In addition to the unique strategy of War Hospital, another very interesting game in this genre was released in January, namely New Cycle. The game from the Turkish studio Core Engage, released into early access in mid-January. The following text is not a full review, but only impressions of what New Cycle currently offers. Although this is certainly not small.
- Platform: PC
- Publication date: 01/18/2024 (early access)
- Developer: Basic Interaction
- Publisher: Daedalic entertainment
- Genre: Building strategy, survival
- Price: €29.99 (Steam)
Played on the following PC build:
- CPU: Intel Core i5-13600K
- FRAME: 32 GB DDR5 6000 MT/s
- Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 (16 GB VRAM)
- Storage: Solidigm P44 Pro (1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD)
Extremely ambitious…
This is another game 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 going through the historical development of humanity again, only significantly accelerated.
Of course, I would like to start with something that is likely to 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 kinds 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 never cease to amaze you.
On the other hand, I must say that it is really very complex and probably not entirely suitable for beginners in the genre. While it can do a good job of showing you on graphs whether the number of pieces of a certain raw material is increasing or decreasing, in the second half of the game there are already so many raw materials that even an experienced strategist player cannot keep up with it, in my opinion. In addition to all this, you have to deal with the residents themselves: so that they have a place to live, so that they have entertainment, security or health care, so that they have something to eat and drink, so that they have clothing and tools. …There really is a lot to be done, and in addition you will gradually begin to prepare the “ordinary workers” for the more educated and advanced classes of the population.
And that is not all. During the game, you have to beware of 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 do not grow in winter, so you have to rely on other food. And of course, there are also decisions regarding the rules and laws of your settlement, which have a long-term impact on its functioning.
…but also with a number of disadvantages
Despite all this, here and there you can see that New Cycle is in early access. The game has a campaign (which is where my impressions were based), and it can even be played from start to finish, but it is clear that there is still a long way to go before completion. In it, you’ll encounter a few (literally) interesting events that highlight the fact that the conflict between the different factions may be resolved, but it’s really just a promise for the future. I reached the end in about 11 hours and it was just a static screen with text. Although I must say that it is quite interesting.
Of course, it’s not just a lack of content; the game currently suffers from a number of problems. The main one, of course, is the pace. While early on you’ll often wait 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 spawn in huge numbers in waves, so you have an absolute surplus of them, and you discover new technologies so quickly that you don’t have time to build new open buildings at all. This will of course not be easy to set up, but it should be a priority.
The overall balance is also related to this, because, in my opinion, some raw materials are processed too long, and others too quickly. At the same time, more advanced buildings do not provide enough bonuses compared to the basic ones (and they 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.
One last thing regarding the technical side. First of all we are talking about bugs, when, for example, a building does not work as it should and you have to click on several things to “recover”, tasks may not work exactly as planned, and probably the conveyors are the biggest problems. This is a pretty important late-game mechanic that will speed up some buildings (by giving them a supply of resources), but building them so that they can connect to each other properly can sometimes be hell. Not to mention, when you quit the game and load a save, the raw materials on the belt are reset, so you’ll have to wait a minute or so before they even go to that building for production to resume.
Optimization is also not entirely ideal. At first the game ran without problems, but towards the end the frame rate dropped to somewhere around 45 or 40 FPS, and the problem was mainly with the processor. This makes sense given the large number of calculations, but it will definitely need to be adjusted. On the other hand, I must say that the game actually looks pretty good for a strategy game and the chosen art style really suited me. And although the game repeats several songs over and over again, the music is also pleasant.
In general, 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 there’s still a lot missing, but the developers have really stepped up and I hope this is just the beginning of a long journey that the Core Engage team still has to go. . If they continue diligently (and for now it looks like they will, they have already prepared several patches since release and actively communicate progress on Discord), then I’m really looking forward to the full version. But I think it’s definitely worth a try.
Source :Indian TV
