Surviving the Aftermath Xbox One X Preview

January 11, 2019 at 8:22pm
By Jason Stettner

This is a really interesting survival strategy game where you’re attempting to guide a group of people after the apocalypse. With each game setup you’re choosing from a number of options and then selecting from three tiers to choose your difficulty.

This can range from how scarce resources are in the world, to the contaminations or even say how frequent apocalyptic events are. From there you generate into the world and command your group of people. You’ll be having them build structures, collect resources from the environment and eventually sending them out into the greater world for exploration.

It’s all about gathering those resources, and trying to make things work. It’s got an interesting setup for management, you choose areas to work on, and need to over time select additional ones. You’ll be building a wide range of structures to assist with survival.

These range from recycling stations, to places where people sleep. You also need to choose certain options during random pop-up events and prepare for the worst as apocalyptic events can still come up. There are also skill tree options to work through, that ties into exploration. Finally a good note is that there are specialty aspects to play, which will alter how situations go when expeditions take place for your group of survivors.

It’s a rather interesting title, and one I personally found quite fun. It should be similar to Surviving Mars which I missed out on sadly, or somewhat like Cities: Skylines since the same overall publisher manages them. This one is quite fun, it hits that post-apocalyptic world style well and I enjoy that sort of situation. It’s a neat backdrop for what you’re doing, and they lean into that well.

It was fun to play, and aesthetically matched the world they were trying to paint here. I played this on Xbox One X for which the game is currently in Xbox Game Preview. That means it’s likely to evolve or well change over time towards a final release. Currently it’s got quite a lot of content, but still needs some polishing. It has frequent screen tearing and some other performance issues. Other than that it’s quite well done, I like the speed options and the controls feel great for console.

You do also have the option for keyboard and mouse which is nice for those that enjoy the input option when they’re playing on their console. I quite enjoyed the game, look forward to seeing how it does develop towards its full release. If they smooth out performance they’ve got a great game on their hands. You can read our review of Vigor below which is a similar idea yet multiplayer game or check out the general game hubs for additional coverage of titles.

Read our Vigor Review
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