New Cycle

This game has good bones, but is lacking identity. I'm recommending it because it's a solid game for being early access and has time to improve. It's clear how much inspiration it takes from Frostpunk - from the menu styles and fonts to the art - but it lacks the same unique mechanics that makes Frostpunk so interesting, cold and fuel. Despite being set in a (post-)apocalyptic world, I never felt like my community faced actual hardship or need because I could crank out basically any resource I needed to astronomical levels that I didn't need to balance so much as overproduce. In the few hours I played there was little to no story and I did not feel like I learned anything new about the world. That being said, for an early access game it works and has decent production trees. They feel kind of inconsequential if only because I don't have any greater overarching goal and so I don't really care besides 'number go up,' again lacking the same sort of urgency or pressure that Frostpunk creates via its world design. There are some things I would like to see changed - technology tree needs to be redesigned more clearly, I should be able to see what laws I've enacted, etc. The UI right now has a lot of clutter and very little of it seems important to me at all given how little management I have to do once I set up my production lines. Morale has no real gameplay impacts and the resource UI isn't well designed for easily seeing what's going up or down, but thankfully you can overproduce everything so it doesn't matter. I know others may not be interested in storyline, but when I chose to play campaign and it indicated there was a story I expected, well, a story. I think that there's a lot of good stuff here and since it's early access I'm pretty sure there'll be improvements and more to come. My hope is that the game can establish its identity more fully. The solar flares are an interesting concept and so is the idea of a 'cycle,' particularly in how it references a production cycle, but there's not much done with that - I would expect that my tiny settlement would have harsh exposure to solar flares and I could research technologies or set up my city to reduce how much they affected my civilian health or productivity, but they didn't even show up when I played. I think what makes Frostpunk so successful as a post-apocalyptic city builder is that the apocalypse does not let you catch a break. It forces itself on you at all points in the game and does not allow any sort of mistake. I was expecting a similar presence in this game, especially given its clear influence from Frostpunk, but I didn't see it.