City-building simulation games, which have a large number of enthusiasts around the world, can allow you to feel the magic of erasing time as if you were in a time machine if you have the right taste, but the barrier to entry is high due to the complex game mechanics and long play times.
Against the Storm, released by Emirates Games, attempted to inherit the characteristics and strengths of the genre by incorporating a rogue-lite system into a city-building simulation while eliminating as much as possible the drawback of being heavy to play. Their differentiated strategy resulted in over 16,000 overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam.
Game Name: Against the Storm
Genre Name: Construction Simulation
Release date: 2023.12.08
Review version: 1.0.0Developer: Emirates Games
Services: Hooded Horses
Platform: PC
Play: PC
Focus on intuitive construction rather than complex management
Many city-building simulation games focus on maintaining a city for a long time. Each campaign has a set period or growth scale, but the beauty of city-building simulation games is that they can continue to develop beyond this.
On the other hand, Against the Storm focuses on achieving specific goals within a set period of time. In other words, city construction and management are merely means to achieve the goal, and no matter how well the city is designed, it cannot be expanded indefinitely. This difference brought about a big change in game play.
For example, to keep a city strong for a long time, detailed planning is needed from the beginning. If everything, including the shape and location of the building and even the roads, is not taken into consideration, problems in urban management are likely to arise over time. It is not for nothing that they say that one must have a strong skeleton.
▲ There is no need to measure it like a knife. As long as the city is running, it is OK.
Because of this, most users who enjoy city-building simulation games tend to develop a kind of obsession with building a new city the moment they discover something strange while playing the game. If you discover a problem when it has grown to a certain extent, it is difficult to fix it, so it is better to start over.
In other words, you can fully enjoy the game only if you properly understand all the elements of the game. Since it is a game, you will get used to it at some point as you play, but for beginners who are new to the game, this presents a very large barrier to entry.
As mentioned earlier, Against the Storm is a game where you must achieve a goal within a set period of time. Maintaining a city for long isn’t that important in this game. To be more precise, even if you want to maintain it for a long time, you cannot. This is because resources are limited for each map played in a campaign format.
▲ You must gain reputation as quickly as possible within limited resources.
In some ways, while existing city-building simulation games focused on further developing a sandbox in which the user could play with his or her imagination and abilities, Against the Storm eliminated sandbox elements and provided a guide to help the game gradually overcome its given goals. It can be seen that the focus was on providing
Thanks to this, even users who had difficulty sticking to city-building simulation games due to their vast degree of freedom can adapt easily and quickly. Even if the city is designed and maintained in a mess, once the goal is achieved, it is considered a success.
Even if you fail to achieve your goal, it is only a failure of the campaign and not a failure in the game as a whole. Due to the nature of the rogue-lite genre, even if you fail, something remains and this can be used as a foundation for further growth. Since it’s a game where you build a city over and over again, there’s no problem if you don’t focus on each one.
▲ It is important to focus on specific elements according to the situation rather than management.
In general, as you build a city and grow its size, there comes a point when things suddenly become more difficult to manage. Against the Storm’s level design is designed to achieve or fail the goal just before that moment arrives.
As a result, I think it’s easy to enjoy because you only pick out the fun extracts of the construction game and skip them over and over again, so you won’t get bored easily, and the play time for one game isn’t too long.
City building simulation meets roguelite
As mentioned earlier, Against the Storm is a game where you have to continuously build the city to achieve your goals, rather than running a city for a long time. No matter how fun city building is, you can easily get bored if you have to go back to the village size every time you try to become a moderately large city.
In the world of the game, a strange phenomenon occurs in which all areas except for one place, ‘Soot City’, are reset at certain intervals. The world reset in this way appears completely different from before. The player must become the governor, go out of the village, build a temporary city, and touch the sealing stones located around the world to extend the reset cycle as long as possible.
In this way, Against the Storm shows a highly complete system as a rogue-lite game, including an environment that resets at regular intervals and repetitive city construction.
▲ Even if you work hard to build a city, it will fly away anyway, so don’t give it too much affection.
Game play can be broadly divided into two sections: world map reconnaissance and settlement construction. In the world map section, you can choose a land to settle in, check the biome of that land before entering, and take the appropriate caravan group and launch bonus. Afterwards, when you move on to building a settlement, you must fill up reputation and complete city construction as quickly as possible while paying attention to the forest’s hostility and the queen’s wrath.
Reputation, which is also the game’s victory goal, can be filled in several ways. As the word suggests, you can think of your reputation as improving if you do something beneficial to the country. As villagers earn a living, donate goods to the country, or complete assigned tasks, their reputation gradually increases.
Conversely, if you behave badly, your reputation will be diminished. To be more precise, you will incur the Queen’s wrath, and as the shame accumulates, city construction will immediately fail. Forest hostility is a system that makes the game more difficult. Contrary to the Queen’s wrath, doing something bad for the forest, such as indiscriminate logging, can incur the wrath of the forest, causing anxiety among the residents and even leading to deaths.
▲ If you succeed or fail in building a city, you can receive various resources and upgrade them.
These penalties are ultimately directly related to the queen’s wrath, so rather than leisurely managing the city, you must pay attention to the time attack system of the forest’s hostility and the queen’s wrath. On the easiest difficulty level, the penalty does not increase significantly, so it is difficult to feel it, but from the moment you go to veteran difficulty, you need to be careful about everything you do.
On the other hand, because of this penalty factor, you will not get tired easily even if you build a city repeatedly. There are two types of time attack within the settlement, but there is a larger concept of time attack that resets the world, so the focus is on growing the city quickly and efficiently rather than making the city prettier.
In addition to the time attack, you will encounter several penalties during settlement construction. For example, when you expand your territory by cutting down trees, you may discover a new vacant lot. If it is a high-risk area, a special event will occur. Certain events are helpful in playing, but some are bad enough to crash the game if something goes wrong. How to deal with this is only up to the player.
▲ It is possible to achieve the goal as long as you follow the Queen’s orders carefully.
In addition, the build-up process of city construction, including the interaction of numerous buildings and the use of biomes, has been prepared in great detail. It is thanks to this randomness and numerous events that you do not get bored easily even if you build a city repeatedly.
However, there are cases where randomness hinders urban design. For example, if you prepared with a weaving tree in mind, but the important weaving building does not appear, everything you prepared will be meaningless. Therefore, as the level of difficulty increases, the design must be prepared more carefully.
In summary, Against the Storm is a game that focuses as much as possible on architecture and design by eliminating the management process, which is one of the main culprits in increasing difficulty in construction games. City building, which can feel monotonous, made the most of the rogue-lite system to add variables, and succeeded in creating a content circulation structure unique to this game that differentiates it from other city-building simulation games.
▲ There is a great sense of accomplishment when you work hard to settle down.
In fact, it is only a little easier than other games, but there are still many elements that will feel difficult for beginners of this genre. For example, there is a lot to learn and know, such as the process of understanding the biome and building a building, how to control limited resources, and the process of overcoming various penalties.
The developer seemed to be aware of this and created tutorials and guides as kindly as possible, but because there were many elements that differentiated the game from existing games, the explanations were not intuitive. With a vague awareness, I think I will only understand once I break it. Still, it is safe to say that there is almost no penalty on the easiest difficulty level, so there are many areas showing signs of concern for beginners.
If you play it once, I think you will immediately realize that the game is more structured than you think. If you have always enjoyed city-building simulation games or would like to give it a try, I recommend getting started with this game.
