Impressions from playing the New Cycle

In addition to the unique strategy War Hospital, another very interesting game of this genre was released in January – New Cycle. The game from the Turkish studio Core Engage, released in early access in mid-January. The following text is not a full review, but only impressions of what New Cycle offers at the moment. Although this is certainly not little.

• Platform: PC
• Publication date: 01/18/2024 (Early Access)
• Developer: Basic interaction
• Publisher: Daedalic entertainment
• Genre: Strategy of construction, survival
• Price: 29.99 EUR (Steam)

Played on the following PC build:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K
• FRAME: 32GB DDR5 6000MT/s
• Graphic card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 (16GB VRAM)
• Storage: Solidigm P44 Pro (1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD)

Extremely ambitious…

This is another game that is somewhat similar to Frostpunk, but of course has its own specifics. It takes place in the future, after a series of solar flares have wiped out most of the human population. So, you take on a group of people who are determined to build a settlement that could serve as a refuge for the survivors. In essence, you are reliving the historical development of humanity, only significantly accelerated.

Of course, I would like to start with what will probably catch your attention at first glance. New Cycle, despite being in early access, already offers a huge portion of content, especially in terms of all sorts of raw materials and their processing chains. From a sawmill that can turn raw wood into processed wood suitable for construction or making mushroom soups, you can reach an industrialized city with developed mines and factories, large power plants or even a train depot. At least from this point of view, the game will not cease to surprise you.

On the other hand, it must be said that it is really very complex and probably not quite suitable for beginners in the genre. Although it can show you well on the graphs whether the number of raw material parts increases or decreases, in the second half of the game there are so many raw materials that, in my opinion, even an experienced strategy player will not be able to keep up with it. . On top of all this, you will have to deal with the inhabitants themselves: to have a place to live, to have entertainment, security or health care, to have something to eat and drink, to have clothes and tools … There is really a lot to do, and on top of that you will gradually begin to prepare the “simple workers” for more educated and advanced classes of the population.

And that’s not all. During the game, you’ll have to watch out for various natural phenomena, such as thunderstorms, which can affect your working conditions or even destroy a building. Of course, the time of year also plays a role, for example, mushrooms won’t grow in winter, so you’ll have to rely on different food. And of course, there are also decisions regarding the rules and laws of your settlement, which have a long-term impact on how it functions.

…but also with a number of disadvantages

Despite all this, there are still some signs that New Cycle is in early access. There is a campaign (which is what I got my impressions from) and you can even play it from start to finish, but it’s clear that it’s far from finished. There are a few (literally) interesting events that highlight the fact that the conflict between the different factions can be resolved, but that’s really just a promise for the future. I got to the end in about 11 hours and it was just a static screen with text. Although I must say, it’s pretty interesting.

Of course, it’s not just a lack of content, the game currently suffers from a number of issues. The main one is undoubtedly the pacing. While early on you’ll often find yourself waiting until more people finally move on to the next era (or “cycle”) because you don’t have control over it yet, later in the game people flock to you and appear in huge waves so that you have an absolute surplus of them, and you unlock new technologies so quickly that you don’t have time to build new public buildings at all. This won’t be easy to adjust, of course, but it should be a priority.

This is also related to the overall balance, because in my opinion some raw materials take too long to process, while others take too long. At the same time, more advanced buildings do not provide sufficient bonuses compared to the basic ones (and may require special conditions), so it often happened that I preferred to build more basic ones, since there was no shortage of them. people anyway.

Lastly, there’s the technical side. Primarily, we’re talking about bugs where, for example, a building doesn’t work as expected and you have to click on multiple things to “recover”, tasks may not work quite as planned, and probably the biggest problem is conveyors. This is a pretty important mechanic later in the game that will speed up some buildings (give them a resource reserve), but building them so that they can connect properly can sometimes be hell. Not to mention that when you quit the game and load a save, the raw materials on your belt are reset, so you have to wait maybe a minute before they even get to the building for production to resume.

Optimization isn’t exactly perfect either. The game ran fine at first, but towards the end the frame rate dropped to around 45 or 40 FPS, and the problem was mostly in the CPU. This makes sense given the large amount of calculations, but it will definitely need to be tweaked. On the other hand, it must be said that from a strategy standpoint the game actually looks pretty good, and the art style I chose suited me very well. And while the game repeats a few songs over and over, the music is also pleasant.

Overall, New Cycle is a very ambitious strategy game that already offers a large portion of content, several maps, and two modes (sandbox and campaign). It has its flaws, and you can see that it is still missing a lot, but the developers have really stepped up their game, and I hope that this is just the beginning of a long road that the Core Engage team still has to go. If they continue diligently (and so far it looks like they will, they have already prepared several patches since the release and are actively updating on the Discord), I am really looking forward to the full version. But I think it is definitely worth a try.