Key Preview Takeaways:
- The build I was shown was exceptionally early – shockingly so.
- There are systems upon systems upon systems, as you’d expect from Paradox.
- The Ancients are perhaps the most fascinating folk you’ll encounter in the wasteland.
I don’t know about you, but my plans for the apocalypse involve hiding in a comfy bunker and playing hundreds of hours more of Paradox grand strategy games like Crusader Kings 3. And now I’ll be able to play out the apocalypse during the apocalypse with the studio’s first new grand strategy game franchise since 2019’s Imperator: Rome, Afterworld. Set in a not too far future North America that has been devastated by an intentionally vague cataclysm, it combines RTS and grand strategy elements as you rebuild the world in any image you desire – from terraforming to cannibalism. And that’s an enticing proposition.
The End is Not The End
Heads up: what you’re seeing is an alpha, and there were several things that we weren’t allowed to show yet, like combat. It’s undeniably rough around the edges. Honestly, one of my first thoughts was that this seems really early to be showing Afterworld to the public. There is a general shape of a game here, where you settle the wasteland, interact with rival factions, and deal with simmering internal conflict inside your own borders. But a lot of it really doesn’t work yet and the balance is all over the place. And that’s OK of course; games are difficult and time-consuming to make. But just keep that in mind as I discuss what I saw.
I was told by the devs that they were getting it in our hands now so they could collect feedback while they still have time to act on it, before systems get fully baked. And I get that. But I will have to be kind of brutally honest that the build I played wasn’t in a shape where I’d want to spend hundreds of hours with it. I hope they take all the time they need to make it the best it can be. I’d be a little bit concerned to hear they were planning to release this any earlier than Q4 next year.
But with that important caveat out of the way, let’s take a step back and talk about what Afterworld actually is. It begins with selecting an origin for your starting band of survivors, similar to Stellaris. And if you’ve played other Paradox games, that’s definitely the closest point of comparison. Just like ships in that game can fly around within a system, your military units and explorers – called rangers – have exact positions within the map’s many provinces and can maneuver and fight individually.
Reclamation Day
The only origin that was available in this preview was the Shelterborn, who are basically Vault Dwellers from Fallout: having hidden underground for the last 100 years or so, they are now forced to deal with a surface world they know nothing about after their life support systems start to fail. The circumstances around which we left the shelter were played out in a brief choose-your-own-adventure-style sequence that can differentiate your new society as anything from nostalgic reclaimers seeking to restore Old America to bloodthirsty cannibals who see strangers as dinner. This sets your starting traditions, values, and customs.
Traditions are sort of a band’s base stats, or how good they are at various aspects of post-apocalyptic state-building. Survival helps with the short-term task of simply not dying in the unforgiving surface world as you scrabble for resources. Hearthkeeping is more about making a nice place to live in the long term.
Values represent a band’s feelings about certain ideologies: Reclamation is about rebuilding America as it was (or as they imagine it was based on legends). Wanderlust is about maintaining a nomadic lifestyle rather than settling down, which is fully possible in Afterworld as base settlements and certain buildings can be packed up and relocated. A band might feel positively, negatively, or not care about any number of the dozens of existing values.
Finally, customs are the story-based explanations of where your traditions and values come from. The Nostalgic custom, for instance, makes you feel positively about Reclamation and gives you a small bonus to Hearthkeeping. A band gains more customs over time either through accumulating pride, which works more or less like experience points, or by developing traumas as the result of negative events like losing a war or being struck by a disaster. Afterworld is an absolute soup of similar nouns, but you can basically get by remembering that traditions are what your band can do, values are how your band feels, and customs are how you acquire both of the above.
From the Ashes
If you want to tame the wasteland, however, you’ll have to eventually recruit or conquer more bands that come with their own set of values that may conflict with your own, impacting the larger tribe’s cohesion and potentially causing a crisis if you can’t make everyone get along. While bands that have food, water, and medical care can grow on their own, assimilating more bands is the only way of acquiring more labor quickly to collect resources, work in your fledgling industries, wage war, and eventually run your logistics network.
This quickly spirals into setting up a government with different bands divided between ruling elites, fully-enfranchised citizens, the oppressed underclass, and if your values allow it, maybe even slaves. I had the option to keep the shelter overseer in charge of everything or try to establish a democracy, and went for the latter path.
All the while, my rangers were out exploring the devastated provinces of the US Southeast. Radiation is a constant threat, especially near ruined cities. But you might also run into hostile clans of slavers, rogue war drones who see you as enemy combatants, bloodthirsty mutants, or simply other tribes competing for resources. The story implies that the world ended a fair bit later than where we are in 2026, so the types of technology you might rediscover in the ruins includes stuff like nanotech, combat mechs, and other sci-fi spectacles.
The New Gods
The biggest players in the wasteland, though, are the towering Ancients. The last survivors of the pre-fall world, each has found some way to prolong their life unnaturally, and each has a unique goal called a destiny that they seek to enact. The first one I ran into, Farouk the American, wants to restore the United States in his image as president of presidents, spreading his civic religion across the wasteland and preparing for a great election to legitimize his power. Lily of the Parks can be found in the Rocky Mountain region and is trying to reverse the ecological devastation humankind wrought. And that sounds nice as long as you don’t ask where she’s getting the fertilizer.
Fairly early on – probably a bit too early for my taste – I was given an ultimatum by Farouk to either become his subject or be forcibly subjugated. It’s not really possible to beat him back in the early game, though you do have the option to pack up and move to New Hampshire where he might never bother you again. Joining him isn’t all bad, though, as your tribe can rise through the ranks to become one of his lieutenants or captains, with each tier unlocking new perks. You just have to be prepared to pay tribute and sometimes do his dirty work. If you play your cards right, you may be able to contest his sham election and put forth your own leader to become president.
Typical for a Paradox game, Afterworld contains systems upon systems upon systems. It would be impossible to cover them all in the scope of this preview, from sending ranger teams into devastated cities to recover old-world tech, to equipping armies with bikes and dune buggies to bring road war to the wasteland while having to maintain supply lines for fuel and ammo. It’s a lot to come to grips with and, like I said, in need of a lot of polish and balancing. But I’ll be keeping this one in my sights, not least of which for the fascinating premise and the ability to fulfill my dream of running an anarcho-primitivist pagan warrior cult in the Rocky Mountains.
While you’re here, check out these previews of other big upcoming games we’ve played recently!
Leana Hafer is a contributing freelancer for IGN with a specialty in RPGs, strategy, horror, and survival games. She has been reviewing video games professionally since 2010 and is one of IGN’s most prolific contributors, with more than 100 reviews published. You can also find her work on sites like PC Gamer and PCGamesN.
