All Will Fall tries something different and makes city-building fun again | Hands-on preview
When you arrive on a damaged ship in the middle of nowhere, with a vast ocean in every direction as far as the eye can see, all hope feels lost. In this post-apocalyptic city-builder, it’s down to you to rebuild civilisation and collect valuable resources while keeping everyone alive. It’s a familiar story, but All Will Fall is incredibly satisfying. Not just in the normal way these type of games are where progress equals success, but with constructing huge structures and keeping them sturdy enough to house human life.
You have a lot on your plate in All Will Fall, but the ebb and flow becomes apparent early on. Find ways to reach resources and build pathways to them; expand you settlement and keep everyone watered, fed, and sheltered; and survive whatever random situations you encounter. For saying it’s the end of the world, it’s a rather vibrant world filled with colour, and the bigger you build your settlement and expand, the better everything looks. Each type of survivor falls into a category like worker, engineer, or sailor, all with their own abilities, and knowing when to use them is something that is always on your mind.
Collecting wood, junk, water, food, and metal acted as the core experience in my preview. By harvesting these resources, I was able to improve living conditions, research new projects that helped my community thrive in a multitude of ways, and really get an idea of what to expect whenever the full game releases. I built shelters for my survivors and began decorating them, stockpiling important materials to keep up thriving, and generally make something of this life we were now thrust into.
There was always untapped resources in the distance, and I had to find a way to reach them. By building a bridge or walkway to them, I could then assign workers to gather. What I didn’t realise is how physics play a big part in creating strong paths for my people to get safely across. If you mess up and something breaks, you can undo your progress and go again, but it acts as a different way to use your brain and I loved that. Once you find a safe way to cross over to a new area, you can then think about building a structure on top of it.
All Will Fall asks you to use your brain creatively just as much as it does intelligently. There are different ways you can create your sprawling city, but without careful planning and research, your people are going to run out of the key essentials that drives them forward, both physically and mentally. Not only that, but you have to deal with changes in the ocean’s level during times of the day, and threats from outside your community. There are even ships that pass that want to join your community, with every decision falling to you.
While you are trying to create something that requires a lot of patience, time, and effort, the gameplay never feels overwhelming. Games like Frostpunk push you to your limits and expect a lot of you, and while you will face many challenges, you never feel overly punished for making the wrong decisions. Life goes on, but as long as you’re willing to put in the effort, All Will Fall is a satisfying city builder that rewards you for your hard work and decision-making.
Although this is only a preview build, I enjoyed what I played of All Will Fall. The world is gorgeous, and the physics-based gameplay when designing and building your community adds a different level of strategy to the genre. The random occurrences that cause you to think fast and mix things up never derail your world, but they do throw new challenges at you all the same. I’m looking forward to getting stuck in and see how it looks when it finally releases some time in 2025.
All Will Fall is coming to Steam in 2025.
