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.
Post-apocalypse apocalypse?
One other thing that is done primarily in the overworld is a series of quests, including the game's main story quest. These quests help keep the game focused and goal-oriented. They require you to send adventurers to particular locations on the map that spawn after you meet certain milestones. Once you make sufficient progress in these quests, the final, overarching quest will begin, which requires you to build a massive underground bunker in your colony. This bunker will be built in multiple phases, and will require you to use or collect almost all different types of resources in the game in order to build and stock the bunker.
So apparently, even though this is a post-apocalyptic game, there is still a second apocalypse looming that requires having another bunker! Well, I guess that tracks with the brutal frequency with which in-game disasters occur. The world of Surviving The Aftermath is, for sure, a brutal one!
There is a main story quest which requires building a bunker to survive another apocalypse.
As far as I've seen, there is no time limit in which to build this bunker, so you're free to continue playing in sandbox style for pretty much as long as you like. The only risk that you run is that if you dally too long and clear out all the overworld resources, it might be difficult (or maybe even impossible?) to collect all the resources you'll need to actually finish the bunker. You'll be stuck having to wait for the right resources to be offered up by other villages in trade, or for them to be offered as rewards from random events.
Ready or not! Here comes the apocalypse!
As I just mentioned, this game's world can be brutal and cruel. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the earliest hours of the game.
Disasters will hit you right from the start, and there is no buffer period to allow you to get your colony established -- or even to get through the tutorial and get a feel for how the game even works. A single unlucky disaster, or a chain of mild-to-moderate disasters can completely and irreparably ruin your game if it happens early enough. They are completely random, and even though the game does give you a warning that a disaster is about to happen, there is still rarely enough time to meaningfully react to them. This is especially true early on, when you have very limited resources, and hardly any spare colonists available to do random resource-collection, construction, or repairs.
In one instance, I had a major radioactive fallout disaster happen just five days into the game. Every one of my dozen or so villagers got radiation sickness, and after the fallout had ended, they all started dying from the radiation sickness one-by-one. I lost almost half my population due to this one disaster, and had no way of growing my population, because I was still a long way away from being able to research the technology to create new Outposts to recruit new villagers.
The game wastes no time in throwing major disasters at the player -- ready or not!
I recommend having multiple Medical Tents built early to treat sick and injured colonists.
The fallout came before I had finished building the entrance gate, which meant I wasn't able to send my scouts out into the world to find Iodine tablets. I couldn't build Medical Tents fast enough to treat all the people sick with radiation poisoning. In fact, I plopped a new Medical Tent down as soon as the warning notification popped up, but the tent was not completed until after the fallout had passed, due to how slowly the plastic collectors work. Maybe if I had gone back to a day 1 save, and built multiple Medical Tents right from the start, I might have been able to successfully prevent any of my villagers from dying. But even if I did that, there would be no guarantee that the fallout event would happen again, because the events are randomized every time the game is re-loaded.
My advice: build at least 2 or 3 Medical Tents in the early days of the game. You don't have to activate or staff them all right away, but it's good to have them available for when things like radiation sickness or a pandemic happen. There is a more efficient Field Hospital in the tech tree, but it's deep, and will take hours of play to unlock and build.
Smaller disasters can strike in quick succession.
In other instances, I would have building constantly being damaged by meteor showers. All my crops would get eaten by vermin, leading to starvation. A freezing winter will shut down all my water collectors and cause dehydration. And so forth. It's just one thing after another, with no opportunity for the player to really get yourself established. And all of this would be fine if it just happened a little bit later into the game. But the fact that it can (and does) all happen before you can even build your Entrance Gate is just ridiculous! In all the games I've played, I don't think I have ever gotten my Entrance Gate built before the first major disaster happens.
There also is no in-game calendar to give the player any clue when particular disasters might be more likely. There's no summer, in which heat waves are more likely, and no winter, in which freezes are more likely. A rando disaster just happens about every in-game week or so, and it could be anything. I think that this is supposed to be explained by the apocalyptic event de-stabilizing the Earth's climate, so that weather and seasons are un-predictable. Even so, after coming off of games like Settlement Survival, which forecasts upcoming events and disasters a year in advance, I was very put-off by the lack of foresight that Surviving the Aftermath gave me.
Add to this the fact that the early game is really tedious. Every game, you have to set up the same basic infrastructure, research the same basic technologies, and deal with all these damn rapid-fire disasters.
An ideology selection in setup can grant access to unique technologies or abilities.
There is some variance depending on your game settings. There are different setup options that will influence the resource scarcity, fertility, and also an "ideology" option which can give you access to unique technologies or abilities, depending on which ideology you choose.
Even so, I was still playing on a moderate difficulty setting, and I still found the frequent early disasters overbearing, and the early colony-building a bit tedious. I can only assume that the harder difficulties are even more obnoxious and tedious. But hey, if you're a glutton for punishment, then go for it! I guess this is all in keeping with the game's theme. So I can't fault the developers too much in that regard.
Back to the colony
When you aren't dealing with radioactive storms or meteors falling from the sky, or navigating your specialists in adventures through the wasteland, the actual bulk of the game will be spent placing and upgrading buildings on a grid-based map. I'm always surprised to see a city-builder or colony-builder still use a grid like this -- especially a grid in which diagonals aren't even allowed. And it's always a nagging annoyance. It's even more annoying when buildings have circular areas of effect, because it makes it hard to tell whether a given building or set of buildings will fit within that circle.
Grid aside, the actual village-building works mostly well. The logistics can feel a bit slow sometimes, but that might be due to extractors being too far from the resources they are extracting. Perhaps I need to get in the habit of building new extractors at the edge of town to harvest more distant resources?
I also have some frustrations with the U.I., especially where worker management is concerned. Workers have a frustrating habit of just disappearing when I try to re-assign them. If there are jobs open somewhere, they will automatically be assigned to an arbitrary job instead of going into the default labor pool. But sometimes, they seem to just disappear, and I can't find where they went. I'm assuming that they move to some other building somewhere that requires an additional worker, but even if I start clicking around all the buildings that support multiple workers, I sometimes can't find where an un-assigned worker went.
I'm also consistently annoyed that I can't view the full list of stats for my specialists that are out in the wasteland. So if I recruit a new specialist, and want to compare his or her stats against an existing specialist of the same type, I can't. I might have to wait for that old specialist to return to the colony.
There is a wide variety of buildings, including insect farms.
Other than these sorts of nagging U.I. annoyances, the experience is pretty smooth. The game has a pretty deep technology tree that unlocks a robust variety of buildings and infrastructure. Pretty much everything I would expect to see in such a game is present, and then some. There's extractors for scavenging materials from old-world buildings. There's multiple types and densities of housing which have different pros and cons, including temporary housing for new immigrants. There's different buildings for collecting underground water versus surface water. There's farm fields, which must be placed in areas of the map that have moderate or high fertility. There's ranch buildings for livestock, including being able to grow insects as livestock. I feel like the insect farms should be earlier in the tech tree, since farming insects for foods seems like it should be more of an early-game act of desperation. But whatever.
As you get deeper into the tree, you can even unlock things like solar panels, windmills, batteries, weaponsmiths, more sophisticated industry, and the ability to clear piles of toxic or radioactive waste.
The tech tree is divided into multiple categories, so you can choose to specialize in a specific tree if you wish. However, you might only be able to go so deep before you need to diversify into other trees to unlock prerequisites. For example, if a building requires electricity, you'll have to divert to the "Infrastructure" tree to research solar panels. Or a building might require concrete as a building material, which will require you to dive a good chunk into the "Resources" tree to unlock the Concrete Scavenger. Or maybe you're able to bypass this prerequisite by finding concrete on the overworld, or trading other resources to NPC villages in exchange for all the concrete you need. You're on your own for electricity though, since that cannot be scavenged from the overworld or acquired through trade.
Concrete is a major blocker for many advanced buildings.
There's a lot to consider when planning your build order and path through the tech tree (once you make it past the basic necessities). There's no single, optimal path.
Useless specialists
I wish that specialists could do more things within the colony. They can harvest berries and wood, but not plastic, metal, or concrete. The mouse cursor makes it appear that they can help build or repair structures, but every time I try to ask them to do this, the just walk over to the structure and stand around doing nothing. The only other thing they can do is fight wild animals or enemies that make it into the colony, but they can't apparently fight bandits who attack the front gate.
This means that if a specialist is in the colony waiting to heal before going back out on a mission, there's very few (if any) useful things they can do, and there's basically no point in keeping a specialist in the colony long-term. This is especially true in the later half of the game, when there's no berries or wood left to harvest in the colony map, when repairing is handled by maintenance workers, and when your perimeter is secured by guard towers.
I wish specialists had more utility within the colony. They can't even defend the gate from attack.
It would be nice if each type of specialist had some special job they could do in the colony. Maybe scavengers can harvest advanced material deposits like plastic, metal, and concrete? Maybe scientists could work in hospitals to more effectively heal people, or in schools to more effectively teach children? Maybe fighters could brawl in the Fighting Pit for entertainment, or just provide passive security that makes people feel happier? And maybe scouts can reveal the map or more efficiently hunt wild animals? Let them do something in the colony! They spend enough of their time within the colony, that I hate that they just stand around doing nothing.
A thriving colony
Between resolving quests on the overworld, scavenging, researching, and building up your colony, there is always something to do, and always some new achievement just over the horizon. It can be easy to get sucked up into the game for hours because you just want to build that next piece of infrastructure, but also recruit a new settler to create an important outpost, and [oh crap!] there's a disaster that I want to play through.
Completing the campaign will require building and maintaining a stable colony for an extended period of time.
The main quest forces the player to wait for a long time while long-term research projects are completed. These projects can take in-game weeks or months, depending on how many resources you devote to them. In any case, having to sit and wait for these researches to complete forces the player to build a colony that is legitimately stable and sustainable for a long period of time. You can't just bee-line to completing the main quest objective and winning the game with a colony that is on the verge of collapse. You'll have to to be able to survive the weeks of research, while also continuing to contend with catastrophes, disease, and raiders.
Even if your colony is already stable, the simple process of having to wait for the main quest to complete will still force you to have to continue building and expanding and could force you back out of equilibrium. You will still likely need to build more housing for any new colonists who arrive, or for children who are born and grow up. And those new colonists will need more food and water. And the buildings that provide that food and water will likely need electricity. And they'll need an increased stockpile of clothes, tools, and medicines, which may mean plopping more of those crafting buildings, which may mean you need more raw resources. And so on.
So yeah, Surviving the Aftermath provides a compelling and addictive cycle of scavenging and building. I wish it weren't constrained to a grid, and it certainly has its share of U.I. issues. If you like colony-building games along the lines of Banished, or Manor Lords, but you want something outside of the medieval theme, then Surviving The Aftermath is by far the best post-apocalyptic colony-builder that I've played.
It's a shame these old ruins cannot be re-purposed or re-used in any way.
Now, the big question is: can this studio handle the Cities: Skylines series? I honestly don't know. A modern, sandbox city-builder is a very different game than a survival colony-builder. But if Iceflake does take some of Surviving The Aftermath's design principles, and apply them to Cities: Skylines, there could be some interesting results. For example, I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of regional overworld for Cities: Skyliens that would allow the player to build connections directly to other cities, have people commute between cities, and trade resources and services. That's a feature that's been in games like SimCity 4 and Cities XL, and is something that I've always felt is absent from Skylines.
Iceflake seems to be starting their tenure with Cities: Skylines II by trying to pick some low-hanging fruit, such as aesthetic and customization options that fans have asked for. So it might be a while still before we see any major updates from this studio. In the meantime, if you're curious to see what Iceflake can do, then Surviving The Aftermath is certainly a worthwhile way to spend some time.
This studio will be taking over the development of Cities: Skylines, which is a much different kind of city-builder.