Recent reviews by Coolguy

We beat Sony at their own scummy game using DEMOCRACY.

this game is amazing. have your kids play it. play it with your kids. play it yourself. just play it.

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.

In most cases, you expect post-release support like a definitive edition to make the game way better and fix all the major issues that thousands of hours of community playtesting has uncovered.

In this case, the Reanimated update made the game infinitely worse.

ok, ya'll don't understand.

there are BOXES.

and they need to be DELIVERED.

it's a pity that like 75% of my hours is just idling while i'm on calls for work but the game's good as hell anyway

It absolutely stuns me how badly this game is put together, even 2 years after I dropped it to put more time in the oven. The writing makes it clear nobody on staff knows the first thing about AIs, the story can't support completely normal play styles (like not shooting enemies), the logistics and economy system works worse than Tropico 1's, they STILL have unimplemented techs (Bioengineered Animals, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing) and immense amounts of the game amounts to waiting for crap to happen.

As much as I like Troy Baker and think he is an amazing guy, maybe next time you can reserve some budget for writers who know the subject matter and programmers that can actually finish the main game systems and hire someone cheaper.

To anyone worrying, the developers appear to have actually played video games in the last few decades. In addition to getting the art style and music right (the freaking Wu-Tang Clan rocks out here), they changed up controls and mechanics such that the game is even more fun than the old quarter-munchers. You remember how your cool special attacks used to eat your health? Not anymore! You have a special meter that you build up by attacking and taunting. I found myself actually using these attacks, it was insane.

The humor is also on point. April takes a picture of Foot Clan ninjas she's just finished throwing around like rag-dolls. Total news gremlin, she is perfect and I would change nothing about her. Top notch.

The game isn't done, and the developer has abandoned it. Complain all you want about it, they do not care. Do not buy this game.

Game is amazing. Haters vacate.