Against the Storm
Against The Storm is a relatively original idea of making a city builder "roguelike", where instead of building one large save file city, you continually start new towns with different modifiers, unlocking things like passive bonuses, buildings and possible effects over each successful run. It adapts the roguelike formula to city builder very well, and like all good roguelikes, there's a huge number of variables to tinker with to make each run different. Honestly, I've bounced off it and couldn't get the hang of it, but I do recognise that it's very highly polished and well made.
Pros
- Excellent example of Early Access. It was updated very regularly and well communicated
- Really polished UI
- Beautiful models and animations
- You expand by chopping down forest and uncovering glades, which contain random events and buildings
- There are multiple races living in your city, each good at certain things
- Each settlement is a race to gain enough reputation before the Queen's Impatience runs out. Completing orders increases your reputation and decreases impatience
- Completing orders also act as an idea of what you should concentrate on next
- The roguelike city builder aspect really works well. The map sizes can stay small-ish, and you can learn from all your mistakes on each map to make a better one next time, instead of having to fix a large inefficient city
- Each Settlement (run) gives you different choices for passive bonuses, so you can focus on different things each time
- Each run rewards you with currencies, which can be exchanged to upgrade the Smoldering City, which gives you permanent upgrades
- There's a HUGE number of permanent upgrades to unlock
- There are "Deeds" which are challenges to complete, which also give rewards. Such as "Discover 10 glades". Mostly these give XP, but some give 2D decorations for your "home" in the city
- You must place decorations in your city to level up the main bonfire, which gives moral bonuses
- Each time you start a new settlement, you can choose a difficulty level, which also gives you more rewards
- Destroying a building usually gives you full resources back
- Many buildings can be moved at any time to new resource nodes or to make room for others
Cons
- I'm overwhelmed by how many different buildings can produce the same things
- There isn't really a good way to see what you can produce in your city, which makes it difficult to know what to choose for unlocks
- It's difficult to work out what's happening to resources. I was producing tons of planks, had buildings waiting to be built that needed planks, but they were stuck at zero. Eventually I found a makeshift post that was turning them all into crates of building materials
- Same thing happened again in another playthrough where I had no wood, for ages, then discovered it was all being turned into planks. You can set limits for resource production, but they seem to be off by default
- It only took 4-5 runs for the game to feel repetitive