Against the Storm Review
Against the Storm is a combo of city building and roguelike elements. While I initially found this pairing odd, I've grown to enjoy the game and its clever take on short live city building. Each round feels just long enough to be rewarding. Short loops reduce time spent at three times speed that becomes a necessary part of so many other city builders.
The roguelike elements of Against the Storm mainly revolve around global unlocks. These are a combination of new building types, some minor new mechanics and various buffs to things like build speed. This portion of the game doesn't feel onerous and mostly allows complexity to ramp up slowly over time.
Your job in Against the Storm is to guide a caravan across the wilderness in search of ancient seals. Your caravan moves one or two tiles at a time, setting up a new colony at each stop. Within your colony, the city building portion of the game, you are tasked with gathering Grace before an ever ticking impatience metre fills and you lose the round.
You can gather Grace in various ways. You can up the satisfaction of your citizens, netting you a slow trickle of Grace. You can complete a set of challenges which are handed out during the run, also giving new blueprints or building materials. There are also events scattered across the map which upon completion will unlock Grace.
Each of the colonies I completed typically won through a combination of these methods. Given many are randomly generated they keep each scenario feeling fresh. Some combinations are more challenging than others and the ever increasing impatience metre does a good job of building player tension.
After around fifteen hours of play time I still have a large portion of content to unlock. Despite that, the main reason I continue to come back and complete more of the game is the well balanced gameplay loop. This game certainly fits nicely for those who, like me, find it tough sometimes to carve out large portions of time for gaming. With each scenario completable in twenty to thirty minutes it is a good game to play in small chunks.
Beyond gameplay the visual and audio design of Against the Storm are also good. I never found myself confused as to where key buildings were thanks to the many unique building designs and small quality of life features like showing the current count of each building helped ease aspects of micromanagement. The music and sound effects are fine, nothing overly positive or negative and they generally blend into the game quite well.
Overall, Against the Storm is a game worth playing. It is well balanced and has enough variety in scenarios to keep it from quickly becoming stale. I purchased the game during its early access period and have been impressed with the new features and polish added that led up to the 1.0 release.
Rating: 3/4 - I'd be happy if more games were like this.