New Cycle will be the first major build game in 2024 and will be released on January 18 on Steam. MeinMMO editor Benedict Grothaus was able to test it in advance and got lost in the game for too long. Unexpectedly strong and complex mechanics kept him captivated for hours.
I have an enormous problem: New Cycle is too much fun for me. Seriously, I really don’t have time for a game where I get bogged down like other nerds in Factorio! Plus, I have way too much to do:
- My second run in the grand Rogue Trader is still not finished.
- The 3rd season of Diablo 4 is just around the corner and will take a lot of time.
- The new sandbox MMO Enshrouded will be released in January.
- Nightingale, the survival game I’ve been waiting for years, is supposed to start testing in February.
Even in Against the Storm, which has been fully released in December 2023, I haven’t been able to take a look since then. I love the game and have already sunk over 130 hours into it.
And now New Cycle is around the corner, a mix of Frostpunk and Fallout. I wanted to check it out anyway, but actually later. But my boss Leya said, “I have something here that basically has your name on it.”
Yes, damn it, it does! I was determined to just play it briefly, BRIEFLY. But then I was stuck in this game for hours on the first night, and I even completely exhausted finished “just one more thing”… multiple times.
A personal Fallout settlement in the post-apocalypse
Quickly about the game itself: New Cycle is a building survival game in which you lead a group of people and create a settlement. You need to take care of the needs of the people, research new technologies, and expand.
In essence, the game is reminiscent of Anno 1800 in terms of building and population. Only the visuals are something that has not been seen in the genre before. Instead of nuclear fallout or frozen tundra, there are steppes laid waste by solar eruptions.
New Cycle plays with the idea that you already know everything: There is electricity and industry, but the knowledge of such technologies has vanished. People have to “relearn” them, and you accompany them in this process.
Unlike most build games, New Cycle introduces several mechanics that completely surprised me. I’m not just taking care of the settlement, but I even create outposts in the world and shape the political landscape of my … realm? New Cycle is already providing me with a lot of what Frostpunk 2 promised me.
“Hey, we heard you like capitalism – That’s why we now have prostitution”
Now don’t expect intrigues like in Crusader Kings 3 or anything, but New Cycle offers some quite far-reaching decisions. Early on in the game, my inhabitants ask me whether I will allow them to engage in barter trading.
As a convinced capitalist, I naturally agreed. Let the free market govern. A few years into the game, however, I was confronted with the problems: Instead of working, especially young women prefer to resort to prostitution.
This leads to a drop in productivity and is certainly not beneficial for a society that lacks medical care. That was not the plan. Shortly thereafter, an epidemic eventually wiped out the colony – although triggered by a quarantine I had to impose due to a world event.
However, since New Cycle had already hooked me, I immediately started a new settlement, armed with the knowledge from the previous setback. This time, I created a communist realm, and so far, it’s going well. I keep noticing more and more details.
From: “We need more people” to: “The world is about to end” in just a few hours
Especially in the first few hours, I kept learning new mechanics. For example, the fact that I can send out scouts to explore outposts, from which I can obtain resources and food, was a game-changer.
The only real major problem, however, is the speed at which everything plays out. At the beginning, the build-up takes an extremely long time. There is virtually no reproduction, and strangers rarely join the colony.
Colleague Fabiano Uslenghi from GameStar criticizes the game similarly. Fabiano has spent significantly more time in New Cycle; you can find his detailed review of New Cycle on GameStar.
I need people to reach the next levels of technology. As long as that takes, nothing really happens. The stockpiles fill up and prevent people from working until there are enough citizens to inhabit the city.
However, at a certain point, it tips over. Instead of having to wait painstakingly for enough thinking heads for my research, suddenly problems arise on top of problems:
- people want more food and pets, which means rations increase
- at the same time, they accuse me if they do not receive their promised rations during a drought
- researchers repeatedly want resources from me because they want to research new technologies or predict the future – if I deny them, everything takes longer
- the sun itself occasionally attacks and causes my people to feel unwell or even leads to dilemmas that require a decision from me
It probably eases up a bit when I have more experience and know how to respond to difficulties. However, this causes colonies to die rather spontaneously for me, and I have to restart with the tedious beginning. And so far, I haven’t been able to finish any campaign.
New Cycle is first being released in Early Access and only on Steam. I haven’t been able to test a few features, like certain biomes, which are still to come. Nevertheless, I am excited and especially happy for the German publisher Daedalic, who is behind the Turkish developer studio of New Cycle. I sincerely wish the team success after Gollum.
