Against the Storm is a fascinating blend of roguelite and city-builder. It was released back in 2023 on PC and is now making its way to consoles including the Nintendo Switch. But with a lot of complexity, depths, and more resource variants than I’ve ever seen, Against the Storm is up against a lot when played on a controller.

I won’t go into an incredible amount of depth on the inner workings of Against the Storm, as it feels like we’d need a few days to cover it all. The basic premise is that you’ll construct multiple cities across a large map as you explore and gather resources for your ruler, the Scorched Queen. Cities are built around pyres which must be constantly fed resources to stay lit. The warmth of these pyres is crucial to the survival of your populace as they hold off against the storms that ravage this world. To keep the pyre lit you’ll need to gather wood and other resources but cutting into the surrounding forests brings with it unique dangers and rewards.

As you grow your town and expand deeper into the forest you’ll stumble into open glades. Some of these are safe, and will contain beneficial boons such as a cache of supplies in addition to more resources to be gathered. Others may be larger and present you with greater rewards, but will carry with them a substantial risk. These risks come in the forms of events that must be completed within a set amount of time to avoid a severe negative effect. Completing these tasks will require you to have specific resources available to you, but you won’t know what those are until you enter the glade. It is a fun risk reward system to engage with as you carefully plot out what trees you’ll cut down and where your city will expand.

In order to keep your city running you’ll need to meet the needs of its various denizens. You’ll be traveling with multiple species who each have their own wants and needs. This can include things like certain forms of shelter, kinds of food, recreation, jobs, and clothing. Let satisfaction drop too low and your populace may begin leaving. In certain scenarios it may even lead to hostility and violence. As such your city will be built around not only expanding, fueling its pyre, and accomplishing set objectives, but on producing the goods needed by the people living there.

This is where Against the Storm starts to get complicated. I don’t think I’ve ever played a city builder or any other kind of strategy game with as many different resources as against the storm. Every basic resource (anything you can harvest from the land) can be processed into multiple other resources, many times the production of one resource will generate a byproduct that is itself another resource. Keeping track of the entire production line necessary to make everything you want to make can be tedious, especially since the menu system can be a little awkward to navigate with a controller. The good news is that you can freely adjust game speed on the fly, and I’d regularly pause to go fumbling my way through menus to find the recipe for whatever it was I needed my city to produce.

The ultimate goal of each city in Against the Storm is to complete enough of the orders sent out by the queen before she grows too impatient with you. This is illustrated by dueling progress bars at the bottom of the screen. Orders may require you to maintain a certain level of satisfaction from your populace for a set amount of time, or deliver a specific resource. For every goal completed the queen’s impatience goes down and your reputation rises. Completing the aforementioned glade events can also contribute to one or both of these progress bars. Upon completing an expedition (successfully or not) you can purchase permanent upgrades to carry with you into the next.

I primarily played Against the Storm on a Switch 2, where it ran extremely smoothly both docked and in handheld mode. Switch 1 performance is also solid though perhaps not quite as snappy. Either way this is a solid port from a technical standpoint. The greatest struggle it faces is in converting a complex mouse and keyboard title to a controller. While I got used to the overlapping combos of button presses to access various screens, navigating tabs with the d-pad remained unruly for the entirety of my time with the game. I had a lot of trouble just selecting the option I wanted and regularly felt like the selection cursor wasn’t moving where I expected it to. If ever there were a Switch 1 game that could use a Switch 2 upgrade purely to add mouse support, Against the Storm would be it.

Against the Storm is enthralling and balances its difficulty with its rewards very well. That being said, if you’re not the type of person to find joy in managing an ever expanding deluge of resource types, you’ll likely be overwhelmed. The learning curve, even with a reasonably well handled tutorial, can be steep. This is only exacerbated by often-times awkward controls, though other elements of this port are very well done. This isn’t going to be a game for everyone, and it's almost certainly better played on a PC, but if you’re looking for a city builder that you can sink endless hours into on your Switch or Switch 2, Against the Storm is among the best options out there.