Against The Storm Has Me Weak in the Knees

“Roguelike City Builder” might be a pure genre descriptor for Against The Storm, but I feel like there’s more to the heart of this somewhat addicting game. Released into early access late last year, Eremite Games have kept up a solid update cadence with some great tweaks and content additions, with the result being an incredibly well balanced and just-right experience I keep sinking into.

As a Viceroy to the queen of the last bastion of life, The Smoldering City, your job is to venture out into the wilderness to explore the world and establish livable settlements. That would be all well and good, but a terrifying storm comes by every couple of decades and wipes everything out, leaving only the central city standing while remixing the world anew, giving you renewed purpose to pack up your caravan and do it all again.

The premise serves its purpose well enough, in that it presents a structure for how to approach play. ATS cleverly takes the best part of the city building genre - the very beginning, where the possibilities seem endless - and has you repeat that for each settlement. Right as your settlement is starting to become a little too unwieldy and micro management heavy, you either win or lose the round and move on to the next one.

The underlying genius behind this design is it takes the regular gameplay loop of a tried and true genre and steps it out to the next logical endpoint. Where a game like Hades cuts it’s loops up into small and medium chunks - room-at-a-time and one run through to the end respectively - Against The Storm splits into medium and longer form loops. One settlement will take you 45-90 minutes to pace through; a full run will start at 4 or 5 settlements overall (to begin with - this expands out the deeper you get in). This leads to a more meditative mode of play that’s less intensive than your usual action based roguelike, becoming a more cerebral experience in its place.

This form is perfect for doing a run before bed each night, for example. Or, getting caught up on a Saturday morning just-one-more-run style, then realizing the sun has gone down and you should probably eat. Don’t ask me how I know.

A base session will go something like this. You begin with a small cadre of creatures - beavers, lizard people, humans and more - surrounding a central hearth and a warehouse. Surrounded by trees, you will get to chopping, building housing, collecting food and gathering other materials. As you expand you’ll come across groves, each with varying difficulty levels of random events and deposits of other materials. You’ll unlock new building options for more advanced refining of materials into more different materials as you earn favour with the queen. If you take too long to do so, the queen grows impatient and cracks the sads with you, losing you the round.

To prevent every settlement/run being the same and becoming drab, there are oodles of gameplay elements and randomization that alter every session. Favour is earned by hitting certain randomly generated goals through each run, tweaking your short term goals each time. While the base set of buildings are always the same - enough to get you going - the number of higher tier buildings you will get access to in any given run is limited.

Each area has its own unique collection of resources and modifiers, nudging you towards certain specialization for that particular settlement. All buildings can gather or produce multiple types of resources, so you won’t often find yourself completely locked out of a path, but brute forcing the ability to make pies every time isn’t the best way to go about things.

It’s very much systems on top of systems on top of systems, all interlocking and interweaving in a very “tickles the brain” kind of way. Of course there is also macro meta progression outside of the micro of each settlement, slowly unfolding new mechanics and other bonuses to keep things fresh for dozens of hours. 

Publisher Hooded Horse really has a keen eye for systems heavy PC focused games, with Against The Storm easily becoming a flagship entry to the stable. The “Overwhelmingly Positive” review score on steam is well and truly earned.

Against The Storm’s roadmap is almost done, so a 1.0 release is likely on the horizon, but even in early access this game is fully playable, incredibly polished and fine tuned to perfection. Now, please excuse me while I boot up just one more round...

A Steam key for Against The Storm was graciously provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.