Surviving the Aftermath

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

I am a long time player of strategy games and this is by far one of m favorite! From the randomized ailments to the challenges each new play through will provide. It really is an all around great game!

StA is a decent game that unfortunately didn't reach its full potential, a little bit more love and actually good DLCs (although you can blame Paradox for their DLC strategy) and it could have been one of the greats alongside Frostpunk.
Worth your time but IMO not much replayability or longevity.

I enjoy the game..

UPDATE: I tried making this game work, started many maps, changed settings ... I cannot finish any map, towards the end the game crashes every 10 minutes and the thieves at Steam won't refund this garbage because I'm past the 2 hours gameplay. Well in the first 2 hours the crashing was not that bad, you can't know this game is bad in just the first 2 hours.
ORIGINAL: This game is the side effect of ChatGPT, I think they had early access or something. A bunch of dudes with no programming skills gather up, make a game with ChatGPT and launch it. Gameplay is decent, city manger combined with boardgame, atmospheric but it crashes at least once an hour, and you can only set the autosave once every 5 minutes. It needs once a minute. Play Surviving Mars instead, much less frustrating.

Great! It is hard for me to stay interested in a game. But this one keeps me hooked. Challenges you enough. I encountered some problems with the gameplay, because of this I had to restart a new colony. But overall it is great. Bought the DLC's as well. Would recommend rebirth, and new alliances if you're really into this.

This game could have been so good. Really I am torn on thumbs up or down because it had so much that could have been done with it but unfortunately, it just doesn't cut it. The 100% hardest part about this game is getting past the early parts of your run, after you can explore the overworld and get a steady flow of tech points the rest of the game is trivial and super easy, even when playing on the hardest difficulty.
5/10 overall is what I would give this game, could have been so much better. Tragically one dimensional

Yea its fun... nice and challenging so far. Once you figure out what to do it gets more exciting.

Sorry, but no. Shallow and one dimensional. Feels like they just increase difficulty as a lazy way to compensate for the lack of depth. Submitted for a refund.

This game is so boring. I keep trying to find a way to make this game not boring, but it's like, HOLY CRAP, Chat GPT made this game. This is what a game that was made by AI, that think they are living breathing humans, would make. I am almost angry at the fact that this game is so uninteresting. Like, I seriously wonder why someone along the way during the development process didn't put on their adult pants, roll up their sleeves, brush their teeth, and say "Hey, this shit is not fun and we need to correct course now, or forever be remembered as the worst thing to happen to humanity since David Bowie died." I hope that the devs read this, look themselves in the nearest mirror, and decide that they will leave a more positive legacy on the tapestry that is the human experience, and aim at making better games in the future. This game is frankly unacceptable as media, and to be fairly honest, it's irresponsible. The poor quality of this game really made me question my faith in humanity, and I feel like many others would say the same.

Post-apocalyptic "Banished". Same controls, the same premise, and the same lackluster end game.