Against the Storm is a lovingly crafted roguelite city builder that respects your precious time and eagerly rewards your engagement.  You’re the Viceroy for the job

In AtS you are a Viceroy. You have been tasked by the Scorched Queen of the Smouldering City to build outlying settlements in the surrounding Forest to obtain supplies for the forthcoming Blightstorm. The Blightstorm is a cyclical, (nearly) world-ending catastrophe that only the Smouldering City can survive. Once it’s done, the world is reset. When you go out into the world the Scorched Queen demands progress. As you build your settlements you are given orders that must be completed to increase your reputation as the coolest and most capable Viceroy out there, but also to placate the Queen and keep her from becoming too impatient. Perhaps like your significant other, or your mum, ahah.. the Queen is excessively demanding and does not look kindly upon any laziness or incompetence.  

Whilst carefully ensuring the Queen will still invite you to her Sunday roast every weekend, you must also manage the villagers in the settlements you build. Your villagers are a mixed bag of humans, beavers, foxes, harpies and lizards. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses but also their own particular needs that, if ignored, will reduce their resolve and likely result in them abandoning your settlement. Lizards love hearty sources of meat and working in the warmth. Beavers love biscuits and, as expected, are excellent with wood. You get the idea.Adding further to these complex managerial demands placed on you are the environmental problems of the Forest, its seasons and its glades. As you venture across the world map different biomes of the Forest present unusual challenges and encourage alternative gameplay approaches. The biomes are lush and beautiful.. and sometimes scary as hell. The Forest is very much alive and grows hostile towards you as your settlement inevitably must cut down wood for buildings and production. As you see your lumberjack beavers eagerly descend upon the woodlands and ferociously destroy its natural beauty, you begin to understand why the Forest (and heck, why Mother Earth herself) gets a little shirty with this sort of environmental destruction. Hey! What if we’re the bad guys? The Forest’s seasons incur mysterious effects on your production output and your villagers’ resolve. Some of the negative effects may be offset by your settlement’s Hearthes, where your villagers gather to take a break from their work and get warm. I guess THEY don’t have a Scorched Queen breathing their necks, eh! Meanwhile, cutting your way through the Forest leads you to glades, which can present dangerous encounters that must be dealt with in order to avoid negative outcomes. However, exploration always proves valuable.

Roguelite WINS for time-pressed gamers

Failure in AtS isn’t pointless and it isn’t ignored. In the event the Queen gets too impatient, and you are recalled to the Smouldering City, all is not lost. You are awarded experience points that contribute to Citadel Upgrades, the roguelite element of the game where you may purchase permanent buffs and construction blueprints. You may have failed to establish your settlement, but you came away a stronger and smarter Viceroy. 

As a tired and weary dad in real life, I LOVE this. Being generally pressed for time, losing in a manner whereby you are given a little something for participating stokes the gamer fire within me. Of course, in defeat you learn how to improve. It’s unavoidable. But I can certainly say I have plenty of real life defeat already stacked up to learn from, so having this motivational ‘just keep swimming’ tool embedded within AtS keeps me focused and allows me to enjoy the experience even when it all blows up in my face. My precious time is respected and valued. I can’t help but think there are too many games where losing means no progress is made. Not only is this unrealistic and sets the wrong impression for life it can just be super, super boring. Building failure into the narrative of the game feels right and deeply rewarding. It makes me ponder a gaming landscape whereby, regardless of whether you win or lose, the game always moves forward.

A Useful Interface

After playing through a few settlements I truly started to appreciate the game’s user interface. Early on it seems a tad startling, even excessive, and I found myself not paying too much attention to it. However, as I became a more competent Viceroy, I started reading the on-screen information like Neo reads the Matrix. I was in sync with my villagers’ resolve, totally aware of their consumption rates and had a complete understanding of the settlement’s production output. I had become ‘The One’. The Viceroy everyone knows and loves. Hail Caesar! Hail ME!! Yeah… So, at this point, I decided it might be a good thing to crank the difficulty up a little (which you are also rewarded for with more experience and therefore more Citadel Upgrades!). 

Going back to the UI, the game feels like one that has been designed truly for the players. With lots going on, there are some wonderful quality of life considerations. For instance, when the resource node your Herbalist Garden is farming runs out you are informed of the node’s exhaustion. Furthermore, you may choose to move the garden and in doing so are provided with helpful arrows on-screen that direct you to where an associated node is found, provided you have already discovered it. This doesn’t feel like spoon-feeding at all. It’s just the right amount of help you need without making it a patronising experience; taking out the unnecessary micromanagement faff and keeping the focus on enjoyable, wholesome gameplay.

So, is it worth it?

AtS is a great game and, in my humble opinion, completely worth it if you enjoy city builders. It’s worth your time, your money, and your attention. The developers have created an excellent player experience with its quality of life decisions delivering a game that secures both complexity and accessibility. It’s clear they put the players first, with options for feedback and ‘request a feature’ front and centre in the game’s pause menu. Adding to this a bustling Discord community keen to follow and contribute to its development, Against the Storm stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the finest PC strategy games out there.