Xbox Game Pass Just Added A Unique City Builder That Thrives On Destruction

A roguelike city builder almost seems like a genre that shouldn’t exist. Surely the point of a city builder is to slowly piece a settlement together building by building, considering both your short-term needs and how everything will slot together hours later, and appreciating the complexity you’ve created as you watch it unfold. If you know that the city is finite, that you’re just going to start over from barren earth before long, what’s even the point? In one of 2023’s best PC games, which is now available on consoles, this clash of concepts is more functional and more captivating than it might seem at first, and it actually fixes a problem that haunts even the best city builders over time.

Against the Storm is remarkably grim for a game full of talking beavers. With little more than a change of lighting, the colorful structures and well-designed animal inhabitants of its world could be downright cheerful. But the world here is constantly awash in gloom, thanks to an unforgiving cycle of storms that’s rendered it almost uninhabitable. At some point in Against the Storm’s history, a magical storm developed that returns periodically to destroy everything except the capital city, with smaller storms between that just make life a bit more miserable. Your job, as an envoy of the queen, is to spend the time between those storms building settlements to enrich her before it all gets wiped off the map.

Where most city builders are about the long game, everything in Against the Storm feels immediate. You’re always under orders from the queen, to build specific structures, deliver a certain number of vegetables, or explore the area around your existing town. The more time you take to complete these objectives, the more impatient the queen gets (represented by a meter at the bottom of the screen), and if you tarry too long, she’ll end your expedition early.

There tends to be a lot of waiting in other similar games, as your villagers slowly gather food or workers construct new buildings. There’s very little of that in Against the Storm, which demands constant movement. Even your buildings can be moved, which means you don’t need to spend minutes pondering over the best place to build a woodcutter’s shack, since you can just pick it up and put it somewhere else when the trees around it have been exhausted.

That speed could make Against the Storm feel shallower than its more contemplative counterparts, but in fact it doesn’t skip on complexity at all. As you manage your settlement, you need to keep an eye on the needs of your inhabitants (a collection of beavers, humans, harpies, foxes, and raptors), which differ based on their species. Satisfying their needs will help your village prosper by speeding up progress toward new blueprints, but eventually they’ll get comfortable and more demanding. Exploration is also key, as you’ll need to uncover new glades by chopping down trees in your way to find events that offer crucial rewards, sometimes in exchange for challenges that can erase all your hard work if you’re not careful.

On top of its city-building complexity is the unpredictability of a roguelike. You never know what resources and blueprints you’ll have access to, so adjusting to what’s available on the fly is always more important than trying to plan everything out ahead of time. Learning how to weather the challenge of this randomness makes every round of Against the Storm feel just as exciting as the last.

It’s the roguelike structure that keeps the game from following into some of the genre’s biggest pitfalls as well. Starting a new city is always exciting, but eventually, many games can descend into a tedious routine of making incremental improvements, or trying to stop the bleeding as one mistake drags down production to create a cascade of small catastrophes. In Against the Storm, it always feels like the honeymoon phase of your settlement, where you’re constantly faced with new challenges and decisions. And if you do mess it all up horribly, it’s only a matter of time before you start again anyway.

Against the Storm is available now on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC. It’s included with Game Pass Ultimate.