Most city builders give you a nice patch of land and ask you to get on with it. Wall World Strategy has looked at that arrangement and decided the whole thing would be more interesting sideways. Alawar’s vertical colony management game is out today, 11 November, on PC through Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store.
The job is to establish and maintain a settlement clinging to an enormous wall. That means balancing resources, infrastructure and the needs of your settlers while trying to turn a very questionable location into a functioning home. Research opens up more options, but a growing colony also gives you more to protect when the hostile zyrex come calling.
There is exploration beyond the settlement too, with robo-spiders heading out on expeditions along the wall. Those journeys sit alongside the management work, so this is about more than finding somewhere to bolt the next building. You need to keep the place supplied and developing while dealing with threats that are unlikely to care how carefully you planned the neighbourhood.
Alawar has also expanded the demo for anyone who wants to test their appetite for vertical admin before buying. The updated trial adds new scenarios and biomes, dynamic events, a larger research tree and additional buildings. Difficulty settings and a Sandbox mode are included too, which should be useful if your preferred relationship with colony management involves slightly less panic.
At the time of writing, Steam’s UK listing shows a 15% launch discount, taking the £17.49 price to £14.86. That Steam offer runs until 25 November, so there is time to have a poke around the demo first rather than making a snap decision based entirely on the words “robo-spider”.
You can also find the game through Alawar’s official website. Between the colony upkeep, expeditions and defensive headaches, it sounds like a fairly involved new occupation for anyone whose current city-building problem is that their towns are disappointingly horizontal.