It's harder than I like, personally.

It's a high-stress city builder where you're generally struggling against starvation, collapse of morale, or both in the early game. What makes it really distinctive is that you're limited to a small set of buildings each game, and the buildings you're allowed change from game to game.

There are several production chains possible, such as copper ore -> copper bars -> tools, but you rarely have all the buildings unlocked for these chains, because of the random nature of what buildings you have available. You have to make do, either trading for items you can't produce, or hoping you'll find a stash of those items in a chest.

The maps are random, so you're never sure what resources you'll find, and different games start in different biomes, so what resources are possible change from game to game.

To win a game, you have to score 14 reputation points. You can earn points by completing quests, making your villages especially happy, or completing events you find on the map. Generally you do some mixture of all 3, though sometimes one method or another will dominate. There's even a random map modifier that prohibits all quests, so you must score points through other means.

All of that means that no two games really play out the same way, You must adapt to circumstances, and you have to be focused on what you need to do to win, since you can lose the game if you take too long.

Game are short, a few hours each. The game ends about the time your village is starting to get stable and prosperous. The idea is that you're a pioneer founding villages, not a mayor running them after they're healthy.

There's meta-progression, as you unlock additional features and bonuses after every game. That also contributes to the variety in play.

It's good, and it's complex, but I personally got burned out by how you restart and relive the high-stress early game so often. I've played games that push you like Oxygen Not Included or Factorio, but I appreciate how those games have a much more extensive period where you're no longer fighting for bare survival.

Lo compré por las buenas críticas. Lo probé y pensé: no está mal, entiendo que tenga buenas críticas porque funciona muy bien. Seguí jugando... no está mal... seguí jugando... no está mal... y me descubrí enganchado al juego.

This is an excellent game.

More often than not, when I see the words city-builder, survivor, roguelike, or deckbuilder, I become skeptical. I’ve been burned too many times by games that try to merge different gameplay elements into a single experience, only to end up with a shallow version of each, where none of the mechanics feel meaningfully interconnected. Against the Storm is not one of those games. It fascinates me how the developers managed to weave together so many different gameplay elements into a single, coherent experience.

The gameplay revolves around building a small town that usually lasts about 3–4 hours on a randomly generated map. You must adapt to the cards you're dealt. Every victory rewards you with resources that you can use to upgrade your hub, unlocking additional buildings and bonuses. At first, this may seem demoralizing if you’re used to the traditional city-building experience, where you spend 20+ hours crafting a massive opulent metropolis. But the real fun lies in facing the many different challenges each run brings. Every game will throw you into a different biome, with different species, starting resources, and available blueprints, figuratively and litteraly, and you must adapt. As time goes on, the forest grows more hostile, lowering your citizens resolve. This incentivizes you to provide better services, complex foods, clothing, housing, amenities. This dynamic sets a good pacing for the game, as you are always aiming at the next resource chain, the next unlock, the next season.

I am not one to replay games. I don’t replay FromSoftware titles over and over with different builds, I don’t replay Baldur’s Gate 3 picking different choices. I usually play a game, finish it, and shelf it, satisfied with the experience. Even with city builders or 4X games, it often takes years before I revisit them. Yet Against the Storm belongs to a very rare catalogue of games that I keep coming back to.

The game's greatest strength lies in its higher difficulties. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it’s through the higher difficulties that you truly unlock the full potential of the game. Many features, like rain engines and the seemingly inefficient resource refinement structures, may appear pointless at first. And they are... at least until you start tackling the harder levels, where they become essential. This ties back into the roguelike aspect where there is a clear progression between the bonuses you unlock as you clear more maps and the increasingly punishing challenges you face.

If there’s one criticism I have, it’s that the game does an awful job of incentivizing players to attempt higher difficulties early on. I stayed too long in the easy tiers at the start, not realizing that increasing the difficulty IS the game.

On the technical side, I have yet to encounter a single bug after 150 hours played. The game runs beautifully and is an absolute joy to play on the Steam Deck as well. And I have to commend the devs here, it’s clear a lot of thought went into optimizing the controls for the deck. Overall, I’m excited to see what else the developers have in store for this game and their future projects. So far, they haven’t missed.