Against the Storm Review - An Ambient Roguelite City Builder

Potatos_are_not_friends , 6 months ago

This game is so freaking good.

But beyond that, the devs are so freaking attentive. This is one of the few developer teams that truly felt like they were making a game alongside the audience.

vtguy , 6 months ago

I picked this game up a while ago but haven’t found the time to play it yet. Guess I’ll have to bump it up in priority…

Knusper , 6 months ago

Ah yes, a city builder, which is a genre pretty much opposite to the original Rogue, but make it like a lite version of Rogue. 🙃

I mean, I don’t really care. Words change meanings. But this one does hurt my brain quite a bit, trying to understand which parts of the Rogue formula they kept…

Sorgan71 , 6 months ago

while I agree it might be hard to make, the two genres are not mutually exclusive

Knusper , 6 months ago

I’m not saying they’re mutually exclusive, I just find it tricky to draw information from that.

For example, I correctly assumed this to not be akin to Dungeon Keeper, which would be a city builder like Rogue in the sense of it being a dungeon crawler.
But at the same, I guess, I assume Against the Storm would have procedural map generation like Rogue did, even though I don’t really consider that typical for city builders.

And yeah, this fuzziness of the term ‘roguelite’ means I don’t really know how much city builder to expect…

rocker , 6 months ago

I agree with you so much. Its not that the two genres can't be mutally exclusive, its the fact that everyone wants to just throw gaming's biggest buzzword at it. I'm just happy that folks have started using 'lite' instead 'like'. Makes it a little easier to navigate.

Tathas , 6 months ago

These days, roguelite tends to mean “A procedural game where you initiate a run that has a start and an end, but then has meta currencies of some kind that you spend in-between runs that affect future runs.”

So in Against the Storm you start a run, and you’re in a fresh environment that depends upon where in the overworld map you chose to start. This portion of the game play is a city builder like Banished or Timberborn or whatnot. You follow the game loop to instruct units to gather raw resources. Spend those construct buildings and allocate units to generate other resources within those buildings. Deal with events that come up. Have a goal that signifies completion of the run, and a hurry up clock of some kind that forces you to get to an end, and then either succeed or fail. Based on how you did, you have meta currency awarded that you can use to purchase unlocks that can allow for new gameplay options or make you stronger so as to be able to play on a higher difficulty, which results in higher meta currency awards.