Surviving the Aftermath

I don't know. The game is technically not bad overall. It’s a bit of a strange mix of a city-building simulator, RTS, and Civilization. But overall, it’s just rather boring. The game has quests, but they’re pretty easy to complete. Your colonists die, but more always come to take their place. I’ve heard that evil colonists can infiltrate your colony or something like that, but I haven’t seen it myself. Relationships with other factions are regulated in a strange way, and so on.
The specialists, meaning the units under your direct control, are interesting, but the game doesn’t develop this idea. In my opinion, it would be much more engaging if they were heroes with specific stats, upgrades, and so on. Well, yes, these characters do have unique stats and traits, but they don’t develop beyond their initial parameters.
Game as a whole feels slow and uneventful. Any problems are resolved quite easily. It’s not a bad game if you enjoy city-building simulators and similar genres. But it doesn’t convey the feeling of survival in post-apocalyptic wastelands like the Fallout series. Change the models and names, and the game would be indistinguishable from an ordinary, bland medieval city simulator.

I've started using this simulator again to prepare myself for 2028.

I like the city building aspects, the different maps and the different quests. After a time the quests repeat with isn't so great but it takes a while for that to happen. Someone said it was terrible bc you had to contaminate your world to build, but I have found that you can keep that to a minimum. I like playing and replaying the game. The continuous winter scenario has consistently kicked my butt so there is always challenge there.

Surviving the Aftermath : 6/10 - Okay

I enjoy many of Paradox’s titles: Cities Skylines was a superb city builder with plenty of modding potential, despite its overwhelming amount of DLCs that arguably could’ve been included at launch. Europa Universalis IV (EU4) is an addictive strategy simulation with countless potential playthroughs and the ability to create dynasties. Meanwhile, Crusader Kings II (CKII) and Crusader Kings III (CKIII) dive deeper into dynasty simulations with rich character development, and Surviving Mars offers a fun and imaginative take on the future of Mars colonization.
Surviving the Aftermath is a title I purchased a while ago during a sale, and I was genuinely excited to try it out. The concept of post-apocalypse survival intrigues me, as it opens up opportunities for engaging scenarios and creative control.
However, this title is skippable. It was released around the same time as Endzone: A World Apart, which is a superior game, albeit only slightly. The two games are very similar, especially regarding building and resource collection mechanics. That said, the world map mechanic in Surviving the Aftermath is a fun distraction from the building management, allowing you to find resources and science points for your camp.
The art style is great and fits the world built here, reminding me of Frostpunk. The graphics are good overall; the animals and wildlife look nice. However, the human models are goofy and awkward, resembling stiff board game pieces. Despite this, the map overview is visually appealing.
Let’s talk about the combat—it is simple and easy to learn. It’s nothing special and isn’t particularly thrilling. You start off by fighting small threats like rats and giant insects, but what doesn’t make sense is how they start fires and burn your buildings down. I understand human enemies doing so, but animal enemies? It feels unrealistic and takes away from the immersion. The combat could’ve used more development.
When using the map, the UI can get in the way, making it irritating to control where your scouts go. The “return to colony” button, in particular, could be smaller. The inclusion of main missions that guide you through the story adds more depth, and the story itself could be interesting in a better game. However, the main gameplay might not be engaging enough to keep your interest throughout the entire story or motivate you to complete all the achievements.
The challenge mode offers a different way to play, making survival harder—a nice bonus. Still, if you’ve played Endzone, you might not find much incentive to invest time in this game. While strategy and survival game enthusiasts could spend over 10 hours plus on it, I lost interest rather quickly. It often feels like a watered-down Endzone.

Overall, Surviving the Aftermath is a fun distraction, but it's not a game I will spend a lot of hours on. I'm sure many people will enjoy it and find it to be a great experience, but I found it boring, perhaps because I’ve played Endzone before. If you're a diehard fan of strategy, city-building, or simulation games, you could definitely find some enjoyment in it.

Beat the game on the hardest settings. Too easy and made for babies.

IT DOESNT WORK ANYMORE DO NOT PURCHASE

Disappointed with the ending but overall a great game

I can't recommend this game. Bugs maybe are not that big, but they do appeare. The problem with this game is logic and how you play it, what it inform you about and what it will never mention.

Logic of building and game play: Upgrading have no sens, some building we can upgrade, some not even when it is obvious to be able. Some building are bigger than worst version, and some are smaller (talking about houses).
How you play: game play is messy, some exploration will be triger with selection, some you need to go to map and do it your self. Some mission will remove othere point of intrest from map, so second group can end up with nothing after figth. some mission are badly translated and just brain dead. The finnal mission is worst. Garage is stupid you have to wait for your car to be fix, and you can't do it before.

Information from game:
You will get a lot of no cloths, but it will not inform you abaut why your workers don't do anything. The no cloths alert will spam like hell, tools to.
Every one is hurt all the time, sometimes for no good reason. Ofc it is imposible to turn off information in alert that you don't give a dime about.

Building:
upgreade of house to have internal heating is stupid, because othere building have non of them so you will have to heat everythin. Population will not live in house close to work, you are doomed. some times people will stroll slowly when every one is runing(and he had job to do, he was just lazy AI).
Wherhouses are badly thought out, wherhouse that can get every thing can't ask for everyting. No option in building to build multiple things.
Reaserch is lazy and badly made.
Eletricy is anoying.
For your people to kill them self you have to build bush to gate dangerus elements, no multi/selections remove elements(the one with shift don't count).
Ranch have slider that I have no ide wht do.
Information abaut production are mishmatch betwen what surpluss you get and what you have in wherehouse(no good logic here).
Some building seems to do whey to little for number people it need.

If I saw that they try to fix game it would be positive but with no work anymore it will be negative.

love this game. what more can i say.

you ever see "those" mobile game ads? this is ACTUALLY that game.

This is a mediocre city builder bootstrapped to a survival rpg, set in a nebulous post-apocalypse that is so generic the game is not sure which apocalyptic aftermath you're supposed to be surviving. The moon broke, the zerg hyperevolutionary virus (by a less copyrighted name) took over, the nukes were dropped, all of the wars were fought, everyone was eradicated by mysterious plagues, everything electronic exploded, and a nebulous evil is murderously enraged by the fact that your ragtag village of misfits, specifically, isn't dead yet. And no one knows if this all happened a month before the beginning of the game, a year, or a century.

Once you get past the complete lack of any consistent theming (besides the color brown, or blue if you have the moondust-cocaine expansion), the mechanics are straightforward, and while the game is balanced well around multiple different paths to food security and survival, they all consist of "research the building you need, build one of it, and then check after a bit to see if you need another."

As for the overworld map, the randomly generated nature of it just makes it more bland. You are specifically time-restricted (instead of resource or population restricted) in when your 'heroes' can act, and on hiring more. And the UI in the overworld and colony both are overly cluttered, and disorganized in how areas of the game work.

Some buildings can be upgraded, some can't, sometimes you can just build the upgraded building to start with, and sometimes you can't. Sometimes the 'upgrade' of a building requires you to tear it down and build its replacement in the same place, sometimes the 'upgraded' building has a different footprint so you need to reorganize your buildings anyways. There is no rhyme or reason to any of the systems between each other, or internally.

You cannot speed up your research speed. This seems reasonable at first, until you get into the mid game with science pouring out of your ears and you can't spend it faster than you gather it (about 280/day was enough to get infinite science), and each technology costs 2-3 days of research, while you can only queue 1 at a time. And since you can't cancel your research either, you are left stuck holding the bag if events would encourage you to research something to protect your people rather than finish unlocking a new resource.

This may come across as disorganized complaining, but when I try to organize my frustrations with the game into individual chunks, each one just bleeds into the next or some other roadblock or frustration like only some points of interest on the map disappearing after you finish them, while still impeding movement for everyone.

For all these flaws, however, the game doesn't feel poorly designed, so much as being victim of 'too many hands stirring the pot' and not having a cohesive creative vision and direction it wanted to deliver on, ultimately delivering none.

TLDR: if you think you want to play this game, go play Homeseek for the difficult post-apocalypse city building (or frostpunk), or Punk Wars (for all its flaws) for a more civilization-esque rpg + city builder, or play more Surviving Mars.

This is like an leveled up version of rebuild or that game in cellphone apps, its good in someway. Im still trying out the game, so i cant recommend it yet

ADADADA

awesome game.

Mixed feelings. Poorly optimized and the game isn't polished as it should, but there's a lot of content and the pacing is okay from the beginning to the end, so you'll always have something to do and it can be challenging... But I don't see myself coming back to the game, poor replayability and there's not a lot of space for you to express your creativity.
Overall, it feels like a decent time filler. 6/10
Would instead recommend Surviving Mars (same devs but fantastic game, absolute gem of a game), Frostpunk and Stranded Alien Dawn.

I was checking in on this game and noticed $60 of DLC and the game has not even really been finished.

Premature launch. Many bugs still remain. Villagers just wander around in circles because the path finding AI is broken. Game seems to be abandoned so the fixes are never coming! 2 years since any updates.

Great game except for the Moon DLC

I likeit so far

it s still raw

Game is bit clunky, tedious and not fun.

A pretty decent survival city builder. It would have been excellent if it had a few quality of life updates but it stands strong even without it. The following is more for the dev than gamers:
- The outpost scavenging areas should really only provide ingredients and not products. It pretty much breaks the economy of products (which I thought was pretty good) when you dont need to craft tools or clothes because before you get the tech to produce the highest level tools you already get enough from scavenging. There are several production facilities I never ended up using because my outposts provided more than enough for me.
- The disasters were pretty good although it would have been great if they could be separately configured during Custom game. I personally liked struggling through all the disasters except the pollution one. Because of that I ended up setting the duration to short which nerfed the others as well.
- A simple indicator on top of buildings which shows their employee slots (occupied and empty) would make things so much easier. I found myself searching for buildings to invest people in when I suddenly get an influx. The "assign when available" function was never useful since the "wrong" buildings would always grab the new people and not the ones you want. So it was only useful for when you only had 1 building that needed more people.
- The pressure from consumables and trying to scour the world finding more until you can produce them was very good. Nothing to complain here, in fact I found it really good.
- There is no way to tell your people which items they should and shouldnt use. This was frustrating. VERY. VERY. MUCH. I had guards running around with hunting rifles when I had automatic rifles in stock. This resulted in them dying in a bad luck raid. Also luxury goods would just get consumed even though you really need to use them for trade when you are still not prosperous, but those stupid colonists dont care!
- The normal rate of food consumption was somewhat low for the balance of the game imho.
- I liked the tech tree, but it mostly didnt make sense how one needs to research certain techs to get to others when they dont even relate whatsoever. I personally think the research cost could have been used to divide the tech into tiers to prevent one from jumping too far ahead. Similar tech could also be linked requiring you to first research it before getting higher level version.
- Loved the cars and how it worked! In the beginning it is novelty but becomes a requirement later. The ui of the car sucked though (the bottom window that would pop up and disappear on the cycle of the moon). I would sugget locking the car ui when selecting the car, same with the explorers. When selecting someone on the world map, just bring up that scaredy cat ui and lock it in.
- I found the defense against raiders frustrating. Why would the raiders be untargettable when I have 20 guys standing with auto-rifles ready to pump them full of lead?!?! The normal attacks was pretty cool and some times deadly, but for some reason the main defense was lackluster and not enjoyable. Instead of doing the special defense thing the bandits should just have spawned in front of the gate like they do sometimes in events.
- Why oh why cant I build the new and improved building immediately??!?!?! It was seriously annoying always building the crappy version and then afterwards coming back and upgrading it... I mean really. Just put a little "up arrow" in the building menu so that I can select the upgraded version from the get go.
- Removing someone from the building would make them drop their cargo and guess what.. it just explodes and go poof. Not ideal, especially since sometimes clicking on employee 1 would remove employee 2 or 3 instead.

There are a few more but I will stop here. All in all I think the base game is pretty good and I enjoyed it despite the occasional irritants.

Wait for a sale. Game is reasonably fun, but buy Surviving Mars instead.

Worker AI is STILL bugged as far as taking care of their needs are concerned. I look at reddit and steam threads from years ago with the die-off problems (at least one of which the devs acknowledged the problem and said they were looking into it), and yet I have the same problems today. I guess there are stupid gamey work-arounds to deal with the problem, but they are unintuitive and not mentioned anywhere in the game.
Otherwise pretty fun, I guess, when your guys aren't killing themselves of hunger or disease just because they are too busy to pick up food and medicine that's right next to their houses.

is good

This review is more of a warning to those who want to purchase this game just because of the screenshots or gameplay description on this page.

So, pros:
1. not bad music, visual component (although the same illustrations get wildly boring after a while)
2. interesting ideas that could potentially make this game a success
Cons:
1. an awful lot of bugs at launch, this clearly hindered sales and eventually led to the game being abandoned by the devs, although most of the initial game-breaking bugs were fixed
2. balance problems: the developers added a lot of things to the game, but not all of them should be used at all or would be interesting to use because of outright failures in game design
3. almost complete lack of replayability, uninteresting late game except for achievement hunting
4. all DLC (except for New Alliances) are half-assed and rather hinder the game than vice versa.

TLDR: if you are a professional player of city-building or economic management games and want to diversify your diet - you can buy it at a discount on sale (just don't take DLC). If you just want to play a post-apocalyptic city-building game - better look for better options.

Can be difficult at times but fleshed out and an immersive experience. Recommended for those who like post-apocalyptic city building and management.

this game and most of paradox games are now slop, they focus on expansions/DLC dont buy into this companies like this need to learn where it hurts more their pocket.

TL;DR game is boring i only played it once and never came back.

Conceptually cool, but the implementation, particularly with the DLCs in play, is very rough. I want to like it, but the amount of hoops to jump through to have any kind of fun is ridiculous.

Good Game

не стоит ждать чегото огого, но со всеми диэлси хорошая

It’s not terrible, but it feels like a cumbersome blend of familiar and new ideas that somehow isn’t as exciting as similar games.

3/10

This game barely held my attention. It makes me think of a mobile app. Generic kind of time waster. There really isn't much to do, and I feel like I spend large amounts of time on 3x speed waiting for next day to begin. The tech tree doesn't seem impactful and seems improperly balanced/ordered. It feels like there's just endless obstacles trying to maximize game time and minimize development time.

I don't think I was deceived by the promotional video. I think the plot is interesting, and the story is slow to advance. City management seems to lack a lot of quality of life. I guess people have different ideas about what makes a game a game.

I guess I was expecting more of a puzzle, than trying to build up resources for random disasters. The game just feels really really dry. But if that's your thing, than this game is for you. I personally prefer more engineering puzzle kind of games.

I really wanted to like Surviving the Aftermath. Sadly, I can't recommend it.

(Note: this is the game with all DLC.)

StA has a lot of good things going for it. The UI and graphics are fine. The actual city-building part of it is pretty good; it has just enough familiar things that builds on solid stuff with just enough new stuff to keep things interesting. It has a "world map" system that's pretty cool, and the main questline goes in some pretty interesting ways that integrate nicely with the gameplay.

In fact, the game is cool enough that I *really* want to recommend it.

But there are two main reasons why I can't.

The first is the worker assignment system. In the game, you build various buildings, and your colonists are automatically assigned to work; the game puts everyone at the best position they're suited for. In theory this is great; you don't have to micromanage getting the best output.

The problem is that sometimes you *need* a worker in a specific slot, and there's no practical way to get them there.

In the early and mid game, it's relatively rare to get new people, so you often have to deal with worker shortages. However, that often means many of your buildings that you need to progress will sit empty, and you just have to wait for stragglers to come in (or your specialists to find a good place to get settlers from). If, say, for some reason your lumber mill is vacant and you need lumber, there's not much you can do until you get more people, and that could easily take several in-game cycles.

The problem is is that....life goes on. While you can't get wood, you can't build X, and if you can't build X you can't feed or house or cure your workers...so they die, or starve, and then you have even *more* worker shortages, and so on. Add to that the special events and your colony can *very easily* fall apart simply because you couldn't assign a worker to a lumber mill. It's not uncommon during a pandemic to have one clinician, who then promptly dies, and no one to administer the sick. (And then 2/3rd of your colony dies.) You can't just build more medical tents to meet the demand--well, you *can*, but they'll just sit uselessly empty.

And all of this is on a feedback loop that you have no control over. If 2/3rds of your colony dies, bodies pile up, because there's no one to build new Dead Body Tents and no one to carry the bodies. So the remaining people become unhappy and leave. Which means the next pandemic is even worse. And so on.

Now, one caveat--technically, you *can* fill that slot. You just need to painstakingly go through and fire each and every worker in your colony until the "right" one gets optimally assigned to the place you need. That's bad, because you're really just trading one problem for another, but it's worse than that because even by mid game you could easily have dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of slots you have to manually go through and "fire" to get what you need. There's no easy way to do it. It's just makework tedium to solve a very real and practical problem.

The worst thing about all this is that they have a system already! There's a "build priority" system where you click on a new building and workers prioritize it. They could introduce the exact same thing for workers. Sure, it's a little more complicated (you can only have one "priority" at a time, so what happens when you need a new priority?) but it shouldn't be *that* hard to implement. A lot of colony sims have managed to have a workforce priority system that works fine; no reason they can't here.

I hate this *so bad* that if they were to actually introduce it, my review would probably switch to "recommend".

The other problem is scale. A lot of things in the game just don't seem like they've thought about the scale of it. Electronics and Components (and, to a lesser extent, Parts) are in VERY high demand in the late game, but there's not a whole lot on the World Map to scavenge, they don't show up as "permanent" scavenge bits, and so very quickly you run out of ways to find them. You can, however, build them in Electronics Factories and Mechanic Shops...but they are *so slow* and with such low worker slots it becomes a huge bottleneck very quickly. Even buying the finished products from other factions provides a small percentage that you ultimately need. And since Electronic Factories require Power, and Power requires--you guessed it--Electronics and Components, you very quickly hit a plateau where you have to very slowly and painstakingly wait for a bottleneck that, by definition, will never clear.

And outposts on the world map are helpful in clearing this out, except that Outposts can be taken over by hostile forces. Unfortunately, many "good" slots are far away from your colony, so you have to devote a significant amount of time and resources defending them. There's no way to prevent it; while you can clear out some hostile territories to reduce the frequency a little bit, even a fully clear area gets overtaken far too often. And there's no way to otherwise prevent it; you can't rely on a nearby ally to help. You can't spend resources to shore up defenses. It just...happens. The end result is that many colonies are inoperable a third of the time, and you have to hire 4-6 Fighters for the express purpose of clearing out these hostile forces for outposts that you *need* to progress. The game gives you plenty of options, but then takes them away. And since you're capped at 10 Specialists, you're effectively capped at the number of outposts you can reasonably have.

Scale is more of an annoyance, but it makes games hit *so many* bottlenecks it stops being fun and starts being tedious. It's not uncommon for a building that requires X to make more X gets damaged, and then you can't get X because the X building won't work. It's like starting over from scratch ever few days because an event you have no control over happened, and you can't become more prepared because there are so many bottlenecks that slow you down you can never get to that point.

The main problem is that games should be full of interesting choices. In theory, this game should have them--it's post-apocalyptic, so there *should* be bad events and hard decisions. But the problem with the game is that you can't effectively deal with any of them. You hit so many resource bottlenecks it's hard to prepare for anything, and random events happen frequently enough that the game is two steps forward, three steps back, constantly, because any time you have even a small advantage it gets wiped away.

I've finished the game, but despite the questline being surprisingly fun and interesting, I couldn't really enjoy any of it. A last-minute bottleneck/worker shortage dropped my population from 350 down to 40 for a random something I couldn't prepare for or prevent, and I limped along to the finish line. I was more relieved that the game was over than I had actually won.

Solving the worker assignment issue would go a long way in solving the scale issue, but even the scale issue could easily be solved by, say, adding more worker slots in higher-end buildings.

As it stands, though, this game is one of the least satisfying games I've played in a long time.

4/10 Bad, but still has its uses.
The tutorial sucks, you need to find a guide to actually play it. But if you do, you get a generic RTS timewaster. Good for when you want something like that and don't care for quality or bugs.

Very good so far. Kind of Against the Storm + Surviving Mars. So far I kind of prefer it to AtS since there's not as much pressure. Tech tree is surprisingly large. Only like 30% through the game but better than I expected so far.

keep at it, the game is fun, challenging and makes you think.^^

Honestly preforming open heart surgery while being blind folded is easier than learning how to play this game. What is up with the winters in his game? The only reason most of my citizens died is because this game failed to explain its most basic mechanics, seriously what do I do with the heating, I’m sorry this game gets a 2/10 for me

I got this on a discount and it's the best 10 bucks I have spent in a long time.

I don't have any of the DLCs or other add-ons, so maybe it gets better, but base game seems a bit tedious.

Very good controller support for a builder game

I truly enjoyed the game. Loved the story and through all the difficulties reaching for the better life for my little toons in the game.
Can YOU survive the aftermath?

Entertaining game

Very nice! :)

it is fun

Great management game

Would love to recommend this but it's "pause it to deal with another Blighted Queen" the game. If your going spawn enemies one after the after relentlessly, just add a button to select all the guards at once. Otherwise it makes the whole game feel like a grind

yes ,its a pretty good game, mycars keep disappeaaring when i bring my specials back to home ??? also i have a broken down car full of other supplies i cant get? when another village asks me to build them a school or housing I can't seem to find how to do that for them i have outpost built in my home? if anyone can help with these things itd make travelling to further locations better thus game would be much better, otherwise its a good game

Maksoin pelistä about 7 egee eli ei hinnalla pilattu mutta! Jotenkin tuntuu, että pelissä on bugeja eikä sitä ole ihan täysin loppuun mietitty. Esimerkiksi ohjeista ei löydy miksi world map:ssä käytettävät actio pointit menee aina kaikki kun välimatkaan tulee valkoisia renkuloitai lmaisemaan jotain numero sarjaa??? Valkoiset renkaan tulee kun vaihtaa laatalta toiselle. Keltainen renkula syö aina yhden action pointin.

Musat on hyvät mutta pelin edetessä alkaa sellanen nappi kauppa, että huh huh ja tämä vain koska elektroniikan tuottaminen ei ole täysin mahdollista eikä esimerkiksi jopa kolmella eri muulla yhteisöllä eikä koko world mapissa ole saatavilla "rare metal" resurssia joka käytännössä estää kaupungin sähköistämisen jos tekee yhdenkin vriheen ja rakentaa väärin tai purkaa rakennuksen jossa metallit olivat eli aika anteeksi antamaton vaikka pelaan kaikista helpoimmalla!

Yksi erittäin ärsyttävä asia pelissä on sähkönpuute ja siitä johtuva koeniden käynnistyminen itsestään. Vaikka sähkö tarvitsevalla laitoksella tai koneella ei oli työntekijää joka sitä yirttää käynnistellä kokoajan niin laitteen ne vaan itekseen käynnistelee itseään josta tulee erittäin nopeasti vitutta ääni efekti. Tämä on selvä bugi sillä jos laitosta tai konetta ei käytä ketään niin sen ei tarvitse itsestään käynnistellä ja tuottaa tätä ärsyttävää ääntä. Toisekseen myös voisi olla loogista olla käynnistelemättä laitoksia vaikka siellä on ihmisiä kun sähkö äei ole tarpeeksi!!!!!!!!!!!!

Peli ei myöskään ilmoita kun rakennukset ovat tulessa vaan sinun pitää kokoajan heti katastrofin jälkeen kattoa kaikki rakennukset läpi mikä unohtuu siinä vaiheessa kun rakennuksia alkaa olemaan jonkin verran pitkin karttaa. Myöskin mini mapin puuttuminen ja kaikkien specialistien yhteen kerääminen näppärästi oikein loistaa puutteillaan. Nämä helpottaisivat huomattavasti pelaamista mutta ei. Sen sijaan sinun on pakko muistaa jokainen rakennus missä ne ovat ja jatkuvast iseurailla tilannetta liikuttelemalla karttaa eesun taasun. Erittäin ärsyttävää ja turhaa.

BUGEJA:


- Vaikka populaatiota tulee lisää niin jengi ei mene töihin ja työpaikat ei täyty.
- Asuntoja on tyhjillään mutta silti jengi valittaa, että ei ole asuntoa.
- World mapissa ei voi hyökätä kaikilla spesialisteilla yhden kimppuun sillä siinä on jokin raja joka estää jos spesialistit eivät pääse vierekkäin. Tämä taas estää tehokkaan vihollisen tappamisen world mapissa.


Pelin oppii noin 10 tunnissa eli aikaa menee. pisteitä pelille annan 3/5 kuitenkin eli kyllä tää ihan ok on kun eka repii hiuksia päästä sen 10 tuntia kun pelin ohjeet eivät kaikkea kerro ja peli mekaniikka ei ole täysin tiedossa joka osaltaan estää kaupaungin optimaalisen rakentamisen.

great