New Cycle
Last updated: 2025-06-27
- Addictive, engaging city-building survival gameplay
- Promising early access title with potential
- Polished and stable performance
- Can become repetitive and tedious
- Unfinished and unpolished aspects
- Flawed logistics system
Emotions
Emotion: satisfaction
Emotion: frustration
Emotion: disappointment
Emotion: excitement
Emotion: enjoyment
Verdict
Mixed
Summary
Positive 70% Ā· Negative 30%. Score: 30 / 100
Positives:
- The game provides a highly enjoyable and immersive experience, with many players finding its gameplay loop addictive and difficult to stop playing. Its unique blend of mechanics and appealing aesthetics contribute to a fun and captivating experience.
- The game is widely recognized for its strong foundation and significant potential, even in its Early Access state. Reviewers are impressed by the developers' clear effort and vision, anticipating further improvements and content additions.
- Reviewers consistently praise the game's well-implemented mechanics, excellent graphics, and overall technical polish, especially for an Early Access title. The game runs smoothly with minimal to no crashes or major bugs, contributing to a seamless experience.
- The game is lauded as a standout city-building and survival game that successfully blends elements from various popular titles. It offers unique mechanics, such as flexible building placement and satisfying industrial progression, elevating the genre.
- The game is noted for its user-friendly interface, intuitive controls, and accessible entry point for new players. It offers adjustable difficulty settings and flexible pacing options, allowing players to tailor the experience to their preferences.
Negatives:
- Players report the game quickly becomes boring and repetitive, often feeling like a chore due to excessive micromanagement and a lack of engaging content or story progression. The late game devolves into an uninspired production loop with little challenge or variety.
- The game is widely criticized for feeling incomplete, buggy, and lacking polish, even after a year in Early Access. Reviewers frequently mention issues with balance, depth, replayability, and overall design, suggesting it needs significant development time.
- The implementation of advanced logistics like conveyor belts and trains is heavily criticized. They are often introduced too late, are difficult to place, or are inefficient, forcing players to redesign their layouts and sometimes making higher-tier production less effective.
- Players struggle to locate specific buildings due to similar visual designs and a brown color palette that blends with the environment. The user interface is also frequently described as confusing, clunky, and overwhelming, hindering efficient management.
- The technology and research trees are criticized for being unintuitive, chaotic, and lacking logical progression or meaningful choices. Players often find themselves researching items that don't immediately make sense or are difficult to utilize effectively.
Gameplay:
- The game is a complex city-building simulator with strong survival elements, requiring players to manage resources, population needs, and intricate production chains in a post-apocalyptic setting. It blends elements from games like Anno, Banished, and Frostpunk, offering a rewarding progression from a small settlement to an industrial powerhouse.
- The game presents a noticeable learning curve, especially for newcomers to the genre, due to its many complex mechanics. However, it offers a good tutorial system and adjustable difficulty levels, allowing players to gradually grasp the systems and find a suitable challenge without being overly punishing.
- The game features deep and complex resource management, intricate production chains, and a detailed logistics system including conveyor belts and trains. Players must constantly manage scarce resources, balance production, and react to challenges like shortages and natural disasters, requiring careful planning and attentiveness.
- The game is set in a post-apocalyptic, dieselpunk world devastated by solar flares, where players lead survivors to rebuild society. It draws significant inspiration from Frostpunk in its atmosphere, survival themes, and overall feel, often described as "Frostpunk without the cold" or "Frostpunk's more lenient cousin."
- The game offers both a campaign mode with a story background and progression cycles, and a sandbox mode for more freeform play. While the campaign features some choices and exploration, their direct impact on gameplay is sometimes limited.
Performance:
- The game generally runs very smoothly across various PC setups, including budget systems, with high FPS and minimal loading times. Many players reported no significant lag, frame drops, or major performance issues, indicating good optimization for an early access title.
- While low settings offer high FPS, they can make the map appear empty. Ultra settings improve ambiance but some details like grass could be better. There were also mentions of some "ugly glitches" and a desire for overall increased image quality.
- A few specific technical issues were noted, such as dimming/effects problems on ultrawide monitors and automatic graphics reduction blurring buildings. However, Linux compatibility via Proton was reported as good, and a camera panning issue eventually resolved itself.
Recommendations:
- The game is widely recommended, especially for fans of city-building, strategy, and survival genres, often compared favorably to titles like Frostpunk or Anno. Reviewers find it engaging, enjoyable, and a worthwhile experience, even in Early Access, with many highlighting its significant potential.
- Many players acknowledge the game's significant potential to become an excellent title within its genre. They express a strong desire for continued development, polishing, and new content, often recommending waiting for future updates or the full release before purchasing.
- Reviewers suggest that new players, especially those unfamiliar with the genre, should utilize the tutorial and consider starting with a 'standard' or 'relaxed' mode to ease into the game's mechanics and challenges.
- The game is characterized as an administration or management simulator, requiring players to engage deeply with resource allocation and strategic planning. It effectively challenges players' organizational and decision-making skills.
- Players note that the game can be challenging or difficult to grasp initially, requiring an adjustment period. They suggest that the experience improves as players become more familiar with its mechanics, despite some inconsistencies.
Miscellaneous:
- Reviewers frequently highlight the game's strong foundation, good graphics, and core concept, expressing high hopes for its future development. Many acknowledge its Early Access status, expecting significant improvements, content additions, and polish before full release.
- The game is frequently compared to Frostpunk, Endzone, and other city-builder/survival titles, often described as a mix of their mechanics and aesthetics. Reviewers consistently praise its immersive post-apocalyptic atmosphere, visuals, and setting.
- Players are eager for new game modes, maps, late-game content, and quality-of-life improvements like voice output and mod support. There's a strong desire for more depth, challenge, and specific additions like a military component or refined systems.
- Reviewers appreciate the developers' responsiveness to feedback and their engagement with the community. This indicates a positive relationship and potential for future improvements based on player input.
- Players suggest that the tech tree progression needs rebalancing, potentially slowing its pace and offering more branching paths. There's a call for a serious review of the tech progression and region management systems.
