Surviving the Aftermath
Survive and thrive in a post-apocalyptic future — resources are scarce but opportunity calls. Build the ultimate disaster proof colony, protect your colonists and restore civilization to a devastated world. Remember: The end of the world is just the beginning.
No Place Like Home
Surviving Earth
Survival is my Specialty
Expect the Unexpected
Mods
Why Early Access?
Surviving the Aftermath Review
Whatever you choose, you start with just a handful of resources next to a broken down shell of a car, and a bunch of now homeless survivors. You have to use that pool of starting resources quickly and effectively to get your camp up and running, building shelters out of recycled plastics, water wells, and the first resource gathering and fabrication buildings.
The survival management genre is still relatively new, yet Surviving the Aftermath—simply Aftermath from here on out because it’s the apocalypse and who has time for formal names?—has a surprisingly conservative start. While its predecessor, developed by former Tropico devs Haemimont Games, embraced sci-fi and speculative fiction with domes and drones and all sorts of future tech, Aftermath evokes more familiar city builders and management games, though not without some enticing twists.
Each resource gathering building has an area of effect around it, where the workers will diligently collect what’s available, but all of these buildings, from the recycling facility to the storage yard, can have their scavenging area changed, meaning you don’t need to dismantle and reconstruct a building just because the specific node you’ve been harvesting has vanished.
As ever, Paradox’s games are hard to nail down—and Surviving the Aftermath most of all, given it’s in Early Access. Paradox is promising monthly updates ahead of a proper late 2020 release, so who knows how the game will evolve. Early Access is a good insulator too, as Surviving Mars felt thin at launch and then grew better after player feedback. Surviving the Aftermath feels, if anything, even thinner. Having looked over the entire tech tree, I wager it’d be only a few hours before you ran out of new buildings and challenges. It matters less though, because there’s no expectation that Aftermath is “finished” yet.
More than anything, Surviving the Aftermath needs to establish its own identity. So far it mostly feels like a reskin of Surviving Mars, and I’m finding that a hard sell. Surviving Mars’s blend of retro-futurism and hard science was eye-catching and unique. Aftermath’s sheet metal and concrete look is Standard Video Game Post-Apocalypse, and while it’s novel to see it in the context of a city builder I’m not finding it much of a hook yet.
I hope it can break out from its predecessor’s shadow though, because there’s a lot of potential—both for Surviving the Aftermath and for the greater Surviving series. I’m already curious what Paradox has planned for future spin-offs. Baby steps, I know, but it could be a juggernaut if Paradox can keep coming up with fresh backdrops.
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