Surviving Mars, with a lot of similar mechanics, I should love this game. But... While I enjoy it, I see significant lacks in the game. First, the wiki lacks the quality of Surviving Mars by far. The embedded Tutorial doesn't explain a lot of things it should. The balancing is too rigid without good configurations that add versatility to the play (like the sponsors, and rules in surviving mars). As I saw in Internet, the game had a lot of changes since the release, and to make it longer, they make a lot of resources bottlenecks that risks to make it tedious and boring because ensure the development depends of too many variables and the non-bottleneck sources are limited which turns into a slow play. And in worse place, they explain NOTHING about how to mod the game. Just "install Unity version xxx and you have here an example". That's all. As expected, that turned into a number of mods ridiculous small, compared with thousands for Surviving Mars. Maybe the engine is not lacking (I know that Unity has a lot of things, but that doesn't ensure modding integration). But even if the engine has the potencial, you can do nothing if you lack documentation. This game with a great modding capabilities could fix all this problems and suits a lot more tastes than the original vanilla play. And extend a lot about the lore, that has a lot potential for people imagination, adding post-game new mechanisms. But... It's what it is. After some years after Paradox declare the game ended, I don't have hope they fix that and turned into a great game. And it's a pitty. These game with the moddability of Surviving Mars would turn really wonderful. Well... At least I can say that the music tracks of the default radio are superb. I really like them a lot.

The game is pretty similar to "Endzone" but with older graphics. I also had 3 crashes in a row, but I think this is due a special quests since after finishing the sidequest I never had any issues again. I hate games with their own special launcher which makes everything annoying but there are instructions online how to get rid of the paradox launcher (it was pretty easy to do). About the game: as said before, this looks like a clone of Endzone (or vice versa). The buildings are nearly the same, the production line too etc. I think the only real difference is the world map and the specialists. The specialists are kind of super units which can build/collect and fight faster. You also use them on the world map to discover new territories. I liked that aspect. Was pretty nice (reminds me on civilization - hexagon map etc.). The difficultiy is quite good. But since I played this type of game before, I knew what to do. But I bet newcomers will die quite often. I only did the main campaign. I liked the idea that you need to discover your local map too and clean up all the waste and destroy the nests of the insects. Especially since you had first to research all this and this took quite some time. So you had to deal with the enemies in parallel to the catasrophes which occured here and there. There were moments where I wanted to give up ... but in the end ... this is the purpose of such a survival game, right? Just continue and try to find a solution. So I did and it worked. I give this 4/5. I read other reviews comparing it to "Banished" ... yes, I played Banished too. But I think these both games are quite different. It's like comparing Civilization and Cities:Skylines/SimCity. They are similar but still different. My ranking here is: 1. Endzone 2. Frostpunk 3. Surviving Mars 4. Surviving the Aftermath

Can't give 2,5 stars here... Coming from "Surviving Mars", this game here obviously had a much smaller team/budget/shorter development time. It does scratch the colony builder itch, but it does so far from its full potential. Everything from the UI, the mechanics (frequent "injury" and "radiation" cascades just to throw in some articial difficulty) to the tutorial/"help" menue (many things are simply not explained) is simply undercooked. Instead of taking time and budget to add some essential quality-of-life features (minimap; building grid view toggle; building keyboard shortcuts etc.) the developer pushed out 3 DLCs that focus on one gimmick each and are badly balanced with the main game. I did spend about 50 hrs with it (one playthrough on normal), but unlike "Surviving Mars" there's little here that will drag me to a 2nd playthrough.

a good game not too easy that you rage quit not hard that you feel stressed out on normal mode. easy to understand. a really good game