All Will Fall is a unique survival city builder that takes the standard genre formula and says, "what if you had to build your city up instead of out?". Set in a post-apocalyptic water world, you will attempt to lead a group of survivors to build and thrive in a new kind of city, one that is built upon the remnants of ships and skyscrapers poking above the surface of the ocean.
The game has a lot of elements that will feel familiar if you play similar city builders. Your citizens all have needs that need to be fulfilled while you balance an expanding city that, in turn, needs more people, who need more things. The twist is that regardless of the scenario you choose to play, the build space is very limited. Compound that with an ever-changing weather system that renders certain buildings useless on a frequent basis, and the survival aspect of the game is amped up to 11. Unlike in other games where you can just build a few more farms to get your food production up, in All Will Fall, you may try to get some fishing boats going. Smart, until you suddenly run into a multi-day storm that scares the fish away, and you're back to starving. Not to worry, you can build a greenhouse and grow food. Not so fast, greenhouses need lots of water, which is always in short supply, and require sunlight. Remember that multi-day storm? Yea, no sunlight either. Back to starving.
The survival elements add a significant challenge to the game, but the real meat of the game is the lack of space. The game forces you to build vertically. Before you know it, you'll be navigating a complex maze of walkways, supports, and overhangs that take you higher and further out to make space for all of the things your hard-working survivors want to stay happy. The kicker is that this is the real world, and gravity didn't go away with the fall of civilization. The game does you a favor and readily shows you when your elaborate construction is going to collapse, but it becomes more and more challenging to find strong footings to support your wooden deathtrap.
Later in the expansive tech tree, I can see metal and concrete construction pieces that I'm sure will enable bigger and bolder plans, but I have yet to unlock those. In my current save on the Cyber Tower level, I have lost almost my entire population twice due to a lack of housing because I couldn't get wood fast enough the first time, and due to starvation the second time. I'm now back up to an absolute water guzzling population of 35 people and working towards some basic human powered electricity. Some of this is probably me just being new and/or bad at the game, but the survival difficulty does make technical progression slow.
In another scenario, my city was on a movable old ship. The ship actually has more horizontal build space than expected, but you have the new challenge of being constantly hounded by the nightmarish Hell Storm that destroys everything in its path. Rather than focusing on a big vertical city, you have to scramble to collect resources from the surrounding area before setting sail again to a new location to avoid the Hell Storm. Better keep an eye on those fuel tanks.
I've only played the Cyber Tower and Ship at the time of this review, but the contrast offered by those two scenarios alone has me excited to keep exploring the other levels. The extremely space-limited Cyber Tower is almost an entirely different game compared to the ever-moving ship. The game has 8 scenarios out of the gate, including one that is a randomized map, as well as the ability for the community to share maps within the Steam Workshop. Essentially, there is no shortage of content.
All Will Fall also includes systems for influence with different worker factions, happiness tracks, and random events. Besides the events being overwhelmingly negative, these systems are nice to have, but functionally the same as a dozen other games. I'm glad they are there, but I expected them to be there.
That's going to be it for this review in progress. I want to continue to explore the full tech tree and check out the other levels before updating this with a final score and opinion, but for now, I am really enjoying playing the game and want to keep going. Check back for the full review soon, and check out All Will Fall on Steam now!
