Against the Storm

City builders have a sameness problem. You learn the systems, optimize your supply chains, achieve steady-state prosperity, and then the game has nothing left to surprise you with. Against the Storm, from Eremite Games, attacks that problem directly. It grafts roguelite structure onto city-building foundations in a way that keeps every settlement run unpredictable, even after dozens of hours. The result landed among the best strategy games of 2023, and its reception reflected that.

The setup is a dark fantasy world where apocalyptic rains periodically scour civilization flat. As the Queen’s Viceroy, you venture out from the Smoldering City into the wilderness to establish settlements, extract resources, and return before the Blightstorm arrives. The meta-progression is persistent. The individual settlements are not. You build, you extract, you leave, and then you do it again somewhere new.

Against the Storm’s Greatest Strength: Building and Crafting

The fusion of genres holds up far better than it has any right to. City builders typically reward patience and long-term planning. Roguelites reward adaptability and acceptance of randomness. Against the Storm threads these together by keeping runs short enough that failure isn’t devastating while making each run different enough that prior knowledge only goes so far. Your available buildings, the local resources, the biome’s quirks, the active challenges, and the modifiers all shift between runs. You’re never quite doing the same thing twice.

The game’s races add meaningful variation. Humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies each have distinct preferences and production bonuses. Different run compositions push you toward different strategies. A settlement heavy on beavers wants different infrastructure than one built around lizards, and learning to read what a run’s population needs and adapt your build accordingly is where much of the skill expression lives.

Six distinct biomes provide further variety at the environmental level. Each biome has different resource distribution, different hazards, and different aesthetic character. Moving between them keeps the visual experience fresh and introduces different resource constraints that stop any single strategy from dominating.

Developer engagement has been consistent since launch. Eremite Games listened actively to community feedback during Early Access and has continued updating the game post-release with new content, mechanics reworks, and balance changes. The community has responded with loyalty.

Steam Deck verification means the game runs properly on Valve’s handheld, a meaningful achievement for a city builder with a lot going on the screen at once.

Where Against the Storm Falters

RNG can occasionally produce runs that feel cruel rather than challenging. Certain resource combinations simply don’t synergize well with the available buildings in a given run, and experienced players will recognize when a run has gone sideways early. The game allows conceding and restarting, but a run that feels predetermined by unfavorable draws can drain momentum.

Players who come to city builders specifically for the long-game, the meticulous urban planning, the satisfaction of watching a city grow over hours into something complex and self-sustaining, will find Against the Storm’s impermanent settlements unsatisfying by design. The runs aren’t meant to be permanent. If permanence is what you’re after, the game’s structure will frustrate rather than engage.

Across dozens of runs, a pattern starts to emerge in how objectives are structured. The task variety is real, but some players note that the underlying goal loop becomes familiar faster than the surface variety might suggest. It’s still engaging for many hours, but veteran players have flagged it as the game’s ceiling for long-term depth.

The absence of native controller support is a gap on PC, though Steam Deck verification means there’s a workable solution for handheld play.

What the Roguelite Structure Actually Solves

The standard city-builder design arc runs something like this: learn systems, struggle through early game, achieve stability, optimize, coast. Against the Storm breaks this arc by making sure the conditions are never stable enough to optimize completely. Randomness isn’t a flaw in the design. It’s load-bearing.

This is the insight that makes the game work. If you’re never playing with the same hand twice, you can’t become complacent. Every run demands active attention. The difficulty scaling reinforces this further, with higher prestige levels adding new constraints that keep even veteran players on edge rather than comfortable.

Should You Play Against the Storm?

Against the Storm is the city builder for players who’ve burned out on city builders. If you’ve sunk hundreds of hours into the genre and find that the mid-to-late game always dulls into comfortable optimization, this is a direct solution to that problem. It’s also excellent for players who enjoy roguelites but want something more deliberate and less chaotic than most of the genre.

Give it a pass if you want to build something that lasts. The settlements are temporary by design, and no amount of care put into a particular run will change that. Players who need permanence and accumulated complexity over long sessions won’t find what they’re looking for here.

The Verdict on Against the Storm

Against the Storm is one of the smartest city builders in years, using roguelite structure to solve a problem that has plagued the genre forever. Each run is genuinely different, the tension never fully lets up, and the developers have kept improving it since launch. If you’ve ever bounced off city builders because they eventually stop surprising you, this one was designed with you in mind.