The other day I managed to play a new city-planning simulator with survival elements and a post-apocalyptic setting, New Cycle. The game turned out to be attractive enough to form an opinion on it and express it in a review.
The project received mostly positive reviews on Steam, but it was not without its shortcomings. It’s probably all about early access, but let’s take a closer look at the only project from Core Engage so far.
At first glance, New Cycle tries to be similar to Frostpunk and other city-building simulators with survival elements. People survive as best they can in the post-apocalypse that came after a powerful solar flare. After a brief introduction to the lore, we are offered to undergo a short training, but not all facts are stated in it, and some important ones are even skipped. For example, how to move to the second level of technology and higher, find out when the children in the settlement will grow up, or why lightning strikes three times in the same place (probably it was worth putting the dining room in a different place). However, figuring it out on your own, especially if you are familiar with the genre, is not difficult and even adds interest.
In the future, after a few minutes of training, development proceeds by leaps and bounds and it is already difficult to follow the systems. As the seasons change, if you have several identical production buildings, you need to constantly change workers manually. For example, picking mushrooms in winter is impossible and it is necessary to switch hunters to game or another resource, and so on. This fact gradually begins to irritate and distracts from really necessary things. The latter include putting out fires, establishing supplies, monitoring mortality, constructing new buildings and studying the map.
By the way, the locations in the game are pleasant and the atmosphere of the post-apocalypse is felt. Travelers periodically come to your settlement, and as the population grows, the number of random events and options for solving them increases, after which quests may be added to you, just like in Frostpunk. True, there were some incidents here too.
Over time, there are too many events and they pour in like a cornucopia, so often, having added 5 or more tasks to yourself for a couple of years, you simply stop monitoring their implementation. Among the tasks are: provide everyone with clothes, create a stock of 1,500 ready-made soups in the warehouse, create 80 tools, put out a fire in a short time, cheer up the residents, and so on. Also, for almost every resource or random effect, such as a lightning strike, there is a choice of further action and a task arising from it, and each affects the gameplay.
There are a wide variety of buildings in the game, and in almost each one you can assign several types of workers, and in the training center, you can even train people and then send them to specialize in production. There is also enough technology, but it is not clear why reaching a certain number of people is required to move to the second level and higher. They come to your settlement rarely and quickly die from disease, atmospheric phenomena and other things. I consider this decision of the developers controversial.
Also regarding technology, here, in my opinion, there is not enough balance. For example, to study such an important aspect as clothing production, a certain amount of paper is required. By the way, paper at the third stage is almost the most important resource, since the ability to train people in specialization, study other technologies, and much more depends on its quantity.
Here we gradually approach another drawback – bugs in early access. It’s hard to love a game that surprises you with its complexity and is additionally riddled with bugs. Have you stockpiled your training papers and sent a crowd to the training center? The usual workers that were there before came out, but the paper disappeared, and this happened several times in a row. Have you placed a canteen in the center of the settlement? Burns down three times from three lightning strikes every year. And so on.
It’s quite difficult to give a verdict on New Cycle. The game is in early access and has not yet been polished; moreover, it is the first project of Core Engage. However, this does not allow us to give it a completely negative rating – for the first game of the studio, it looks high-quality and is addictive in the first hours. In addition, there is already a plot, pleasant music and atmosphere, and further development is just around the corner.
