The Nightwatchers DLC for Against the Storm on Steam has been released and brings new content. MeinMMO editor Benedict Grothaus has played the new content and finds one of his favorite games now even harder – but also much better.
What kind of game is it?
- In Against the Storm, you build cities and must take care of your residents’ needs to keep them happy. The different peoples each come with their own advantages in production and preferences regarding food and work.
- Unlike in Anno, you are playing against time: The seasons change and during the “storm” season, everything becomes even more difficult due to threats. Each year, the storm gets stronger, with more dangers.
- You have to continuously restart the settlements with new conditions and new possibilities. After a certain time, the entire map is reset, and all settlements are destroyed. Against the Storm thus offers virtually unlimited replay value, while also featuring a meta-progression that keeps pushing you further, no matter how successful the settlements were (
Roguelite
).
This is what the DLC includes: On July 31, the Nightwatchers DLC was released, which is now the second paid content for Against the Storm. The DLC is available for the PC version (Steam, Epic, GOG, Microsoft Store) and costs €14.99 or only €13.49 until August 14 on Steam. The console version for PS5 and Xbox will follow later.
With Nightwatchers, there are now bats as new residents as well as two new biomes: the bamboo forest and the rocky gorge. The biomes come with unique gameplay mechanics:
- In the rocky gorge, there is no wood, which is usually common, posing a significant problem. You must keep a flame alive to prevent your villagers from despairing. Instead, you can obtain wood from the unique black market or random events and merchants. The “forests” provide you with stone and other materials.
- In the bamboo forest, there are no natural cultivation areas, which significantly limits food production. Instead, there is a huge fluffy beak in your settlement that you can take care of to obtain fertilizer and create your own fields.
Bats as new residents are metallurgists who work well but are reluctant to do so – meaning they have bonuses on production but not on morale. They are picky and hardened: If someone else (and weaker) leaves, they become more satisfied. Along with the bats, the council hall is available as a new building, allowing you to banish villagers to strengthen the new people.
Along with the DLC, Against the Storm received the free update 1.8, which included some visual overhauls (like bat architecture), new foundations, buffs, and new upgrades for your only permanent city. There are also some new options that aim to make the game more enjoyable.
New challenges and picky citizens
Against the Storm is one of my absolute favorite games, and I have invested more than 180 hours into this construction game. For me, it is especially a comfort game that I can always play whenever I urgently need a distraction. Here, I can accurately estimate how long a round will take and just unwind – even if it’s brutally hard.
Publisher Hooded Horse has already given me early access to Nightwatchers so I can check out the new content. The bats excited me with their announcement, but Against the Storm has become even more complex with the DLC:
- Bats are incredibly demanding. They cannot be “preferred” and their needs are difficult to satisfy. Once you have them in the settlement, victory becomes significantly harder.
- The new biomes are an excellent addition. The new mechanics force me to approach things completely differently than before, with recipes and buildings I usually use infrequently or not at all.
- Accordingly, I also utilize the remaining population differently than before. Beavers, which used to be somewhat of a “must”, are no longer as important because the advantages of other peoples become more essential under certain circumstances.
The core feature of Against the Storm is adaptation, which is evident simply from the game idea of having to withstand an unpredictable storm. With Nightwatchers, I am forced to relearn or reevaluate many things. That’s what makes Against the Storm so great for me: It is never the same, in any round, with no update.
As a major point of criticism, I feel that bats seem rather useless for their high needs. They are good metalworkers – a role previously filled by beavers – and thus excel in mines and everything involving copper and such.
I must say, however, that metals and all their products were never particularly relevant for me until now. This will probably change, simply because I must adapt to the new circumstances. With the next 200 hours, this will likely improve as well.
Due to its nature, in which you constantly fight against the storm and have to provide for your population, Against the Storm belongs to the survival genre, or more precisely: to the building survival, a genre that has been booming in recent years. You can find more survival games here: The best survival games 2025 for PS5, Steam, and Xbox
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