Surviving the Aftermath
Rebuild civilisation in this post-apocalyptic management sim.
DEVELOPER ICEFLAKE STUDIOS • PUBLISHER PARADOX INTERACTIVE survivingtheaftermath.com
My first survivor dies after his house is flattened by a meteor. Things aren’t looking good for humanity in Surviving the Aftermath, the post-apocalyptic follow-up to Surviving Mars. Surveying my burning colony, I have a lot more things to worry about than the now rotting corpse. Like its predecessor, Aftermath drops you in a hostile world that you’ll need to make safe for a group of survivors. Sometimes they will die. This time, however, we’re back on Earth and with a new developer, Iceflake Studios, at the helm. It’s also a bit more conservative. On Mars we had domes, drones, and flashy future-tech, but back on Earth it’s all about the basics of survival.
My colony isn’t in too bad a situation initially. The difficulty is determined by some choices you make about the setting right at the start – how brutal the apocalypse was, how many people made it – and I opt for a middle-ofthe-road armageddon with a small number of survivors living in a slightly radioactive forest.
Survivors need food, shelter, and power, and at this stage their demands don’t get much more complicated – the numbers just get bigger. Keeping those numbers high does require several different resources along with lots of ramshackle buildings. Thankfully there’s a lot of junk lying around waiting to be picked up.
GATED COMMUNITY
One of the first milestones in Aftermath is building your gate. It’s just a wall of cars and junk, but it connects you to other regions and lets people know you’re open for business. You’ll start to attract strays, too, and some might even be useful. One of the wanderers that joins my colony is a specialist, able to go out into the world in search of more resources, adventures, and science points for upgrades.
It’s lucky that my specialist is off sourcing some meat when the radiation storm strikes. Aftermath features several disasters with different effects and potential countermeasures. There isn’t much I can do about meteors, but when facing the radiation storm I’m able to make sure all my crops are gathered before they can be killed off, and I know I have a shipment of food coming in if there’s a shortfall. It starts to feel like I’m getting the hang of the surviving part of the game.
My colony still manages to conjure up a few mini-disasters of its own. Aftermath spits out random events and personal conflicts, ranging from people wanting to fight bears to people simply brawling with each other. Being a permissive leader, I leave them to it, so before long I have a colony full of injured idiots.
There’s not much you can do to make your colony pretty, but through research you can unlock slightly nicer – and much more effective – buildings, letting your survivors upgrade from a tent to a caravan, for instance.
Surviving the Aftermath is pretty straightforward right now, but the disasters and rowdy survivors are engaging obstacles that spice up the familiar objectives. Iceflake will be giving the colony layer an update, with the world map getting some more attention in this month. While the studio has plans for more Early Access updates after that, it’s looking for feedback from players before it settles on them.