There are a few video game genres that I usually shy away from. Those mostly being strategy games and turn-based games. Two genres that often go hand in hand. Despite all that I decided to give Against the Storm a try after receiving it through the Humble Choice subscription. I friend had praised it a lot in the past and was pushing me to play. I don't regret it. This game is great.
Against the Storm is a roguelite city builder strategy game. At first it was hard for me to envision what that meant. That a city builder could also be roguelite had never crossed my mind, but it works really well. Basically instead of focusing on one big town you build a lot of small settlements in the timespan of 40 minutes to two hours.
You do this on randomly generated maps that has randomly generated resources using a random selection of buildings. Each game might also have several positive and negative effects tied to it, like increasing or decreasing your food production. You'll also get random perks throughout the game that change how you approach each map.
A game is won by reaching a high enough reputation level before the queens impatience reaches a certain level. You gain reputation by having happy citizens, completing quests and completing map events. The queens impatience grows passively over time. You can only complete a certain amount of settlements before having to wipe the map of all your settlements. This is when you get materials for meta upgrades to make your subsequent games easier.
The first two hours are spent in the tutorial. While it does a good job of teaching you the ropes of the game it's not a great advertisement for the game. It's very linear and scripted and doesn't really give a real impression of how the game actually plays.
Once you get full freedom of the game it's just so good. You build your settlements one after one and because there's so many random elements to each map and game no settlements will ever feel the same. One game might be heavily focused on making food for your villagers because food is abundant and in the next settlement you only have stones and clay and run on a constant food shortage.
This is the only game I've been playing all week and it doesn't feel like it's going to stop anytime soon. I stream a few of my games throughout the week so if you want to check out how my first proper game after the tutorial went then you can check out the video below. I also try and explain the basics of the game as it goes along.
https://youtube.com/live/4BnsimWnrhg?feature=share
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
