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In New Cycle, the world as we once knew it has ended by way of solar flares of apocalyptic proportions. Humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction, death and destruction have ravaged any semblance of familiarity, and those who have somehow made it through the apocalypse are struggling to survive.
In the style of big hits like the Anno series and Endzone – A World Apart, it is the players' obligation to unite scattered survivors into a new society, stabilize it, and in the course of time expand their initial small camp to a thriving Dieselpunk metropolis.
That's where you come in to help your community back to a better future. But before you can dream of salvation, your first goal should be keeping your civilians alive while preparing for the unpredictable nature catastrophes that the New World throws at you. Mining, foraging and trading with whatever goods you can uncover will aid survival; and while you'll juggle just a handful of resources when starting out, you'll eventually be switching and swapping between over 40 different resources – all of different scarcities that change dynamically over time - meaning multitasking quickly becomes essential to keeping your settlement alive.
Moreover, the further you progress, the more demanding your population and workforce will become. Developing basic, primitive tools into power tools, for example, can help speed up the means of production – in turn unlocking more complex buildings and upgrades that will help drive your newfound form of society forward. In doing so, you'll also manage your community's Morale, Efficiency and Workforce size.
Everything in New Cycle revolves around good resource management and effective settlement planning. At the beginning, you will only have the opportunity to collect some basic resources such as wood, stone and mushrooms, but over time will develop new techniques to obtain more valuable resources and food sources. Keeping track of time is generally important because as the year progresses the seasons change and with that new challenges arise. If winter preparations are not sufficient and rations are issued too much, the people will starve in the cold winter and cannot find any food in the barren environment. Therefore, it is helpful to research various food sources early on to meet at least the survivor's basic needs.
It is worth mentioning at this point: Like Frostpunk, the resources in New Cycle are limited, so there is always a need to explore, find rich environments and lands, as well as reasonable processes and procedures, so as not to quickly fall into mismanagement.
In practice, this will see you overseeing all facets of your civilians' lives as you strive to make their existence easier moment-to-moment, streamlining your production chains and the faculties you have at your fingertips. In some instances, that might mean pulling your settlement's knowledge, leaning on your most acclaimed academics and celebrated scholars with an eye on rediscovering forgotten technologies; in others, it may mean building central resources such as soup kitchens to ensure your community stays fed and watered. When starting out in New Cycle, you'll first need to meet the basic needs of the working class – but as time progresses, and technologies get rediscovered, you will need scholars and experts who are harder to satisfy.
Through all of this, you can really lose yourself in morale management, with keeping your settlement happy as a whole becoming an entire game unto itself. Tinkering with ration sizes, working hours, daily water distribution, and many more idiosyncratic features will let you find the perfect input-versus-output balance, if such a thing even exists.
To this end, the New Cycle Steam page says: "In the New World as well as in the Old, knowledge is power and unity is strength." And with that, you'll overcome the harshest obstacles of the post-apocalypse, developing forgotten technologies and uniting your settlement by whatever means necessary – lest you risk the lives of your community and humanity as we know it.
The debut venture of Turkish developer Core Engage, New Cycle is a stunning and sophisticated survival city-builder and next time, when you think of the Turkish games industry, Mount & Blade might not be the only game you think of.
If you reckon you're up to that challenge and society survival games like Frostpunk, Surviving Mars, IXION or Endzone: A World Apart, then you should wishlist New Cycle on Steam right now.
