I play a lot of survival city builders, but there’s always a certain point where you’ve solved all the puzzles, balanced your resources and population, and the “survival” part fades away as you just keep building.
Against the Storm solves that issue by making each city short-lived. You’re constantly starting from scratch and working to balance your population and resources, with the added difficulty of the forest getting angrier the longer you’re around. Each level also has a loose time limit represented by the “Queen’s Impatience”, and if you haven’t achieved your goals quickly enough, you lose. (Which really just means you don’t get as many resources for the meta-progression.)
The city building is kept fresh by randomization of the buildings you can choose from; you can’t follow the same pattern every time because you may not have the same buildings available. In addition, each city has random modifiers that provide bonuses and penalties, and often affect how you approach your expansion.
The meta-progression between cities adds new starting bonuses, new buildings and features, ways to mitigate the randomness (by providing re-rolls or expanding the number of choices you have), and other smaller bonuses (like slowing the queen’s impatience or increasing production speed). Like most roguelite systems, it simply makes the game a little easier the longer you play.
Aside from the gameplay itself, Against the Storm is extremely well-polished for an Early Access game – the visuals are great, everything feels “complete”, and I have yet to run into any bugs. The team updates the game every two weeks, and recent updates have added a lot of new content and adjusted several aspects of the game.
Against the Storm has quickly become one of my newest addictions, being pretty easy to play but also having a lot of depth and difficulty (if you want to push into higher difficulty levels). I’ll definitely be playing it for a long time to come.