Played Against the Storm: Keepers of the Stone DLC
I've played quite a lot Against the Storm off and on since it came out. I think it's a truly tremendous bit of citybuilder/roguelite design - but a complex, imperfect one, too.
It's the kind of game that's full of extremely easy-to-fall-into "trap" mechanics. Some features or upgrades may trick players into misspending their resources. You can also juke around the negative consequences of various meters, reward opportunities, and economy crises by fiddling with stuff in menus or delaying your activation of rewards. It takes a while to learn that a lot of the stuff you can do in the game is not, actually, stuff you should do. There's a lot of detail here, and gaining mastery in ATS sometimes means learning to ignore the details that are there to trick you.
The game is also visually a bit muddy. The game has a drafting mechanic where you unlock different buildings for your city across the course of each run. Knowing what kinds of resources and recipes your current "build" offers you is really important, and you have to forbid and enable various ingredients constantly throughout the course of a map. While the buildings do have pretty good design language to set them apart from one another as categories, it's a total mess within each category--there are so many scale-roofed "lizard" themed buildings that I can't tell apart from one another. This makes it a bit more of a chore than it should be to set ingredient and recipe permissions across a set of thematically-related buildings.
Because the game is so textured and complex and tricksome and visually soupy, I was pretty worried about purchasing the new DLC. It adds a whole species to the game: Frogs, who are obsessed with masonry, for some reason, and eat a new food called paste. I expected that having to remember or think about this new stuff would completely ruin the game for me.
Frustratingly, some components of the DLC were just a free update that you get automatically if you own the game... so even before I bought the DLC I was already a little overwhelmed. There are new food and clothing recipes associated with Frogs, and a new resource-gathering system (fishing). I wasn't sure if I really wanted to add even EVEN MORE stuff to my experience with the DLC proper.
In the end, I bought it because all the new stuff in the free update made me feel like I was already playing some kind of unfinished and limited version of the DLC, anyway. (I can't say that this is a good player experience, haha.) Surprisingly, I'm glad I did get it. This DLC, strangely, actually lowers game difficulty for me rather than raising it. Fully the opposite of what I was expecting!
The DLC rebalanced the needs that some species have, and the new slate of needs and limitations is just a lot easier for me to handle (particularly once I added the actual Frog species they were redesigned to accommodate). Frogs are pretty middle-of-the-road with respect to needs, and they "combo" off of other species in a pretty flexible way.
For example, most species benefit from only 2 types of city services (a mood-raiser generated by certain expensive buildings) while Frogs accept three. Each species also has "complex food" preferences. All other species have a spread of 4 or 5 total foods and services that they will accept, and the worst debuffs in the game can only be avoided if they have both a food and a service. Frogs have 3 foods and 3 services, so they're just easier to please.
Frogs also crucially do not have a "need" for (and will not even live inside) basic housing. Frog-specific housing has a ton of upgrades that affect resource production and storage, though. It's pretty easy to avoid the penalties associated with Frog housing, so their drawbacks aren't particularly serious, and they give you a lot of flexibility in return.
Here's the frogs, by the way. Extremely goblin individuals:
The Frogs were clearly designed to decrease the burden that species uncertainty places on drafting. You begin each map with only partial knowledge about which species will settle in your city - usually you start with only 1 or 2 out of 3 total species. It sometimes hard to choose which food production buildings to draft until you know which species you're taking care of. And every time they add a species to the game with DLC, making those decisions will get a little harder.
Thus, an easily-pleased species and a rebalanced needs slate. I was surprised to see that these critters basically directly addressed my main fear about adding a DLC species to an already-crowded game!
Anyway, ATS still has a lot of issues that I love to be frustrated by. (I am still playing the game, obviously - to me, the things that are bad-weird about it almost make it more compelling to play.) Nevertheless, I was impressed to see this team avoid what I think of as "Sims creep" - adding more and more DLC-detail to a game until it's so dense and overladen with STUFF that you can't really enjoy it anymore. I've played a lot of roguelikes that flattened and and muddied their mechanical challenges by adding more and more tiny things to worry about at once.
I can't say that the most recent update was genius design or anything, though, because I think that the "free" portion of the DLC update actually made the game substantially more annoying for me while I was trying to learn it without Frogs. I basically only bought it because the half-implemented DLC was pissing me off!
Hope you enjoyed this trip into Evil Citybuilder Land with me. Here is a quick shot of the other part of the DLC I didn't mention at all, "expeditions," where a little guy who plays drums rides a water strider out over the ocean to find treasure chests. It's this type of game!!! Maybe you'd enjoy it!!
