Yet another Steam NEXT FEST is upon us and this time I managed to grab a bunch of games and try them out with more than just half a day to spare. 😂

I've written up my first impressions of three of the games on offer to so far — Aka, Soulstone Survivors, and Diluvian Winds — behind these blue words. All three of those games were polished and enjoyable in their own ways, and I put two of them on my wishlist to purchase at a later date.

Today I'm looking at ZERO Sievert (a post-apocalyptic shooter), Against the Storm (a city-builder), and Earth From Another Sun (an open world space sim). Let's see if these three will show as much promise! 😁

 

ZERO Sievert

ZERO Sievert...

A pixel post-apocalyptic shooter. The premise sounded alright. I was looking forward to exploring an open world, whether it be a pixel one or one more graphically pleasing.

Unfortunately, I can't even show you any screenshots because the game wouldn't allow it, and the image above for the header was screencaptured from the Steam page instead.

So, if you'll allow me to just... babble... with no imagery to break up my words. Let's begin:

There are several different equipment loadouts to choose from before you begin. Each one has a random assortment of guns, ammo, food, medicine. Some are more catered to overall survival and others outright war. Once you've chosen the loadout you'll begin your game with, we find ourselves in a bunker: ZERO Sievert — the last safe place.

There's an area in the bunker where you can craft. You can craft many things: ammo, medicine, food, and you can upgrade your guns.

After speaking to the bartender to get our first quest — to merely survive in the first map, The Forest — I make my way to the traindriver to send me to the forest. The traindriver also asked for some supplies for his train.

It was here everything went wrong. In the loading screening to the forest, I was warned that the game suffers from memory leaks and that I should restart it every 30 minutes or so. And then, finally, the forest loaded and it was running at maybe 5 frames per second.

It was unplayable. Utterly unplayable. So I closed it. Only to discover that I didn't even get any of my screenshots for my time. Thanks, game.

ZERO Sievert is a hard pass at the moment. No. Nein. Nyet.

 

⭐️ ⭐️ 🌈 ⭐️ ⭐️

 

Against the Storm

This city-builder is quite different! You start in the middle of the forest, as decreed by the Queen, and you have humans, lizard-folk, and beavers at your command.

The goal of the game is to grow your settlement before the Queen gets impatient with you and your efforts. She sounds like quite the tyrant!

I was really impressed with the opening scene before the game begins. It was very artistic and pleasing to the eye, and the voiceover was nicely voice-acted.

The game kindly informs you of your win/lose conditions as part of the tutorial, and is always made available to you in the help Atlas. It's time to begin my settlement and try to make the Queen proud!

It might just be because I'm playing the tutrorial, but we're not given all the things at once. I need to gain more favour with the Queen before I'm allowed to build anything. The Queen's messenger allows me the knowledge to build some woodcutter's camps in order to deforest the region, collect wood for my hearth, for building, and to open up new areas of the forest.

I really like how you can move things after you've built them, so you can continuously reposition things, like the woodcutters cabins, to where more trees lie after you chop them down.

Each race has a thing that they're better at, but you can assign them to work wherever. Beavers, of course, are good wood choppers, humans are good at farming and beer brewing, and lizard-men are good food scavengers.

As we play, we receive orders from the Queen. She wanted us to build 2 woodcutter's camps and assign a bunch of beavers to work the wood. Once I completed that, I got rewarded and another objective was given to me.

The rewards are more population for my settlement, food, resources, and sometimes perks, like in the above screenshot where woodcutting has become easier for my peasants.

With the woodcutters we can expand into hidden glades. In these glades can be resources or enemies. Some glades have a big evil skull and crossbone symbol on them signifying that there may be a difficult encounter within.

In the glade above, I found a herbalist camp and some flowers and mushrooms conveniently placed nearby! I had two options upon discovery: rebuild it and use it as my own, or salvage it. I thought the best course of action was to keep it for my own and assign some chumps to farm it. 😛

Every so often, an event will pop up in the top corner of the screen. Most of them seem to be more villagers for your settlement, but in this case I received the option to benefit my settlement a little more.

I went with the exploration contract. It seemed like the better choice, especially this early in the game where I'm very actively exploring.

A very nice feature of this citybuilder is that not only do I build the buildings, but I build the decorations too. I choose where the paths go, where little benches, barrels, decorative flowers, everything goes. It's really nice that I even have the option to build decorative items!

And once again, I'd like to state that it's reeeeally nice that I can move things after I've built them. As I expand, I can make a nicer housing area, for instance, without destroying and rebuilding.

Soon I satisfied the requirements of the tutorial and it was time to start my game properly. I'm really enjoying this one! It's not just a citybuilder like I thought it was, but it's a proper colony sim as well. I need to build, keep my villagers happy and their resolve high, all while completing things at a decent pace so as not to offend the Queen.

It's really good. This one is going on my wish list! Hell, I might even buy this one at full price once it's released. I'm enjoying it that much. I heartily recommend this one and if you have time you should totally check out this demo while it's available during NEXT FEST. 😊

 

⭐️ ⭐️ 🌈 ⭐️ ⭐️

 

Earth From Another Sun

Earth From Another Sun is the one I was most excited to try today, and I'm cautiously recommending it at the moment. I feel as though this could be the Space Sim I've been waiting for.

While I enjoy Stellaris, and Endless Space 2 feels a lot like Stellaris Lite so I enjoy that too, I find most 4X space games and space sims overly difficult. I find that they're too complex, swimming with unnecessary technobabble just to make them sound more modern and spacey, and the user interfaces are generally god-awful.

Earth From Another Sun is very intuitive. It's a nice change of pace!

When we first start up the game, we have to create an account to log in. It seems to be a 1-4 player co-op game, with mass multiplayer city hubs and world chat. I've named myself Kaelci and I'm making my faction the Great Astanian Offensive, despite being more of a defensive person. xD It just sounded spiffy.

You can choose your emblem for your faction and place it on a tapestry type thing. There's also the option to upload images, which could bode terribly for the more immature among us. xD

We're given a bunch of simple quests that serve as a tutorial to learn the game. The first one is a quest that teaches us how to engage an enemy in combat. We fly off around the immediate space area until we find a pirate and proceed to click on them to initiate our attack.

I assumed that it would be ship-to-ship combat, but we end up on an asteroid or something fighting the pirates.

With the battle won, I return to my ship and I level up. Each time you level up you get the ability to unlock new items to craft. In this case I got some armour and potions and grenades!

We then follow a series of more tutorial quests that teach you how to mine nearby asteroid belts, salvage shipwrecks, and craft these items and I feel sufficiently learned for the time being to just go off and explore.

I land on the nearby planet of Terra, New Earth, and marvel at my surroundings. The graphics are quite pretty!

On the minimap you can see where various shops, questgivers and things are located. Thanks to mining a million things while I was exploring, I managed to complete a couple of quests immediately. One of the quests was actually quite amusing and made me smile. 😊 A very, very thankful robot and I had a thanking competition. Thank YOOOUUUUUUUOOOUUOUOUOUOUUUUU. It was amusing.

Curious at what the love-heart symbol on the minimap was, I went on an adventure and found a prostitute, HAHA. I didn't feel like wasting my money on her though. It's only the start of the game. I'm sure there are better things I can waste my money on.

I hopped back onto my ship and went to a hatchery, to collect some eggs for someone back on Terra. This place was intense! I didn't have enough grenades so I was running around and jumping like a loony just shooting all the things and drinking healing potions until I couldn't anymore.

I ended up surviving 13 minutes and killed 300 odd things xD but didn't manage to retrieve any eggs before dying. Definitely need like 50 grenades before going back in there!

This game runs very fluidly, it feels very smooth, the controls and gameplay are intuitive, and I'm really enjoying it.

But back to what I was saying in my first paragraph — what I've been wanting since forever is an accessible space sim of some sort. No Man's Sky is good and all but it doesn't quite scratch the itch that I want, and I'm hoping the upcoming Starfield will be decent but who knows what that's going to be like.

It's hard to explain what I actually want, but this mixture of 1-4 player + multiplayer hub with beautiful environments, quests, good writing, mining, salvaging, upgrading, exploration, the hint of first person 4X... it's amazing. I hope this does well. I want it to be what I want!

I'm enjoying it. It releases in 2023. I'm adding it to my wishlist and I'm hoping it will be grand. GRAND!

 

⭐️ ⭐️ 🌈 ⭐️ ⭐️

 

In conclusion, don't even bother with ZERO Sievert, at least not for a long while. It needs a lot of work for a mere pixel game. I can't believe the frames I was getting considering my setup! For a pixel game! Absolutely ridiculous; I'd hate to see it on an older computer setup. Not to mention the inability to take screenshots, admitted memory leaks, everything. Ugh. Needs to cook a bit more.

Against the Storm and Earth From Another Sun, however, are very much worthy of watching and wishlisting. I'm hoping so badly that Earth From Another Sun turns into the Space Sim of my dreams and Against the Storm is just a brilliant little city-builder/colony-sim that I'm looking forward to diving right into upon release.

So far out of the six games I've looked at, five have been pretty good and only one has been terrible and not fit for human consumption. This NEXT FEST is going well!!

Next on my First Impressions Demo-Fest List are: DREDGE, Forever Skies, and Aquatico. Coming in a day or two! 😁

 

Until next time!! 😊

 

---

 

_{All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci and are from the games: Against the Storm and Earth From Another Sun.}