All Will Fall Review – Frostpunk Meets Waterworld

All Will Fall

Post-apocalyptic oceanic catastrophes must be a thing now, because All Will Fall joins the first person action game Tides of Tomorrow in the same narrative wheelhouse. Of course, All Will Fall is a colony building and management sim, and a pretty good one, at that. Like many games in the genre, All Will Fall also has strong puzzle-like elements swimming alongside.

Upward Mobility

All Will Fall tasks the player with building and expanding complex floating settlements on small plots of floating real estate. Naturally space is limited so that structures must be built vertically. This wouldn’t be a problem but for several annoying, limiting factors. The first is physics, those immutable laws that require weight distribution and structural engineering savvy in order not to…well, fall. Structures will evolve into a web of connected platforms but there is always a risk that the whole Jenga-like construction will topple into the sea.

The second limiting factor is the motion of the ocean. Rising and falling tides, monster waves and storms that roil the sea can also bring down poorly made platforms. At the same time, receding tides can reveal additional resources and buildable property. And even if the entire structure remains generally intact, rogue waves or high tides can wash away specific buildings like housing or food production. A starving population is not ideal.

As with all colony or building sims, there’s always the puzzle-like elements of how, when and where to allocate resources. Additionally, there’s the challenge of catering to the colony’s various factions and subspecialties of Engineers, Sailors and Workers. Although this element of All Will Fall is not especially deep, it certainly adds another layer of complexity overall.

Going Deep

Where All Will Fall excels is in balancing its systems. Building and physics, resource management and people pleasing feel connected in ways that make sense. While no one aspect is deeper than another, the whole assembly provides plenty to think about and tinker with. There’s also quite a bit of content, with 8 scenarios, each with unique challenges, a sandbox mode and level editor. There’s enough depth in the tech tree to allow players some creativity once the basic needs are in place.

All management and building sims suffer from some of the same issues. Mainly, there’s almost always an optimal build order in the early game. You have to have housing and food, you need to collect resources and give everybody something to do. The starting group of workers aren’t self-motivated, they need to be assigned tasks, so there’s some mico-management from the start. While All Will Fall throws enough weather and water-related curveballs at the player to make each scenario a little different, the ocean environment can get a little repetitive.

All Will Fall combines stylized character models with more detailed and realistic structures, and it feels a bit visually incongruent. Controls are mouse and keyboard only, so players will need to abandon their controllers. Placing structures was a little finicky and often required a lot of camera adjustment to fit pieces correctly. This only gets more problemmatic as structures grow in complexity. While not a huge issue, All Will Fall’s music and sound design were fairly bare bones and somewhat repetitive.

Sleeping with the Fishes

Less grim than Frostpunk, All Will Fall transposes a smiliar gather-build-manage loop from the frozen wastes to the endless ocean. Fans of the genre will enjoy All Will Fall’s challenging physics-based construction puzzles, resource management problems and keeping the workers alive and productive. For the game’s reasonable price point, there’s plenty of content available, not to mention Steam Workshop support and custom scenarios. A bit of visual repetition and control quibbles aside, All Will Fall is overall a strong entry in the colony building sim genre.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***