I had first played this game a couple years ago. I mostly liked it, but never got around to reviewing it. When Paradox fired Colossal Order as the developer of Cities: Skylines II and assigned Iceflake Studios to it, I decided to go back to Surviving the Aftermath to see how well it holds up, and to give myself a better idea of whether Iceflake could handle Cities: Skylines. And since I still had all my original review notes from when I first played 2 or 3 years ago, I decided to go ahead and finish that review!

Adventures in the wasteland

Well for one thing, Surviving The Aftermath is leagues better than the other post-apocalyptic colony-builder that I played a few years ago, Atomic Societies. Aftermath largely succeeds in all the ways that Societies failed, and if given the choice between the 2, Surviving the Aftermath is the hands-down winner. About the only things that Atomic Societies does that I really missed in Surviving the Aftermath were the ability to pass laws and mandates based on various ethical dilemmas, and the ability to re-purpose old buildings and infrastructure and incorporate them into your village.

Random events will ask you to make moral or ethical decisions.

Aftermath doesn't do either of those things. but that isn't to say that Surviving the Aftermath doesn't contain plenty of ethical and moral quandaries. Surviving the Aftermath will throw various quests and random events at the player that may require you to make moral or ethical decisions. People might show up at your gate asking to be let in, and you'll have to decide whether they might pose a threat, or if your village has the resource and infrastructure capacity to support them. Other events may ask you to decide to help strangers in trouble, or to attack them and raid their supplies. All of these decisions can affect your resource supplies or influence your colony's morale.

Aftermath also puts a large emphasis on exploring and adventuring in the wasteland. In addition to managing your colony, there is an entire procedurally-generated overworld map separated into small regions. Each region may contain one or more locations that can be explored or scavenged for supplies. There may also be bandit camps for you to fight, and other villages for you to trade with. You can even set up your own distant outposts in the overworld, which can provide passive resource production, gather more colonists to add to your population, conduct research, or provide places for your adventurers to heal or drop off supplies.

It's almost like having an entire second game within the game! Trying to optimize your exploration and scavenging also creates some unique strategies, and can even influence the way that you build some infrastructure within your colony.

I was a bit disappointed that the overworld wasn't a bit more dynamic. Nobody else does anything in the overworld. Bandits from the camps don't attack or threaten your colony, any of your outposts, or any of your adventurers who happen to be in the area. Nor do they threaten or attack the NPC villages or any survivors who might be wandering around. Nope, they just sit in their camp waiting for you to attack them, which provides a small amount of supplies or silver.

Your specialists will scour the overworld for resources, and battle with bandits.

There's also no competition with the other NPC villages. They don't expand and build outposts of their own that might claim territory or resources that you want. So the whole overworld map feels very stale and static, and is basically just a giant menu for collecting supplies over time.

There's a bit in X-Men: Apocalypse in which Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, and Jubilee are walking out of a theater after seeing Return of the Jedi. Cyclops and Jubilee are arguing about whether Empire was better than Star Wars, and Jean remarks that "we can all agree that the third one is always the worst". This, of course is a jab at X-Men 3: the Last Stand, which I'm sure we can all agree is still the worst of the X-Men movies. It's also the first one that Bryan Singer didn't direct. But what might - or might not - be lost on Singer and his writers is the little bit of irony that Apocalypse is also the third movie in a series: the prequel series that started with X-Men: First Class.

X-2 and Days of Future Past remain the standout excellent films in this particular franchise. I don't think that Apocalypse ever degrades quite to the train wreck that was The Last Stand - not even close. But it does fall victim to some of the same traps that The Last Stand fell into: namely that it perhaps tried to fit too many stories into one, and doesn't tell any one of them particularly well. Much like The Last Stand, this one even starts to fall on its face when it goes into "Dark Pheonix" territory. Thankfully, they avoided turning that into a major plot thread though...

Perhaps the clumsiest storyline here was the Four Horsemen themselves. As per the comics, Apocalypse must recruit four powerful mutants, amplify their powers, and then use them as his own personal bodyguards. Other than Magneto, these characters' introductions and development all had to be rushed through. It seems a bit ironic that in these movies, it always seems to be the characters that we're most familiar with who get the most set-up and exposition; while the new characters receive little-or-no explanation or development. I never really bought into these horsemen though, or why they would be willing to help this obvious villain. I get that he tricked some of them with promises that he would "save humanity from itself", and he earned some loyalty with others by healing them and making them stronger, and that he used Magneto's grief and anger to his advantage, but the moment his plans started shifting away from "destroying corrupt systems and governments" towards outright "destroy the world", I just couldn't believe that none of the others batted an eye! Was there some kind of mind control going on as well? But he doesn't have mind control powers; that's why he wants Professor X.

Aside from Magneto, The Four Horsemen felt undeveloped and lacking in motivation.

Maybe if the movie could have established that Apocalypse had somehow brainwashed them, then I'd be more willing to accept it...