Cities Skylines 2 is a superb strategy sim, sure, but perhaps lacking a certain drama. You build your roads. You tweak your economy. You slowly balance budgets and levy your taxes. But there’s no huge, malevolent, overhanging threat – and huge malevolent threats make any game better. Look at Frostpunk. Snowbound, starving, and barely holding on to the final vestiges of society, that’s a strategy game with some tragedy. You blend Frostpunk, Cities Skylines 2, and the sweeping scale of Civilization 6, and you get this, a superb new post-apocalyptic strategy game shortly arriving on Steam.
Welcome to New Cycle, a fresh colony and strategy game from independent developer Core Engage. In stark contrast to Frostpunk’s everlasting winter, in New Cycle, the world has been destroyed by a solar flare, pushing human civilization back hundreds of years, and leaving scarce few resources. Environmental dangers, warring tribes, and the constant threat of extinction hang heavy over your incipient society. From microcosmic municipal management to big, bird’s-eye view decision making, if you make the wrong calls in New Cycle, your entire world will fall to the flames.
Naturally, resources play a big role here, and you need to chop, mine, cultivate, and trade to keep your society alive. More important, however, are your people. If their morale drops, if their efficiency is too low, or if there aren’t enough of them to fill your workforce, everything you’ve built will rapidly start to unravel. Likewise, if you fail to meet their needs, you run the risk of being overthrown.
With a striking steampunk aesthetic, complex and evolving simulation, and a superb-looking mix of colony and grand strategy game systems, New Cycle arrives on Steam Thursday January 18, but you can already wishlist it right here.
Alternatively, try some of the other best 4X games, or maybe the best management games ever made.
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