If you love city builders and roguelikes but you haven’t played Against the Storm yet, you’re missing out. Eremite Games and Hooded Horse’s beautiful strategy game blends approachable but deep mechanics with flavorful dark-fantasy visuals, and has earned itself Steam’s coveted ‘overwhelmingly positive’ rating with 95% of user reviews recommending it. Following the launch of its 2024 Keepers of the Stone DLC, which introduced Frog villagers, the developer reveals that it has another expansion pack on the way, and you can sign up to help test it today if you’re interested.
In our Against the Storm review, Josh praises the city-building game as a “near-perfect” blend of genres, and it’s only continued to grow since then, having now sold more than 1.5 million copies. Through multiple updates and a paid expansion, Against the Storm is even better today than it was at launch. Now, we’ve been given a glimpse at what’s next. The second DLC will include several features, but the standout introductions will be another biome and a new villager species: bats.
Against the Storm’s bat-people are described as “stern and fiercely devoted.” First introduced as part of a community vote two years ago, Eremite Games says their arrival will “complete the species roster we’ve envisioned for the game.” It adds that the newcomers are experts in metallurgy but find no particular comfort in any specific type of work, and that they “take pride in enduring what breaks others and cannot stand being favored.”
Bats utilize a passive ability called Dedication, which causes them to gain Resolve when members of other species leave or die. This sounds like it should make them particularly useful for any situations that are proving too tough for your other villagers. The arrival of bats will also be accompanied by another free content update for Against the Storm.
Eremite notes that both the new DLC and corresponding update are currently “still months away,” but if you’re curious to try out the new additions you can actually do so right now. Starting today, an open alpha test for the DLC will be taking place via an experimental branch on Steam. Note that there are no incentives for taking part and you should expect to encounter placeholder assets, bugs, and balance wobbles.
If you’re interested in taking part regardless, you can do so by heading to the ‘betas’ tab in the game properties menu from your Steam library. From there, enter the private beta access code ‘LetMeTestTheDLC’ (without quotation marks) and you’ll unlock the ability to join the DLC 2 open alpha, which is planned to run for approximately four to six weeks.
It uses the same save files as the game’s experimental branch, and you’re also able to employ a selection of console commands to jump through the progression so you can test the new content however you wish ahead of its full launch later this year.
Whether you’re on the hunt for the best roguelike games or the best strategy games on PC right now, we’ve got you covered.
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