The world’s gone to pot in All Will Fall, and the tides have risen to the point where you need a ship to survive. Luckily enough, we had one. Unluckily, it somehow ran aground on what appears to be the top of a skyscraper. Finding solid ground is nice, as all that sloshing around wasn’t doing anyone any good, but our ship is out of commission, and we have to find a way to survive on the few slabs of available concrete. Quite the pickle, but I love a challenge.
TinyBuild and All Parts Connected’s All Will Fall is a physics-based survival city builder, which is both a mouthful and really the only way to describe what’s going on here. Think Ubisoft’s The Settlers meets Jenga, with a little bit of Frostpunk thrown in for good measure. You’ll do the regular city builder stuff – constructing buildings, gathering resources, that type of thing – only you’ll be forced to work within the small surface area of whatever building you’ve landed on.
Food, water, and shelter are the basics you’ll want to sort as quickly as possible. You’ll find small parcels of resources dotted around your living area, and sending your people to gather these will give you enough to ensure you survive the first few days. After that, it’s time to put your thinking cap on.
All Will Fall’s USP is the building. You can build horizontally and vertically, but you must always consider structural integrity and gravity. The tides go up and down, and occasionally you may discover other potential building areas as they do so. Getting to these will require you to build bridges, but it isn’t just a case of connecting one side to another; you may need to build supports if the bridge is too long, and even then, you may find it a disaster waiting to happen.
Occasionally, I had to take a long way around when getting from A to B, connecting smaller island ruins, and using ladders to gain height before building a stable crossing point. Towards the end of my playtime, my settlement looked like a web of wooden boxes, with the workers buzzing around like industrious spiders.
Once I was out of the initial danger, my focus turned to sustainability. You have a large tech tree to work with here, and you’ll have to decide between tools that rely on the environment, such as rain catchers, and others that require a secondary resource to operate, such as wood boilers. With the former, you always risk suffering a drought, while the latter is problematic as it requires a constant stream of wood. I went hard on rain catchers only for no rain to fall for a worryingly long time. I soon began to fidget, fingers hovering over the wood-guzzling alternative.
It doesn’t help that your citizens have a voice. I mean, it’s nice for them to be able to demand things like extra food and the like, but it throws a spanner in the works when they want, say, more water. How selfish. I acquiesce, of course, but it takes a second as I weigh up what we have vs what they want.
Your population is split into three factions: workers, engineers, and sailors. Each has slightly different attributes when it comes to gathering, researching, etc, and you’ll get the most out of them if you assign them to the right buildings. Keeping them on-side is also important, with various boons available depending on how happy they are and how much they trust you. It’s another balancing act, but one that gives your people some depth.
Occasionally, you’ll encounter a random event, ala Frostpunk. Little illustrations pop up in the corner of your screen, with a few choices below. This could be a ship of people approaching, for instance. You have a choice to make: do you opt to take these people on, increasing your workforce but also adding an extra drain on your resources, do you let them carry on their way, or do you demand they leave whatever supplies they have and send them packing?
Each choice has a consequence. You could gain some reputation with your workers but annoy the sailors, or you could please everyone but lose a ton of wood. There was one time when a slaver ship tried to sell me a person. They got told, and I quote, to “fuck off.” Everyone liked that.
Towards the end of my playthrough, a mysterious structure appeared as the tide fell. I won’t go into specifics, as I think the speculation was part of the fun, but the opportunities this could unlock later on in the survival game are intriguing, and I think I’ll be dipping my toe back in when the full release rolls around.
All Will Fall strikes a balance between expansion and maintenance, and the puzzle-lite elements of building my settlement forced me to think outside the box in a way most other city builders don’t. My houses may resemble a bunch of crooked teeth, but they’re solid, and that’s okay for now.
