Recently, while playing Ixion, I stumbled upon another interesting city builder with roguelike elements Against the Storm. After playing a couple of games, I understood that I’m a goner, the game sucked me in like there was no tomorrow. Eremite Games Studio created a perfect example of a game that combines extremely thought-out mechanics, addictive setting and interesting mix of features, promising many enjoyable hours of gameplay.
I was astonished upon learning that the game was created by only five developers. Against the Storm is currently available in Steam Early Access and receives continuous updates from the developers, like the most recent Twitch integration.
Let’s start with the world and the story. The world of the game is taken over by Blightstorm that hits over and over again once every few years. There exists but one bastion of life, the Smoldering City ruled by its Scorched Queen. You are the Queen’s Viceroy, charged to reclaim the wilderness and create new colonies to provide the city with resources for development.
As you start your illustrious career, the Smoldering City is quite a pitiful sight, broken down and starting. You will need to provide the city with a variety of resources to build it to greatness. Whether it will match one that once belonged to it or be something else entirely is something that no one knows.
You will get to build and develop colonies that will gather supplies. As the city rebuilds, your colonies will get bonuses in turn. Each built-up settlement remains on the map and is ruled over by governors, providing you with opportunities for trade. Each new colony is a step into the unknown, further away from the Smoldering City and into the wilderness. And, as you build 4-5-6 colonies and start to relax, the Blightstorm hits again and destroys all your hard work.
Against the Storm is primarily a game about micromanagement at its very heart. Any inattention to even the smallest details can bury your newborn colony. However, it is not a game over but rather a loss of time and a chance to lose leadership among the other Viceroys.
Every colony begins with the main building and the Ancient Hearth, the only structure that can protect your settlers from adversity, improve their mood and allow you to further develop the settlement. In the very beginning, you can only construct the most basic but also the most necessary buildings. Thus starts extraction and processing of wood, collection of food and other resources that can either be used in further development or be upgraded to a rarer quality. The process of building dwellings for your settlers, creating the basic infrastructure and even working on roads is of very high importance from the start.
The ordinary lumberjack camps, buildings for collecting other initial resources such as stone, meat, insects, roots, etc. have a certain collection radius. Yes, they can be moved but it will cost additional resources, so it’s worth it to plan from the beginning where you are going to place your structures, if it is worth it to create two of the same resource collection buildings or if it is going to be more profitable to move one once it’s done with its own location.
Processing resources is equally important: regular wood can be turned into planks that can then be used to create advanced structures. Similarly, copper can be processed into ingots, meat into kebabs, grass into fabric that can be used to create clothes to protect settlers from weather and so forth.
Thinking through all of this is not as easy as it sounds, but the reward will be a community effectively working together like clockwork. Even roads need to be laid wisely as they increase the movement speed of your wards.
At the moment of writing this article, the game features four races (with the roadmap pointing out the fifth). Each has its own advantages and preferences: beavers love to work with wood, eat pickles and want to be educated; humans take pleasure in gardening, are not averse to eating flour and demand religion; lizards are excellent hunters that prefer dry houses and spend their nights trashing up bars; finally, harpies are gifted scientists, live in clean environments and eat kebabs like there is no tomorrow.
These peculiarities need to be met and affect the mood of your wards. Satisfy their desires, and their mood will improve and, in return, give you new building blueprints. Negative mood will lead to settlers leaving your colony or even dying.
The game comes down to clearing the eternal forest and opening up glades where you will find new resources and events to take part in, both good and bad. Every tree you cut down, every clearing you open, and even the number of lumberjacks you have affects the forest’s hostility. The forest is always watching and unnerving your wards, and the higher the hostility level, the more misfortunes befall your colony. Starting with the simple anxiety of your settlers and going all the way to toxic rains that will be taking the lives of your citizens. However, there are ways to lower that hostility by kindling a fire in the Ancient Hearth or using other ways provided by the game.
Building each colony takes a few in-game years, during which you will see the change of seasons and weather: from sunny days to storms and rains which spoil the mood of your settlers and might prompt someone to leave to look for better working conditions.
There are 2 bars that you should keep an eye on: your reputation and the Queen’s impatience, blue and red respectively. The blue one represents how close you are to winning while the red reflects your approaching defeat. The red one grows over time or if you commit some negative deeds while the blue one can only be influenced by completing the Queen’s decrees or having your inhabitants in their best mood. The whole game is this sort of refined race and an attempt to maintain balance between fulfilling the needs of your colony and showing obedience to your Queen.
Another important aspect of Against the Storm is trading. You can build a Trading Post that will invite merchants with an assortment of various necessary goods and recipes such as sharpened axes that increase the speed of wood collection, boots and bags for movement speed and the overall amount of carried items respectively. You can sell your goods or exchange them for something you need… orrr simply rob a merchant and trade your reputation and lives of people for his goods.
The second roguelike component is, of course, the traditional randomness. Random modifiers, Queen’s decrees, merchants’ stock, items in the clearings and much more. However, Against the Storm is not just “some randomized game”, usually building your colony turns into a kind of puzzle where you have to prove yourself in order to turn any situation to your advantage. It is possible in almost every situation, however, you can also try your luck.
Every victory brings you experience and resources needed to rebuild the Smoldering City, and every building will give you a small bonus in the next game. And you will really need them since the game has a variety of different conditions and modifiers at the start of each settlement. It gives the game an incredible replay value and will suck you in for the entire span of your weekend while you try to reason that you will just “try one more map”.
The game also features a pleasant aesthetic: the music is not bothersome and you can spend an entire day listening to it without being distracted. The visuals are pleasing to the eye, the running of your settlers, the work of buildings, even the rain – everything is harmonious and pretty. It can be quite entertaining to stop and watch the work of a well-tuned colony as a bunch of settlers work in various buildings or run around on errands. Wells produce water, water is being delivered to the structures, settlers carry resources to and from the warehouses, all beautifully animated.
Despite being in the Early Access stage, Against the Storm features a great replay value, constantly nudging you to increase the difficulty and set new heights for yourself. The developers continue releasing new patches, hotfixes and offering new content, mechanics and adjusted balance. The game is a pleasure to play, it doesn’t have a million buttons and menus, everything is concise and clear to see.
