When the demo for New Cycle first came out, I puttered with it for a little bit and thought, “Hmmm, this might have potential.” And now, as it approaches its Early Access release date, I have the distinct feeling that I may have erred. New Cycle puts you in the shoes of a nameless settlement leader fifty years after a massive solar flare brought our current civilization to ruin. Using the immediately available resources of your starting zone, you must rebuild from a tiny camp all the way to a bustling metropolis, all while keeping your people fed, clothed, and healthy. As you progress, you’ll rediscover lost technologies, deal with natural disasters and man-made problems, and learn to build up supply chains like a post-apocalypic Jeff Bezos. In its current state, only access to the Sandbox and Campaign modes were available, though two others are listed. Those other scenario modes, each positing a more heavily built up settlement, appear to be either locked behind an undescribed milestone or are just unavailable right now. Similarly, you have access to three different biomes at the start, but the fourth is blocked off.
Visually speaking, New Cycle isn’t a bad looking game. Different environments are pretty well detailed, and the weather effects are consistent with the seasons, as well as one-off events like sandstorms and lightning strikes. There is a definite aesthetic in place as you work your way up the tech tree and new buildings become available. Early tier structures carry a simple rustic feel, while their successors have an early Industrial Era (and later modern) look to them. As you develop, you’re able to explore surrounding regions using an overland map that shows the zones and their particular resources. As you play, residents will putter about your town and you can click on them to get finer details about each of them, though you won’t be able to zoom in closely enough to get facial details on the models. Their stat card will likely carry a portrait, though several villagers will likely have the same portrait if you click on them enough. The user interface in general is fairly clean, though certain quibbles stick out regarding the presentation of available resources.
The audio on New Cycle is pretty minimal. The soundtrack is sparse and not terribly inspiring, a problem if you’re trying to get yourself into a flow state to manage the myriad demands of your settlement. Environmental audio is a little better, but even that isn’t what I’d call particularly impressive. There is no voiceover work of any kind, which I can understand from a logistical perspective, but it does hamper the immersion.
When it comes to gameplay, New Cycle is a hot mess. Some might make invidious comparisons between New Cycle and Frostpunk, and I can see that perspective. You get the feeling that somebody wanted to make Frostpunk with more stuff crammed into it, and not have to deal with that pesky “we’re all going to freeze to death!” moodkiller of a theme. It makes a number of assumptions about how far civilization would fall in the event of a high-energy solar discharge which does not translate into a fun experience. And within those assumptions, it does everything to try and punish you for advancing.
You see all of your resources at the top of the screen. But it doesn’t make any distinction between raw materials (iron, wood, stone, etc.), processed materials (ingots, lumber, glass), and finished goods (clothes, tools, prepared meals). It’s all just stuck in there, creating potential confusion and quietly demanding you reorganize the layout to suit your own taste. Not a great deal of fun, and silly given how they’re perfectly OK with using a tab system for the various structures you can lay down. Speaking of which, the developers (I think) accidentally did something right by auto-generating bridges across rivers. It makes getting to areas split by a river gorge less painful. But it’s disappointing that such convenience feels like it was an oversight.
While there is a seasonal cycle in New Cycle, there isn’t a day/night cycle, which is odd given that it marks each season by a number of days. The fact you can’t evenly divide the number of game days which pass into a game year is deeply irritating. And no matter how much time passes, it feels as though raw materials, processed materials, and finished goods are all consumed at exactly the same rate rather. This leads to a lot of material shortages and a feeling that you’re supposed to lay out your settlement in a highly specific fashion rather than anything organic.
This feeling is only reinforced when you leave the Sandbox mode for the Campaign mode. There, events occur on a strict timetable. You have no way of avoiding these events. You have no way to fulfill these events ahead of time. You’re just going to get slapped with conditions and circumstances that will eat up all of your production for several game days (instead pulling from your existing stocks, which would have been sensible). Making things worse is a high degree of information opacity. You’re seeing numbers, you have access to charts and graphs, and somehow you don’t feel like you understand exactly how everything’s working together.
There’s a serious lack of cohesive worldbuilding and narrative structure in the Campaign mode. You’re visited by at least one other major faction, along with small bands of other survivors, yet you find no evidence of them anywhere on the exploration map. Adding insult to injury, random events such as fires and lightning strikes will either destroy your buildings slowly or instantly, and usually at the worst possible times. Fires in houses and industrial buildings happen, I get that. People get careless. But even a beaten down technical base should be able to figure out the basics of a lightning rod. By the same token, it destroys the suspension of disbelief that a settlement which is capable of making glass is somehow incapable of building greenhouses for year-round cultivation of vegetables and herbs, much less figuring out how to cultivate edible mushrooms or figure out how to deploy small-scale aquaculture.
Worse, it feels as though the biome maps are entirely static. Playing the demo, I wasn’t sure if the maps were procedurally generated or if the developers had a “deck” of different biome maps. But in its current iteration, New Cycle has exactly one map for each biome. Yes, they’re distinctive, but they feel like they’re fundamentally rigged against the player. An extra twist of the knife in the same vein involves the exploration map. You’re essentially rebuilding an entire country, and all your scouting efforts turn up are points of interest. The thing is, the shape of that map is also static. The contents of each zone might be different from playthrough to playthrough, but it’s hard to tell.
When New Cycle finally comes out in Early Access next month, if this is the state it goes out in, I suspect there’s going to be a lot of very unhappy players. I’ve rarely witnessed a game actually get worse from the quality seen in its demo, but this one manages to pull that feat off. If you’re a hardcore city-builder and you’re needing something to fill your time between now and Frostpunk 2, you may want to keep an eye on New Cycle, but you might be better served to wait a bit and see where it goes.
Axel played New Cycle on PC in Early Access with a review code.
