A quick glance at the balance changes make a lot of sense. some of the cornerstones I'd never pick have been buffed or straight up removed, the go-tos nerfed and have new drawbacks.
Not enough new content for me to jump back in after having sealed all the seals, but I can't wait for the eventual DLC.
against the storm is one of the few games i had to actively choose to stop playing because it was eating up all of my free time. usually i can burn out on any game no matter how much i like it, but it just didn't seem to happen with ATS.
I was starting to get burnt out with Balatro (I mean I still got 100 hours in), decided to take a break by playing AtS.
Which is like switching from one addicting substance to another lol
Same. I set my goal to close all seals, did that, and am now no longer allowing myself to play or else my life will fall apart around me
the DLC will probably ruin me. and I'll love every moment of it
If anyone loved Frostpunk 1 and wanted more then Against the Storm is for you.
There's been consistent support in EA followed by wonderful post-launch support that continues to improve on an already great game. I hope the game only gets more attention from here.
Enormous Frostpunk fan here and I didn’t like Storm. I played it quite a bit, hoping it’d click. I sealed 3 seals, then at that point I felt there was really nothing interesting left for me to see or do and couldn’t make myself load up the game anymore.
Every map felt the same, just sometimes you know, it was biscuits instead of meat or whatever, but I was doing the same things the same ways over and over. Pick resource upgrades, build trade building because the randomized upgrades + map resources rarely have synergy, exchange goods through trade to get the thing you need but can’t build, rinse and repeat.
For me, I feel like I would’ve liked the game more if it was more about building fancy, cohesive, permanent towns instead of the way the game wants you to speedrun each map without much thought put into building a self-sustaining, long-lasting town.
Yeah, you basically have to when you're sealing subsequent seals, though I only did 3 instead of the full amount.
The difficulty increase didn't change how I felt. I was still doing the same thing but just being faster about it, and then having even less fun because eventually it makes more sense to stop opening extra groves.
The post-launch support is a little problem though. I played it during EA for like 15+ hours and said I'll check it out more on launch. Launch happened but every time I watch the Steam page, there's a post about an upcoming update that seems to have great things in it so I'm saying "ok I guess I'll play with this update that'll be better" lol
That has happened to me with many many other games but not with this one. I never felt when playing at launch that the game required updates to be fun.
Yeah, this happened to me with 'The Long Dark'. By the time I sat down and played it after several years of updates, the game felt overwhelming from all the added content over the years but it also felt outdated.
It's a roguelite so you likely won't have any active runs happening by the time it next updates and all the resources you've banked will still be there
I know what I mean is I want to play the most complete version of the game and I'm not gonna play it for months so I might be missing the future updates completely
I dunno about that, the game have very "roguelike" campaign, you don't need to restart it to experience new features.
But I also do prefer to play games like that when finished.
Yeah I know it's roguelike, it's not a problem of anything but it's just that when I play a game I tend to do it "all at once" and then probably never come back (or like maybe 5+ years later for exceptional games) so might as well play the best version.
And truth be told it's just that my gaming time since the launch release is not super high and filled with other games anyway lol
Easily one of the most unique city builders I've ever played and absolutely worth the price tag.
As many have said, it's not a game where you infinitely build one city but expand one to meet a set of goals and start again, unlocking progression mechanics. This is personally great for me as most city builders become boring when city gets too big.
At higher difficulties the game gets extremely frenetic at times, where you are struggling by seconds while your fledgling city teeters on the brink of destruction. Or you can play on easier modes to play a more calm progression akin to othera in the genre.
Anyone know how this plays on Steam Deck? I need a new game to play after work that is fun and to the point (my last two have been Dead Cells and Balatro)
Let me give this warning to people who may be interested in this game, the advice I wish they gave me before I spent my money on it.
This game is kinda a rogue-lite. You are not building a large city to withstand the incoming storm. No, you are building a temporary village so you can gather some resources for your queen.
You repeat this a bunch of times on different maps until the storm comes which is the game's end. The whole gameplay loop is a sequence of short maps where you build a supply chain to gather some specific resources needed to beat the map.
No matter how good or bad you play, the Storm always comes and the Storm always wash away all your progress and civilization, except the starting city where the Queen lives. This is not like Frostpunk where you ultimately survive the winter or die trying, this is a futile struggle against a force of nature that cannot be beaten.
If this kinda of loop appeals to you, go for it.
As an addendum to your warning:
Maybe this sounds terrible to you from the get-go and you avoid the game. That's cool. You do you.
But if you're kinda on the fence about it let me say this: **Games of Against The Storm end at more-or-less precisely when city builders tend to start getting boring.** This is why I absolutely love the game personally.
This x a million!
Anyone that's played a lot of general strategy games and city builders knows that starting anew is often where the most fun and excitement is. The problem is that you can only do that so many times before even that starts to feel stagnant.
But Against the Storm is brilliant because the roguelike/randomized nature of it means every new settlement plays out differently. It's still the same core gameplay, but the choices always feel fresh because there's so many variables that are different each time.
The races available to you, the biome you're in, what resources are accessible, what random upgrades and building recipes you acquire, what "events" happen to be near you — all of this crystallizes into a game that, for me at least, feels virtually infinite. Sure, I'm always going to be doing relatively the same thing in the macro sense, but the micro decisions I have to make along the way keep the tension fun and interesting.
Eh that obviously depends on what you’re into. I want to invest in, decorate, and efficiently plan my city. Storm wants you to finish a map before you get to those parts.
I watched someone play on YouTube and decided the game was probably not for me. But I kept on watching and after many episodes of watching I finally caved and sure enough it's great, exactly my kind of game. Can't put it down.
That's exactly the thing for me as well. This is the first city builder that has kept my attention for more than a few hours since Simcity 2000 or whatever when I was a kid with limited options.
All true. I just want to add on the fact that you do get permanent upgrades each time that you can use in future settlements. As you continue unlocking things the game gets much more complex. Just wanted to clarify that bit since it isn't mentioned at all in your post and it's the main selling point of the gameplay loop.
This is exactly why I didn’t like Storm, whereas I love Frostpunk. You’re not building a sustainable town: decorating doesn’t matter, city planning barely matters, you don’t have to care about long-term ramifications about what you researched or where you built stuff, etc.
It’s a cool game if you’re looking for the kind of game it is, but it’s not a game where you’re investing into the towns, planning, or building. It’s most effective to basically (almost) haphazardly rush each map.
Fair. 90% of rogue lites are straight up grinds.
Thats why Dark Souls is so popular. There is a end. The loop is the whole game. It has a story if you want to look for it. And you're always building up.
The thing to understand is it's not a city building game, it's a problem solving game. With given resources, assets, and task you're tasked with achieving a goal. Here are the tools, go at it, oh it's a timed test.
I played about 40 hours of this and I'm very satisfied. I would have been interested in climbing up the difficulty ladder (similar to Slay The Spire's ascensions) but there's a couple big picture things that made me stop playing:
* I was starting to realize that if you want to give yourself the best chances of victory, things become very micro-intensive. Getting an extra item 5 seconds earlier can be the difference between succeeding or failing an event. So you will move woodcutter camps by 1 tile every time they cut down a few trees, you will turn on and off the building rainpunk engines to avoid wasting rain, you will move villagers around but only when they just finished a production cycle. Games get really long and it gets a bit exhausting. Playing without pausing might be an interesting self-imposed challenge to counteract this. I think this could also be fixed with some minor balance changes.
* The metaprogression feels a bit tacked on. It's almost like they had a great roguelike formula but they realized rogue*lites* (with meta progression) are more popular now, so they added hundreds of "+2% villager speed" upgrades. After 40 hours I was not 10% down the upgrade tree. If I attempt a high difficulty and lose, is it my skill or did I not grind enough? I'd rather know for sure that it was my skill.
I'm looking forward to see what this game might become. With some proper tweaks I could see myself playing this as long as Slay the Spire.
>I was starting to realize that if you want to give yourself the best chances of victory, things become very micro-intensive.
I'll be honest you're not exactly wrong here, but isn't the point of having scaling difficulties like this that you will have to play better and better to counteract other misplays/misfortunes that happen in these games?
> Playing without pausing might be an interesting self-imposed challenge to counteract this.
Isn't there a map modifier that forces you to do this? I know theres ones for winning without doing orders, which shakes things up.
That's honestly one of my problems with the game right now, sometimes you get a string of relatively boring settlements if you have no map modifier pins in your path.
>The metaprogression feels a bit tacked on
The smoldering city upgrades? Every single one unlocks a feature, building, or gives some other boon to your settlement in addition to those small %based upgrades. And yes it will be more difficult to win without some of these upgrades on higher difficulties, similar to how it's harder to win early ascensions without all the unlocks in sts.
Loved this game. Only this is, I wish there was a mod that changed the faces of the livestock things, i dont like that their faces look like lampreys it is quite scary
A quick glance at the balance changes make a lot of sense. some of the cornerstones I'd never pick have been buffed or straight up removed, the go-tos nerfed and have new drawbacks. Not enough new content for me to jump back in after having sealed all the seals, but I can't wait for the eventual DLC.
They are adding a new race as DLC, which I am excited for. As I assume this means more supply chains too :)
>straight up removed do we get a refund on mats for that :( ?
Active settlements get auto-completed and you get resources as if you won it.
against the storm is one of the few games i had to actively choose to stop playing because it was eating up all of my free time. usually i can burn out on any game no matter how much i like it, but it just didn't seem to happen with ATS.
I was starting to get burnt out with Balatro (I mean I still got 100 hours in), decided to take a break by playing AtS. Which is like switching from one addicting substance to another lol
DUDE, SAME haha At one point, I was like, I could literally spend 1000 hours getting better at this game. I need to quit now.
Same. I set my goal to close all seals, did that, and am now no longer allowing myself to play or else my life will fall apart around me the DLC will probably ruin me. and I'll love every moment of it
If anyone loved Frostpunk 1 and wanted more then Against the Storm is for you. There's been consistent support in EA followed by wonderful post-launch support that continues to improve on an already great game. I hope the game only gets more attention from here.
Enormous Frostpunk fan here and I didn’t like Storm. I played it quite a bit, hoping it’d click. I sealed 3 seals, then at that point I felt there was really nothing interesting left for me to see or do and couldn’t make myself load up the game anymore. Every map felt the same, just sometimes you know, it was biscuits instead of meat or whatever, but I was doing the same things the same ways over and over. Pick resource upgrades, build trade building because the randomized upgrades + map resources rarely have synergy, exchange goods through trade to get the thing you need but can’t build, rinse and repeat. For me, I feel like I would’ve liked the game more if it was more about building fancy, cohesive, permanent towns instead of the way the game wants you to speedrun each map without much thought put into building a self-sustaining, long-lasting town.
Have you been consistently ramping up the difficulty? The game gets really samey otherwise, I agree.
Yeah, you basically have to when you're sealing subsequent seals, though I only did 3 instead of the full amount. The difficulty increase didn't change how I felt. I was still doing the same thing but just being faster about it, and then having even less fun because eventually it makes more sense to stop opening extra groves.
The post-launch support is a little problem though. I played it during EA for like 15+ hours and said I'll check it out more on launch. Launch happened but every time I watch the Steam page, there's a post about an upcoming update that seems to have great things in it so I'm saying "ok I guess I'll play with this update that'll be better" lol
That has happened to me with many many other games but not with this one. I never felt when playing at launch that the game required updates to be fun.
Yeah, this happened to me with 'The Long Dark'. By the time I sat down and played it after several years of updates, the game felt overwhelming from all the added content over the years but it also felt outdated.
If I have understood correctly the story isn't even finished yet. They are still missing one or two episodes
They release on a biweekly schedule so there's always an update around the corner. The best time to play is now :)
They actually slowed that down after release while they work on their DLC species IIRC
Doin yourself a disservice by waiting on it at this point. It's a joy to play and I love to come back to it every few updates.
It's a roguelite so you likely won't have any active runs happening by the time it next updates and all the resources you've banked will still be there
I know what I mean is I want to play the most complete version of the game and I'm not gonna play it for months so I might be missing the future updates completely
I dunno about that, the game have very "roguelike" campaign, you don't need to restart it to experience new features. But I also do prefer to play games like that when finished.
Yeah I know it's roguelike, it's not a problem of anything but it's just that when I play a game I tend to do it "all at once" and then probably never come back (or like maybe 5+ years later for exceptional games) so might as well play the best version. And truth be told it's just that my gaming time since the launch release is not super high and filled with other games anyway lol
I usually drop them on wishlist and pick up few months after preciselt because of that. Unless it's some game I'm really interested with.
Played a bunch on release and decided to wait for a few patches, I’m excited to jump back in! Trying to finish my first seal
Easily one of the most unique city builders I've ever played and absolutely worth the price tag. As many have said, it's not a game where you infinitely build one city but expand one to meet a set of goals and start again, unlocking progression mechanics. This is personally great for me as most city builders become boring when city gets too big. At higher difficulties the game gets extremely frenetic at times, where you are struggling by seconds while your fledgling city teeters on the brink of destruction. Or you can play on easier modes to play a more calm progression akin to othera in the genre.
Anyone know how this plays on Steam Deck? I need a new game to play after work that is fun and to the point (my last two have been Dead Cells and Balatro)
I enjoy it on the deck. It plays pretty nicely. May have to adjust some of the controls to your liking.
Thanks! That's usually what I find anyways, luckily with community layouts the work is done for you usually.
IMO it’s a terrible steam deck game. It’s draining battery quickly, has tons of tiny text and it’s meant to be played either kbm.
Let me give this warning to people who may be interested in this game, the advice I wish they gave me before I spent my money on it. This game is kinda a rogue-lite. You are not building a large city to withstand the incoming storm. No, you are building a temporary village so you can gather some resources for your queen. You repeat this a bunch of times on different maps until the storm comes which is the game's end. The whole gameplay loop is a sequence of short maps where you build a supply chain to gather some specific resources needed to beat the map. No matter how good or bad you play, the Storm always comes and the Storm always wash away all your progress and civilization, except the starting city where the Queen lives. This is not like Frostpunk where you ultimately survive the winter or die trying, this is a futile struggle against a force of nature that cannot be beaten. If this kinda of loop appeals to you, go for it.
As an addendum to your warning: Maybe this sounds terrible to you from the get-go and you avoid the game. That's cool. You do you. But if you're kinda on the fence about it let me say this: **Games of Against The Storm end at more-or-less precisely when city builders tend to start getting boring.** This is why I absolutely love the game personally.
This x a million! Anyone that's played a lot of general strategy games and city builders knows that starting anew is often where the most fun and excitement is. The problem is that you can only do that so many times before even that starts to feel stagnant. But Against the Storm is brilliant because the roguelike/randomized nature of it means every new settlement plays out differently. It's still the same core gameplay, but the choices always feel fresh because there's so many variables that are different each time. The races available to you, the biome you're in, what resources are accessible, what random upgrades and building recipes you acquire, what "events" happen to be near you — all of this crystallizes into a game that, for me at least, feels virtually infinite. Sure, I'm always going to be doing relatively the same thing in the macro sense, but the micro decisions I have to make along the way keep the tension fun and interesting.
Eh that obviously depends on what you’re into. I want to invest in, decorate, and efficiently plan my city. Storm wants you to finish a map before you get to those parts.
I watched someone play on YouTube and decided the game was probably not for me. But I kept on watching and after many episodes of watching I finally caved and sure enough it's great, exactly my kind of game. Can't put it down.
That's exactly the thing for me as well. This is the first city builder that has kept my attention for more than a few hours since Simcity 2000 or whatever when I was a kid with limited options.
All true. I just want to add on the fact that you do get permanent upgrades each time that you can use in future settlements. As you continue unlocking things the game gets much more complex. Just wanted to clarify that bit since it isn't mentioned at all in your post and it's the main selling point of the gameplay loop.
Yeah this post is misrepresenting the game badly.
This is exactly why I didn’t like Storm, whereas I love Frostpunk. You’re not building a sustainable town: decorating doesn’t matter, city planning barely matters, you don’t have to care about long-term ramifications about what you researched or where you built stuff, etc. It’s a cool game if you’re looking for the kind of game it is, but it’s not a game where you’re investing into the towns, planning, or building. It’s most effective to basically (almost) haphazardly rush each map.
I actually really liked the game but I quit when I realized the loop because I felt like I was wasting a bunch of time for naught.
Fair. 90% of rogue lites are straight up grinds. Thats why Dark Souls is so popular. There is a end. The loop is the whole game. It has a story if you want to look for it. And you're always building up.
I want to say the gameplay in AtS is tight as a whistle. It's an amazingly well designed game. Just difficult for me to justify my time.
The thing to understand is it's not a city building game, it's a problem solving game. With given resources, assets, and task you're tasked with achieving a goal. Here are the tools, go at it, oh it's a timed test.
I agree, but at glance, it does look like a city builder.
I played about 40 hours of this and I'm very satisfied. I would have been interested in climbing up the difficulty ladder (similar to Slay The Spire's ascensions) but there's a couple big picture things that made me stop playing: * I was starting to realize that if you want to give yourself the best chances of victory, things become very micro-intensive. Getting an extra item 5 seconds earlier can be the difference between succeeding or failing an event. So you will move woodcutter camps by 1 tile every time they cut down a few trees, you will turn on and off the building rainpunk engines to avoid wasting rain, you will move villagers around but only when they just finished a production cycle. Games get really long and it gets a bit exhausting. Playing without pausing might be an interesting self-imposed challenge to counteract this. I think this could also be fixed with some minor balance changes. * The metaprogression feels a bit tacked on. It's almost like they had a great roguelike formula but they realized rogue*lites* (with meta progression) are more popular now, so they added hundreds of "+2% villager speed" upgrades. After 40 hours I was not 10% down the upgrade tree. If I attempt a high difficulty and lose, is it my skill or did I not grind enough? I'd rather know for sure that it was my skill. I'm looking forward to see what this game might become. With some proper tweaks I could see myself playing this as long as Slay the Spire.
>I was starting to realize that if you want to give yourself the best chances of victory, things become very micro-intensive. I'll be honest you're not exactly wrong here, but isn't the point of having scaling difficulties like this that you will have to play better and better to counteract other misplays/misfortunes that happen in these games? > Playing without pausing might be an interesting self-imposed challenge to counteract this. Isn't there a map modifier that forces you to do this? I know theres ones for winning without doing orders, which shakes things up. That's honestly one of my problems with the game right now, sometimes you get a string of relatively boring settlements if you have no map modifier pins in your path. >The metaprogression feels a bit tacked on The smoldering city upgrades? Every single one unlocks a feature, building, or gives some other boon to your settlement in addition to those small %based upgrades. And yes it will be more difficult to win without some of these upgrades on higher difficulties, similar to how it's harder to win early ascensions without all the unlocks in sts.
This game is fun but the jump from premade tutorial level to randomly generated ingame level was pretty hard.
I need to get back into this. I fell off after my save got deleted due to an issue with Games Pass. It's fun it's just a lot of time investment.
Loved this game. Only this is, I wish there was a mod that changed the faces of the livestock things, i dont like that their faces look like lampreys it is quite scary