You can choose to start with a bunker or
vehicle laden with supplies.
Surviving the Aftermath
EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW
EXPECT TO PAY
£15.50DEVELOPER
Iceflake StudiosPUBLISHER
Paradox InteractiveLINK
survivingtheaftermath.comNEED TO KNOWLike 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-of-
the-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 by survivors and turned into
recycling plants or fishing wharfs.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
Surviving the Aftermath.
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. The scale of Aftermath is
significantly smaller than Surviving Mars,
so even just a few upset colonists or bad
eggs feel like a big problem.
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. I also start plonking
down lanterns on every street corner to
brighten the place up. A little goes a long
way at the end of the world.
Surviving the Aftermath is pretty
straightforward right now, but the
disasters and rowdy survivors are
engaging obstacles that spice up the
familiar management objectives. Iceflake
will be giving the colony layer an update,
with the world map getting some more
attention in December. While the studio
has plans for more Early Access updates
after that, it’s looking for feedback from
players before it settles on them.
Fraser BrownM
y 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.Rebuild civilization in this post-
apocalyptic management simSURVIVING
THE AFTERMATH
MY COLONY STILL MANAGED
TO CONJURE UP A FEW MINI-
DISASTERS OF ITS OWNPLAYED
IT