Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation
This is probably the game I played the longest while still being unsure if it is actually good. And I didn’t even finish it.
Story
J:A.S.S is a base-building survival simulation as the name suggests. There was a zombie demon apocalypse, you and a few others have survived the initial carnage but now you have to ensure your longterm survival. Maybe you can even find out what happened and if you can fix it!
Gameplay
Gameplay is divided between classic base building - farm food and resources, craft advanced materials, provide everything for your group of survivors, build defenses - and combat, which is itself divided between defending your camp and exploring different locations for materials and for clues about what happened to cause all of this.
– Real player with 176.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Base Building Games.
TL/DR: Judgement simulator mixes Xcom’s unforgiving struggle for survival while capturing alot of the base-building and character nuance of rimworld. It’s intense and wild at first, but eventually becomes dull by not maintaining the level of challenge. Unforgiving, and not for the faint of heart.
I’m reserving judgement on this one for now (no pun intended). It’s a good skeleton of a game, but missing content in terms of story missions, and weak variety of enemies and gear. Awesome vision, but only good (read: above average, but not great) implementation. Sometimes I think I’m harder on good games with untapped potential, than on bad games; I may be leaning that way on this one. They say a full release is coming in the next few months with new enemies and story missions, along with a price increase, so I’ll probably have to re-evaluate this review after I see what it looks like.
– Real player with 122.1 hrs in game
Generation Nova
“They told us it was a foolproof method for interstellar travel."
How would you feel about waking up from cryo-sleep centuries too early on a huge space ship?
GENERATION NOVA is a strategy game of resource and colony management. The player has to balance the passengers needs and resources to keep the them alive and happy. Hopefully you will manage to build a community large enough so that one day the last generation on the ship will land on a habitable planet and start their new life on the ground. But don’t be too eager: Expand too fast and you might not have enough workforce to feed the children. Will you make the sacrifices needed to keep the voyage running or will the cold hull of the ship contain only corpses in the end?
The game takes inspiration from games like Banished, Rimworld and Frostpunk. Huge inspirations for the story and setting are from books Across the Universe and the Silo -series and the film Passengers.
Intuitive Building System
Build nearly two dozen different buildings that all serve a specific purpose inside the generation ship. Mine passing asteroids to create resources and tools to keep the generations growing. Keep the security and happiness up to pump up the working speed and hopefully lower the suicide rates.
Technology Upgrades
Assign passengers to conduct scientific research to gain upgrades in the passengers' and buildings' workflow. You don’t want to keep half of your population tilling the soil in the farms do you?
Dynamic Event And Task System
Choose your playstyle: Make harsh decisions and be a tyrant or be liberal and try to help as much as possible. In the end only thing that matters is that the generations will live on. Make the elders work or let them enjoy their last moments in life in peace. Encounter problems with material and resource malfunctions and order passengers to fix the issue even at the cost of their life or let the material go to waste.
Passenger AI
The passengers have been through a lot by just waking up in the ship. Social problems will eventually occur and everything will take a toll on their psyche. Manage their happiness and hope to keep the needed production lines going. You don’t want to end up with no tools to mine the asteroids. And you definitely don’t want the food to run out.
Interesting Zone System
Depending on where you are flying through the space the people of the ship might get more creative and faster in work. But pass a dark void or a nebula and the problems might start piling up. Hopefully the hull will not be breached in the asteroid field. Plan in advance to go on a resource production spree when you know the passengers are willing to do the extra work and give them the breaks they need when times seem the most dire.
Full Music Score
Over an hour of atmospheric and original music tracks made by Markus Brogaard.
“Home… This is our new home for now. Maybe one day my at least children will breath unfiltered air."
Read More: Best Colony Sim Sci-fi Games.
Shelter Manager
I checked the game and it’s quite intuitive. There are resources you can spend on construction. They have tools drawn on the icon. Work points keep generating and later can be used in production and construction and so on and so on.
Shelter is more like a simulation manager game and I like it.
– Real player with 5.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Economy Games.
A game in the genre of a shelter simulator.Nice graphics and atmosphere of the game, similar to Fallout Shelter.
– Real player with 4.5 hrs in game
Atomic Society
When I first purchased this game, I have to admit, my initial judgement of it was not favorable. The game was slow and plodding as it was so resource intensive. Saving took several minutes, for example. But, as the years passed, the devs overcame these obstacles and created a fairly decent game. To be certain, it isn’t yet completed, but in its current state, it is definitely worth the money. I would recommend getting the game now before it leaves early access as I imagine they will be asking much more for it once completed.
– Real player with 116.8 hrs in game
You know that meme with “I expected nothing and I’m still disappointed”?
This pretty much sums up how I feel about “Atomic Society” after 1 day of playing it.
(I can’t ask for a refund anymore, but I would if I could.)
Think at your ordinary city building game. Food buildings for food, water buildings for water, housing… and that’s it. There is nothing post-apocalyptic, no danger, no radiation, no mutants, nothing. You start the game with 35-50 people (depending on the difficulty) + your “custom” character. As you play the game, no matter how bad you do, other people join your city. There is literally an endless line of people on the map, heading to your location. (Ah, and before you ask, I did “finished” it on expert mode.).
– Real player with 71.6 hrs in game
Buoyancy
Buoyancy has something special going for it for sure, you know this within the few hours playing it.
However at the 6hr mark (at least for me) I felt like I had already experienced all of the game mechanics and all of the challenge was gone. Population was easy to maintain (even passed 150 pop) and everything else started to repeat itself. The pirates towards the end really weren’t a threat nor were fires and extreme weather threats.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this, especially because it’s a early access title and the low price point still provides decent value. I can’t say this enough, but games like this is exactly why I love early access. Buoyancy is a gem!
– Real player with 33.4 hrs in game
Its still in development but and I have high hopes for it in the future but right now its pretty dumb. For a full explanation continue reading.
Its virtually impossible to set up steady food production because the villagers you have working on water, wheat, bread, beer (yes beer) all the necessary things to keep the colony going just randomly quit there jobs and wonder off. Once your population reaches a couple or three hundred you are pretty much guaranteed to have one of these situation which results in running out of food faster than you can get all the villagers back to work and as a result dozens or hundreds die. Now to get to this point you had to build a large raft. You need a lot of villagers to row the raft around to collect supplies from the ocean. Once you lose a sizable chunk due to one of these wandering abandonments of duties you don’t even have enough people left to row the raft and are basically done.
– Real player with 32.4 hrs in game
Project Martians
can’t re-read (tutorial) objectives, save game ended up broken mid tutorial but at the start?
it seems more of an early access proof of concept than anything.
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
Clumsy controls, a broken tutorial, and not much to recommend it.
– Real player with 0.3 hrs in game
Sheltered 2
There is a good game waiting to happen here but right now it is still a product that should be in Early Access.
There are TONS of bugs and features that simply don’t function well and the game balance is pretty much non-existent as it stands.
Bug example:
Your Shelter (which you have painstakingly expanded and built onto) is breached or invaded. You use the very rudimentary control scheme to position your survivors right in front of the door as they are cutting through, ready for COMBAT!!!! Then, nothing as the collision detection fails utterly and every invader literally clips through your survivors to go on and loot whatever they want.
– Real player with 111.4 hrs in game
Hooked on this game for a while. Plenty of bugs back then. But a lot of issues have been fixed, although there’s still few remains but worry not, they always working on the game! Beginning part of the game has always been fun to me, as you get used to it. its get easier later unless you are playing on harder diff cause breaches could be brutal if you aren’t careful enough. Overall, pretty chill game to spend few hours in!
– Real player with 98.7 hrs in game
Cliff Empire
It’s quite a decent game for $15. There is a lot of unlockable content in the mid to late game that the sheer scale of the world makes you think that you really got value for money. The game starts off slow but picks up the pace later so in the beginning expect to wait around a lot for your production to catch up with your construction needs.
At the start, you can get whatever you need from your great “supplier” in the sky as long as you have money but in the later part of the game, the “cheat” in production closes and you’ll start to need to produce everything by yourself. This slowly ramps up the difficulty. Expect to lose your first 3 or 4 games before you learn the mechanics of the game and it becomes easier, if you go in with preconceived notions of “how the game MUST work!!”, you are going to be in for a rough time. Remember to save a lot if you’re still learning if you don’t feel like restarting from the beginning often.
– Real player with 175.9 hrs in game
Wow. This game is my surprise packet of the last 5 years.
Bought game in very early access for about $8.00 - could see potential, but it needed work and content was limited. Thought it was a good concept and small amount of money well spent. Never expected what I got for that paltry $8.00.
After playing about an hour and moving on, I noticed that the game was constantly on the update list, so started taking notice of developer updates - man these guys, whoever they are, or whether they are “guys” at all, work very damn hard.
– Real player with 92.7 hrs in game
Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville
A series that takes an inventive twist on the zombie apocalypse setting, Rebuild takes the “man versus man versus nature” struggle present in most games pertaining to zombies and reframes the gameplay from the more common action/shooter elements and turns it into a 4X game of conquest. The world of Rebuild is one in which the survivors are all fairly competent people. Nobody here is an idiot that is going to stand there and quiver in fear while the zombies take a bite out of their neck. The primary struggle is maintaining the flow of your resources and zombies are only really a threat when you spread your people thin. Fortunately the game manages to balance this well so that you’re generally never too comfortable that you don’t have to worry. Each map tends to follow the same flow of scrambling your survivors frantically so you can find food to eat that night to having a slight bit of breathing room so that you can begin to, as the title suggests, Rebuild and then challenge the AI factions present. Zombies ramp up their difficulty as time goes on as well. There are a few strategies that generally guarantee victory as long as you execute them well but I’ll leave you to figure out what those are. It has clever nooks and crannies and like any other good 4X you’ve played it’ll keep you up all night as you have multiple goals planned out at once, one of which can always be achieved in Just One More Turn. The ebb and flow guarantees that you’ve always got something to do.
– Real player with 338.0 hrs in game
Summary: Turn based zombie survival
Multiplayer: No
Completion: 46 hrs
Cards: Yes
Cloud: Yes
Rebuild 3 is a real time or turn-based tactical zombie survival game with a focus on recruiting followers and expanding territory. The game offers two distinct modes of play, Quick Play, and Story. Quick play offers unlimited procedurally generated maps, with various settings that can be adjusted to your liking. Story mode is a whole campaign where you can carry over leader stats and a small group between missions.
– Real player with 81.6 hrs in game
Surviving the Aftermath
So after investing a lot more time into this game, I’m able to make a much better go at reviewing it. Overall, the game is generally rough and unpolished. It’s features do not feel complete, it’s engagement is simplistic, and the AI is generally dense as a box of rocks with terrible priority management.
Logistics - A colony simulator lives and dies off of how it can handle logistics; people, resources, industry and so forth. This is StA’s -biggest- failure by far. There is one single method of moving resources, and that’s having individual units lug them from place to place. As bases get bigger, you’ll quickly hit a point where 15 to 20 percent of your population is employed in the role of porters. There is no method by which you can speed them up or get better ways of transporting goods. Even with that many porters, you’ll still be unable to get things to where they need to go half the time. Compare this to Surviving Mars (SM), where you have either porters, drones, or aircraft to rapidly transport items.
– Real player with 116.1 hrs in game
It’s a colony building game with a wider world (regions) that you interact with in the form of scouting, scavenging, trading with other colonies, setting up outposts, doing story events, and simplified combat.
It’s a great game with an immersive atmosphere. It requires critical thinking and problem solving skills.
It always has you thinking about the future; where will the resources come from after these run out? Can I use the last of them, or should I save them in case something comes up? What do I REALLY need from the tech tree that would be the most benefit right now? At the same time, it also has you problem solving on the fly; I put extra people working the clinics because a lot of people got sick at once…but now maybe should I send some of these medics to be lumberjacks today? (Yes, everyone can do every job…unrealistic, however the game would be even more complex if you had to train each person for each job.)
– Real player with 47.7 hrs in game