The former Civ 5 director's long-running passion project
is filled with nice ideas, but they never threaten to pull together.
One of the first tutorial pop-ups you'll get in At the Gates - and
there aren't many - warns you that this is a "hard, slow game". It's not
the warmest of welcomes but that's not what At the Gates is about. This
is a game about surviving gruelling winters and, slowly but surely,
expanding your economy and influence against the odds. There's nothing
wrong with that; hard games are often the most rewarding, and slow ones
can be soothing. The problem, however, is that it's less hard than it is
exasperating, and less slow than it is straight-up catatonic.
The setup in At the Gates is pretty standard 4X stuff: choosing a
faction - with the only one available at the start being the vanilla
Goths (more are unlocked by conquering or allying with them in-game,
which is a nice touch) - and then spawning, with very little, in a
random position. The structure, though, is surprisingly different: you
get one Settlement for the entire game, and instead of buildings within
it, all of your economy is built around people, or Clans. At the Gates has fantastic tooltips, to its credit. I do love a good tooltip.
At the surface this is a neat idea - you're playing from the humble
beginnings of a hunter-gatherer tribe, not a grand, imperial
civilization - and so bringing the human element of early civilization
to the fore makes sense. The problem is that in practice, as with so
many things in At the Gates, it just doesn't quite click. You start with
one Clan - a single unit - and you need to train them in a profession,
like Reaper or Gatherer, that falls within one of six disciplines, like
Agriculture. You need to unlock the profession first, by studying it
from the tech tree, and then once you've studied it you can begin your
little unit's training.
The idea, I think, is that this builds into a nice, efficient cycle
of studying the tech tree and then training units in what you've
unlocked, but in my time so far it's never really threatened to get
going. To train a Clan in a profession they need to be housed inside
your settlement's base building, where they're not doing anything - so
you'll need to pluck core parts of your economy out of the economy
itself to actually progress them. Winter is tough, and it's very easy to get caught out - sometimes unfairly, however.
That slows things right down, of course, but more than that it
often just leaves you with two equally unsatisfying options: make no
progress in your economy (often at the risk of genuinely starving to
death), or make no progress in the actual advancement of your society.
Too often you have to choose the latter, keeping your extremely
narrowly-specialised units out in the wild gathering resources of
whatever kind that's available, for you to just about get by, whilst you
languish behind the other more-developed societies in the game. Repeat
reminders that you're not training anyone - !!! - mean you're made to
feel almost guilty that your settlement isn't continuously re-tooling
units into something else, but there just isn't the incentive to.
There's no reason to change your Reaper to a Fisherman in a land-locked
field of wheat, just because you can. Instead, it feels like the game is
built for you to stagnate.
The other big headliner for At the Gates is its seasonal changes, a
weather system designed to give the game a certain rhythm, which again
feels like a small-but-smart shift in 4X design on the surface and,
unfortunately, again feels like more of a shackling of the fun than an
enhancement of it in practise.
Depending on where you start on the map, you'll feel the winter
months to different effect - the in-game years take 24 turns to
complete, with about 10 to 12 turns of winter - but you'll always feel
it to some extent. As the year progresses from spring through to winter
the map, a gorgeous, painterly thing, gradually evolves with it, until
it freezes over, the vast majority of it painted a deceptively festive
white. The impact for you is decidedly less cheerful. Many resources,
particularly food, become ungatherable, so you'll need to stock up in
advance. Some tiles become impassable due to blizzards, on top of
already impassable or severely hindering terrain like swamps, flooding,
or rain. The rest are suddenly deeply hazardous - your units often can't
move more than one tile, and if they're outside the small area of
effect of your settlement, they'll need supplies to survive, or they'll
starve to death. Supplies are gathered simply from the tile they're
standing on, and almost all of them have no supplies in the winter, so
you'll need to plan well ahead: leave a Clan more than a few tiles
outside of your settlement for the cold months and there's a good chance
that, without careful micromanagement, they'll die. Diplomacy is rather unformed in At the Gates. There are
few options other than accepting or rejecting the demands of the AI as
and when they come up.
It sounds tough, and it is, but where it moves from tough to
exasperating is in the little failures of the UI in clarifying the
consequences of what you do - no warnings or notifications that a Clan's
struggling for instance, either in combat or in starvation, means that
once you've acquired more than a handful it's very easy to lose one
without even noticing. Multiple times I've had long-serving Clans that
had ever so gradually built up experience and level in their discipline
go on to die without even realising it. On another occasion, I tried to
move one from its position just two tiles out of my settlement area back
into safety, and it died on the one tile in between because it wasn't
quite clear whether moving it would allow for the usual one-turn grace
period where it can survive on low supplies or not. There goes five
hours of training with it.
As for the rhythm, what this all means is that you effectively
can't do anything for half of every in-game year - in other words, for
half of your time playing the game. Every winter, you need to bring your
units back to safety from the resources they were foraging, or
micromanage them in short-term encampments. You could retrain them,
seeing as you've already shuttled them back to the settlement, but then
there's little point in that because there are only certain resources
nearby, and only these bottom-of-the-tech-tree professions can harvest
them. So you spend ten to twelve turns doing little more than clicking
'next turn'. Then maybe four turns just walking units back to where they
were through the awkward terrain, and before you know it it's time to
start prepping for that winter again - don't forget it takes even longer
for them to get back! Arguably the primary way you interact with At the Gates
is through its tech tree, but with the pinnacle of your civilization
being... fishmongers, it fails to capture that compulsive spirit of
progress.
None of those gripes really get to the core of At the Gates'
problem though: that it just doesn't give you a reason to keep playing.
It's almost a survival game, asking you to find ways to hold out against
the harsh world and worrying foes that surround you, but it just
doesn't have the texture to make that compelling. There's not enough of a
reason to stick with my silent, often belligerent and precious Clans
through the tough times. There's not enough of a tease of what's to
come, a game built around a tech tree - which should be a 4X fan's dream
- but with the most glorious accomplishments of that enforced and
seemingly endless teching being an upgrade of my Bard to a Minstrel.
After a long time grinding out the seasons you'll eventually find
an equilibrium, where you just about get enough food and resources to
keep ticking over, you've stopped having any kind of trouble with
bandits, there's no reason to progress further up the tech tree to
simply take your people out of their finally-just-about-working jobs,
and the enemy factions don't really have any interest in attacking. That
Roman Empire you're supposed to be overthrowing just keeps giving you
some food every now and then for playing nice. At that point, naturally,
you take a step back: to think about not just what needs doing next,
but what point there is in you doing anything whatsoever, and that's
where At the Gates hits a pretty impassable wall.
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