Devs are taking the game in the wrong direction.

Game used to have active exploration of your home base area, which was interesting. That's now been replaced by building watchtowers that slowly and passively make the fog of war recede. Boring.

There used to be a point to building a gate for your settlement: protection. Now, the gate is useless. Enemies are instantly inside your base. This is not a bug. This was a deliberate design decision.

You can no longer scavenge for basic resources outside your camp, either. Apparently the apocalypse wiped out every single piece of wood, block of concrete, or scrap of metal except in your little camp area.

They are literally paying someone to come up with the worse design choices and implement them. I used to enjoy this game, but as long as it keeps going in this direction, I cannot recommend it. Don't waste your money.

Edits (2 years-ish later) : The things i described as problematic did not change much. Still can't really plan for tactical defence unless spamming guard towers. Still can't refil a workplace for more that one production cycle so workers are still always idling. Haven't seen the gate combat mechanics yet, nor how electricity is used, hope those points improved. Will keep you posted.

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I don't often write reviews, and I REALLY wanted to like this game. What's not to like? Post-Apocalypse, survival, from paradox? I must say, it has potential, and I am having fun trying to grow stuff and survive disasters.

But, I won't go into all details that have been covered by other reviews, but to me there are 3 game killing issues that have been around for as long as I played, and I played since launch :

1- Combat and base defense is horrible (srlsy, worst combat mecanics I have ever seen). There is a gate that you can defend, but wildlife assault come from BEHIND the gate, and you can't build walls. And guess what, when ennemies breach the gate, where do they spawn? Yes you got it, raiders spawn all around your town, not just from the gate. So there really is NO way to be strategic about defence, except spamming guard towers (which use scarce workers). Also, your gun supply (if you ever get to guns) deplete from simply existing and being handled. So that cool cache of 15 guns you found in the wild might have disapeared when you need them if you don't have that end-game gun factory running to refill your stack.

2- Workplace are SOOOO inefficient because they can't stack more than what is needed for 1 action. So, when your assigned workers are done with building 1 set of tools, oh well they idle for a while until building is restocked. What's even the point of having carriers if they can't refill workplaces to 2/3x the component WHILE crafters do their jobs, so they can be efficient during their whole shift.

3- Workshops which use electricity still consume 100% power when idle or at night (common sense, like turning off the light swich when you leave the shop didn't survive the apocalypse it seems).

Right now, the devs are adding some "nice to haves" like better quests, or improved outposts rather than making the game fun to play fixing base management to actually make it fun. I will gladly change my review when one or two of those issues are fixed.

Very fun if you like colony sims The sprinkles of random RP events really helps bring it together. I have enjoyed it for many hours, but it does feel a little incomplete. It's like the game is mostly there, but would feel better with a bit more rounding out.

PRO:
+ Satisfying town building aspect
+ Individual colonists with traits and names
+ Specialist system adds more depth and story to the game
+ Random story events make the game more interesting
+ Catastrophes make even the easiest game setting more challenging
+ Decent sized tech tree with meaningful upgrades
+ Great difficult and challenge level selection process when starting a new game

CON:
- Specialists need to be super micro managed both in the colony map and world map
- Specialists don't auto finish long paths that were established the previous world map turn
- The farther the Specialists need to travel on the world map, the more tedious it becomes
- Sometimes world map specialist control can feel like a chore
- Inability to select specific colonists to a job; current is random who it adds

Below is stuff I wouldn't hold against the game at all and personal preferences.

INSIGNIFICANT CONS:
- Lack of upgrade options directly on buildings. (I prefer games where when I place a building down I can upgrade the building in that spot. This mostly affects housing and is a super minor thing.)
- World Map Resources don't respawn close to your city. It would be nice if even only smaller things respawned near the city and better materials had to be found much farther away.
- Specialists not helping when raiders attack your gate feels weird, especially when you can make them stand there and watch. Would be nice if there was something for them to shoot too to make it feel like they were protecting, or just make it so they can't go past the gate when it is being attacked.
- Colonists don't seem to relocate items from an overloaded storage space into a more empty one? Maybe I missed it, but it would be nice if there was a way for them to better redistribute items instead of just an allow/disallow option.
- I would love to see more assignments to carriers be it priority on what they do, or specific jobs. For example maybe one person only carries to food storage, or make it so one person can work on roads
- More focus on improving colonists traits and abilities so that they are better suited for specific job types
- Banner icons and choice having more variety would be nice to make it more customizable
- Some lack of mouse over tooltips. It's pretty minor but especially when starting out I have to match pictures instead of oh that is this new item and it is for this.

SUGGESTIONS:
- Have the ability to assign basic roles to specialists on the colony map such as, repair things, gather things, or help build
- Allow "auto pilot" for specialists on the world map. For example when selecting something that will take 3 or 4 turns of AP recovery, let them finish that path automatically. When you click far away and see the numbers, it makes it seem like they will auto complete, but then they don't
- Add more random events, even ones that offer no or just a minor reward. There is a decent amount now, but more would add more fun world building.

One word - combat.
Seems like devs refuse to listen to anyone. In a game about building up your city and defending it from the outside world, enemies literally spawn in your settlement with no warning, bypassing the gate and all defenses. The game just presses "delete colony" button. Incredibly frustrating and frankly, idiotic mechanic that punishes the player for building up and manning the gate (which is supposed to be your main defense) which only takes away colonists for a pointless task. Bandits or enemies spawn in, kill your colonists and specialists, destroy buildings and leave unharmed, since your guards do not even have time to react. The only countermeasure is to assign half your colony to a full perimeter of guard towers, which is absurd.

1.0 patchontes state that this issue has been fixed, so i fired up the game and gave it one more try. Naturally, the exact same thing happened. Nothing was fixed. For some mind-boggling reason devs insist on actively making their game worse. Because it used to be that enemies spawn OUTSIDE your settlement (ridiculous, i know).

This game has potential, but until this ridiculous mechanic is removed from the game, i absolutely do not recommend buying this, especially after the price increase. You will only waste your time, planing, protecting, surviving and building your beloved settlement, until the game simply decides that you had enough fun and spawn kills you.

P.S.
Baffling, truly. Whoever is keep pushing for implementing this settlement combat system needs to be fired immediately.

tl;dr: there's a lot of promise here, but for a city-builder to get logistics so wrong is disappointing, and too many game mechanics are still very shallow. Hopefully it will continue to receive significant work.

Logistics are what holds city builders together. You collect resources, store them somewhere, and then use them up. Aftermath doesn't seem to have learned either from its contemporaries (the shining example being Frostpunk) or anything else in the genre. In particular, in the late game you'll frequently find yourself with perhaps a hundred "unemployed" pops, who default to being carriers. This should mean things get transported quickly, right? Nope. When a task (carrying, building) needs to be performed, the game picks one (1) of your free settlers and has them do the whole lot. The rest will continue to mill around your main storage hub indefinitely. The end result is that after your colony hits a certain size, buildings can take weeks to get finished, because all your steel / concrete / components will continue to pile up in the nearest storage facility to their production site, and a single worker will haul themselves the entire way over the map and back carrying 15 units of it to your building site at a time. On the other hand, if you decide to build a new road (which doesn't require any resources), each square of road is treated as a separate building, so your entire unemployed population will swarm en masse and finish it in seconds. There is no way to allocate settlers to redistribute materials between your warehouses: all you can do is block a certain resource from being held in a given warehouse, which only means that a) it takes longer between something being produced and it showing up in the UI and b) it'll be stored in the next-nearest warehouse, which is hardly an improvement. I have no idea how this, the most fundamental mechanic in the genre, was handled so poorly. Either a mechanism needs to be added to have carriers be useful at their jobs, or this entire mechanic should be abandoned and harvested resources simply automatically accumulated in free storage.

Resource gathering is also a chore. Early on you'll want to gather the resources lying around the starting area. However, the only settlers that you can directly task to gather wood or berries (or animal corpses) are your champion units, who are far better served exploring the world map. So you need to build special (small) food or wood storage buildings, and then set a circular gathering area which your unemployed pops will then theoretically march over to and start grabbing stuff. The first problem here is that these stockpiles have low capacities and can only hold basic resources. The second is that after you've gather all the e.g. wood pallets in an area, the building is useless (per the above logistics fails, it is massively more efficient to build a new gathering site right next to any wood found further away than have your pops shlep all the way to a distantly-set gathering point) and so is good for nothing but being demolished. You're probably going to end up using the largest warehouse type for all of your storage across your camp.

Next, food. After you settle down for a while your pops will want something better than berries and raw meat to eat, so you can start building cookhouses and mess halls to prepare better meals. But (and this is a critical point that the game never bothers telling you) these buildings don't serve people food directly: they're just another manufacturing building, having food and firewood delivered to them and dumping meals on the street to be taken to a warehouse. If someone gets hungry, they walk over to your warehouses. And if the raw food is being stored in a warehouse that's closer to them, they'll happily eat that instead.

On the other hand, you might get malnourished citizens, but you'll rarely see people die of starvation. Maybe to make up for the broken logistics, resource provider buildings produce absolutely huge surpluses. A single hunting camp next to a big wood will fill your warehouses so full of venison that you'll be constantly exporting it. Once you get access to farms, you only ever need one of the top-tier version of each to generate massively more of its resource than you'll ever make use of. A fish farm in particular will generate hundreds of fish a day.

The remaining mechanics (the world map, trade, and random events / catastrophes) are still very shallow. The mainline quest in particular is a literal afterthought that was only added just before leaving early access. You'll want to recruit as many explorers as possible, make contact with all the nearby settlements ASAP for trade, and start putting science outposts down for a steady trickle of science (more than enough to finish the tech tree in a few months) and scavenging outposts down on regions that produce rare resources. These include automatic rifles, the top-tier base defense weapon, that you never ever need for yourself (your champion units are far better at fighting than any colonist and can actually be told what to do) and that sell for an absolute fortune. You can basically conduct all of your trade with them, when you're not trying to get Sin Town to take another 400 excess fish and cabbages off your hands.

This has already gone on for long enough. Suffice to say, if you made it through all that, then you hopefully get the impression that this could use a lot of work yet. The atmosphere is nice enough and all the basic pieces to make this much more fun are there, but not in the right order yet. Figuring out logistics alone would make this much less frustrating to play.

There is a lot to like in this game. The aesthetic is fun, the tech tree choices feel meaningful early game, game-play is engaging and the narration of story events is pretty good. Despite these positives there're some pretty glaring issues that are preventing me from recommending this game, and they primarily boil down to three issues: Missing Features, punishing starts, and trivialized mid game.

Missing Features: There are a lot of things in game that make me ask 'Why'd you stop here?'
Combat is the first one. I don't know why it's in the game. If you get attacked by wildlife, your own citizens will deal with it by descending on it like a swarm of angry bees and punching it to death. Raids are either stopped at the gate, or crushed as soon as they get inside. Putting a guard tower or scout tower immediately behind the gate is basically enough to set you for life. Its not even a detriment to having people dedicated in this role, because they still haul and build even when working 'defense'. There is no ability to launch raids either, which brings me to my next point:

On the world map combat is even worse. There are stationary bandit camps that do nothing but block a world map resource spawn and require one or more specialists to kill. There is no nuance here, bigger number wins. The end. It is perfectly viable to just go around them, and then stack all of you specialists on one camp when you have nothing better for them to do. The game doesn't punish you for leaving them on the map, so don't bother with them until you've exhausted everything else or you need to build an outpost.

Diplomacy is another odd feature. Its there, you can make friends with your neighboring settlements, but I don't think is does anything. Becoming friends with one doesn't lock you out of trading with another, so its not like you need to pick and choose your trading partner's based off of what goods they sell vs what you have. Its also really overpowered in mid or late game, but I'll get back to that.

There isn't really anything to do on the world map other then explore it. You don't send people to make outposts, you send a specialist. I think having to send out people would probably hurt more. You also don't need to feed, defend, or communicate with them once established. I'm not sure what else I'd do with it, but as it stands right now a Fallout Shelter 'send out, return with stuff when health is low' system is almost better. That would require less micro at least.

Punishing starts:
If you live or die is very much RNG. The catastrophe system isn't great, and so you basically get forced into one of two scenarios: You have survived the RNG based events, or they kill you. Map wide modifiers like Heat wave, cold wave, radiation, and others happen to one world map section at a time. There is no way to force your settlers to shelter around the one fire pit you have burning, or ask it to ration wood. You have enough to last or you don't. Heatwaves are the same- You have enough water to get through it, or everyone dies. Fallout? Build more medical huts and hope you can out heal the radiation sickness or people die in droves. Depending on what the game chooses to through at you will determine if you live or die.

Finally, easy from mid game on.

Once you unlock large farms and have enough people to staff them, you've won. Selling food to other settlements will net you tech points, non-renewable resources like plastic, metal, and parts, and the renewable stuff as well like firewood and lumber. I have yet to see the need for irrigating my farms, even barren maps have enough fertile land to more then overproduce, and between corn and cabbages you'll be set. Ranches produce a crazy amount of meat as well. I had three, two for chickens and one for sheep, and was out stripping demand on meat for more then 150 settlers.

This means you always have food to trade to your neighbors, who restock their own products every in-game day or so. At this point you can do whatever- the ability to trade for infinite anything allows you to overbuild your own survival set-ups and trivialize the catastrophes so you can take your time building the end game bunker for a game 'win', with no pressure from any outside force. The excess money makes recruiting specialists easy, which in turn makes building outposts easy.

There is no outward pressure- you either lose immediately or cruise to victory, which also kills any replay value.


Hopefully the modding community or later patches will fix this, and I'll edit my review if they do, but for now I don't recommend this game.

I really wanted to like this game.

I like city/colony builders, I like hard challenges, and I like games where there's not really someone at fault, or some big bad. The world just kind of sucks, and you're here to make it suck less.

Unfortunately, Surviving the Aftermath has two serious problems that completely ruined the fun for me.

First, the core logistics and flows of the game are simply bad. There's a lot of waiting around for something to happen, and waiting around is very bad because the game puts out challenges on regular intervals. The reasons for the waiting are numerous, many of them aren't avoidable, and the ones that are can be potentially devastating.

Example: For whatever reason, only one actor can deliver resources to a construction zone at a time. So, if a project requires 100+ items, it will take a minimum of 20 deliveries to commence construction. This is an unavoidable problem that only gets more pronounced as the game goes on.

This unavoidable problem also creates an avoidable one that is just devastating: If you place 5 buildings, and only have the resources to build 4, the overwhelming likelihood is that NONE will be built. As all buildings are served by only one actor, all 5 buildings will be 1 trip short of completion. God help you if these 5 buildings were all resource gatherers; you just deadlocked yourself!

There are more needlessly inept things - NPC actors path through dangerous territory routinely. They refuse to self-care properly, causing larger problems like infections or mutations. The science unlocks are poorly documented and contain dozens of gotchas. There are hidden "features" in certain buildings that are wholly undocumented and exist only to catch you out. Just when I thought I was going to get something done by putting power generation online, my wind turbines simply exploded, leaving me with no spare parts to rebuild them. Apparently, this is just something wind turbines do every now and again. Go figure.


And then there is the content. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. Like so many games in this genre, Surviving the Aftermath puts down an interesting world and core, and then never goes far enough with the events, scripting, and actions to really commit to the bit. In a game where there is a lot of waiting, one could at least keep the player interested with lots of different quests, events, situations, or challenges. Unfortunately, there's so few of all of these that you will invariably start seeing duplicates of all of them before properly entering the mid game - where there is a lot more waiting around to do while your colony produces enough stuff to trade for the things it needs to progress. There really needed to be something like 50 quests, all of which could be categorized into challenge and reward classes that could be subtly picked out to help the player get past their next roadblock. Instead, there are 15 quests, at least a couple of bugs that can render them uncompletable, and they're chosen randomly. Their relevance to your situation is questionable.

Similarly, there really needed to be something like 20 random harmful events, all focusing on different fundamental building blocks of your colony. These should be then complemented by at least as many different major catastrophes, which specifically target multiple building blocks at once. Instead, there are 5 harmful events, 3 of which are completely ignorable, and 6 catastrophes, 3 of which are sad non-issues and only 1 of which is truly dangerous (the winter storm). It's really hard to get excited about the challenge coming your way when you've seen it 4 times already by mid game.

In case you're wondering, difficulty settings won't help - I played on the maximum difficulty, 200%, and still found the Magnetic Storm, the Meteor Shower, and the Pandemic all just annoying interruptions rather than actual challenges.

The final tl;dr is that Surviving the Aftermath feels more like surviving the boredom. If the developers had committed to their core game loop, this really could have been a great game. Instead of commitment, though, there's a dearth of core content and shoddy shortcuts where good base mechanics should be.

First to cleaify - I have 30 hours in game on Epic so my Steam play time isn't relevant.

Over recent years, there has been a marked rise in the number of both colony management and city builder simulators, all across the gaming market. Some of them were very well done, such as the colony survival sim, RimWorld (which has garnered a massive underground audience since its full release back in 2018), while others were a crashing bore.

Iceflake Studios has taken influences from both colony management and city builder games alike, and created an amalgam of both with their new title, Surviving the Aftermath. As you’d probably guess from the title, the game’s setting is a dangerous post-apocalyptic world where scattered groups of survivors are locked in a life or death struggle for survival.

You’ll manage a small group of colonists who will have to collect resources and build up their meager starting colony in order to survive. This means you’ll have to do things such as planning where to place structures in order to yield the best results for their efficiency. Food and water are, of course, of paramount importance at the start of the game. From there, you’ll move onto gathering wood and stone and many more resources that the game world provides.

Some of the more advanced resources that your colony will need to obtain are scattered around outside of your colony’s domain. In order to gain access to those, you’ll have to hire Specialists who are adept at acquiring them. This, in turn, opens the game up from your colony map to the more expansive overland map.

It’s nice that Surviving the Aftermath provides each of your colonists with a bit of personal flair including their own wants and needs. Some of them are also imbued with specific bonuses, such as being able to work faster, etc. The game strikes a good balance between having micro and macro management elements present.

In an apparent ode to another post-apocalyptic survival sim, Frostpunk, you’ll occasionally be presented with choices that have ethical dimensions to them. Making the right choices can spare the lives of your colonists, bolster your resources, and the like. On the other hand, making the wrong decisions will usually result in something really bad happening.

In all, Surviving the Aftermath is a highly engaging game that combines many of the best elements of both city building and colony management sims.

THE GOOD
- Addictive gameplay
- Lots of options to configure our game.
- Wide variety of constructions
- Interesting interplay between random catastrophes and resource usage

THE BAD
- Outdated combat system.
- Exploring the map is essential, but a complete chore

DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | GOOD | GREAT | AMAZING | MASTERPIECE

If you like this review, then please consider giving it a thumbs up. I've also reviewed other games that you might find interesting. If so please follow Top of the Chart.

Reviewed on: Win10 Home 64-bit, Intel i5-11600K, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB TUF, 32GB DDR4-3600 RAM, 2 x Kingston NV1 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, Internet Broadband 300/50 Mbit

the game has potential but it has some crippling flaws at the moment

- too much micro-management, the specialists twiddle their thumbs while the settlers are overloaded with work if they are not precisely asked to activate. and it is even more obvious when looters attack the gate, the specialists admire the spectacle, nothing more.

- the management of the specialists on the world map is even worse. the specialists have action points and are unable to follow an instruction to the end, they have to keep coming back to the map to spend their action points on a regular basis. it was enough to manage them in real time with notifications when they finished their task but no. i really don't understand why it was decided to manage them turn by turn when there is no "turn" in this game.
EDIT: and it's even worse once the vehicles are unlocked. it's impossible to go to resource sites by car, you have to stop a few kilometers away, get out of the car and use action points to enter the site (rather than managing it automatically) the specialists don't know how to act in a group, for example attacking a bastion of raiders. you have to take them out one by one and then have them attack one by one, action point by action point, it's really unnecessarily long.

- the specialties of the specialists are a joke. one would have imagined that a scientist would recover more knowledge from a source or a recuperator would recover more resources after a dig but no, they only do it a little faster. so no problem to send a brute to search a lab or to send an intellectual to collect mushrooms... one would also have thought for example that a recycler would have been able to give a boost to the recovery of resources at the colony but not.

- the interface is quickly overloaded and yet there is a cruel lack of information. there is no mini map for the colony and you have to go and look for resources one by one on the map, either through the specialists or by moving the work areas of the buildings. and nothing indicates on the buildings that their work zone is empty, it is indicated on their work zone, which if it is far away obliges to click on the buildings one by one to check that everything is in order. and of course, when the work zone is empty, the colonists turn their thumbs, rather than activating themselves by moving a little further away from the work zone for example

- the management of the activities of the settlers is strange, everything is managed at the level of the buildings, on this side there is no problem, but the transport of the resources is left to the carriers, i.e. the settlers without designated activity. the problem is that without a carrier, the colony is at a standstill and we cannot for example block a certain minimum number of carriers for example.
EDIT: and it's even worse with contamination. we spend our time checking the buildings one by one to make sure that the level of contamination is not too high. we have to check the toilets regularly, one by one, to activate their maintenance, and often have to do it via the specialists because the other settlers are busy or confine themselves to the limits of the work area of their assigned building. the work zones are really THE msiguided idea of the game. that the settlers work in priority around the established marker, ok, that makes sense. but that the workers stop at a limit doesn't make sense, especially for example for the repairers, who seem to abandon the damaged or contaminated buildings of the colony around them. i have the impression that it would almost be necessary to build a repair shop next to each WC, that doesn't make sense.

- last point VERY problematic: it is very difficult to find precise information in the colony's lists and impossible to sort them, let alone to be redirected to a particular settler or building. we are really very very far from the quality of the almanacs of the Tropico games (especialy 4th).

This game feels like a really good alpha or early beta - certainly not ready for release, but it's got a lot of potential and the tech is there. Unfortunately, this is supposedly the full release, and a lot of the obvious flaws should have been fixed by now.

Good:
* Pretty (if you like post-apocalyptic)
* Stable (no crashes or slowdowns)
* Colony-building and resource distribution promotes a very organic, messy, and natural town design, which fits the aesthetic very nicely, and gives it almost a 'puzzle game' aspect.
* Hilarious apocalypse mashup setting: plagues and radiation and extreme weather and meteor bombardment, all in the same week!

Bad:
* World map is terrible: lousy pathfinding, bad specialist interface, no ability to zoom out to see the whole map
* World map combat is really just comparing damage and health numbers, which is at least functional
* Colony real-time combat is uncontrollable garbage with tiny, unselectable characters
* No colony-wide job/priority management system
* No progression system for the 'hero' characters
* No colonist AI - if they get attacked by an animal, they just stand there and die, while twenty of their buddies (all armed with machine guns) walk past them on their way to work
* If you queue a building upgrade, it deletes the building immediately, even before gathering the materials. If the colony doesn't have the materials yet, it just deletes the building (why would it delete the old building at all? It's "upgrade" not "replace")
* Quests and events don't have meaningful choices or interesting outcomes. The same old woman wandering up to hand me medicine in five or ten different ways doesn't count as 'gameplay variety'.

If this game was still in alpha, I'd give it a big, enthusiastic thumbs up: it's a promising concept in a functioning game engine, with some legitimately good points. As a full release, it's a tedious mess of micromanagement and missing/failing systems.