One of our favorite city builders has sold over a million copies on Steam, and there's an expansion on the way

A fantasy city near a mountain
(Image credit: Eremite Games)

Typically when you're playing a city builder, the metropolis you're constructing is meant to last a long time. In fact, making your city last the whole game is usually the entire point of the game. 

That's one of the reasons why Against the Storm stands out from the crowd. The cities you build won't last long because they simply can't. In this strange fantasy realm, a magical catastrophe has resulted in a world on the brink of annihilation from hurricanes and rainstorms, and the cities you build are doomed from the start. Managing a group of settlers who can be humans, lizards, or beavers, you'll contend with the elements and also  the demands of an increasingly impatient queen as you try to gather enough resources to build your way further into the world.

We really dig it here at PC Gamer—our Against the Storm review (91%) calls it a "well-designed, charming, enthralling roguelike city builder"—and now we've got solid proof we're not the only ones enjoying it. According to developer Eremite Games and publisher Hooded Horse, Against the Storm has sold over a million copies on Steam. That's a whole lotta happy builders: it's got a rating of "Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam with over 21,000 reviews, too.

"We find it incredibly reassuring that even such a small and relatively unknown studio like ours can thrive on Steam," said Lukasz Korzanowski, co-founder of Eremite Games. Korzanowski also credited the time Against the Storm spent in early access, communicating with players and "listening to their feedback" as a big part of the roguelike's success.

The studio isn't finished, either. Another free update to version 1.3 is in the works, and an expansion is planned for later this year that will add a new species, an additional biome, plus new buildings and events.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

Read more
A medieval merchant in a small village
Manor Lords, the best city builder of 2024, hits 3 million sales as players continue to fill its maps with muddy medieval towns
Manor Lords promo art - knight on horseback looking at a medieval village in the distance, viewed from behind
PC Gamer's Best City Builder of 2024 has sold over 2.5 million, but here's the big news: Now it has bridges
Personal Pick: Against the Storm
Against the Storm looks charming and cosy, but it's actually the best and most fiendish city builder I've played in years
A city near a waterfall
I played a whopping 23 city builders in 2024, and here are my 5 favorites
A castle being beset by horrors.
Cataclismo review
Best City Builder 2024: Manor Lords
Best City Builder 2024: Manor Lords
Latest in City Builder
A citizen of a city
Cities: Skylines 2 celebrates 10 years of Cities with more nuanced homelessness and six new DLCs
doctors treat plague-stricken peasants in the medieval-ish city-builder Nested Lands
Nested Lands is a 'brutal' survival city-builder about guiding villagers through a plague-infested world, and you can play its open alpha right now
A medieval city
'It may seem like a whole new game': One of my favorite medieval city builders just got a huge update with a ton of new features
All Will Fall - A concrete and wood ramshackle city in the middle of an endless ocean
This 'physics-based survival city builder' stuffed all my favorite words into its title so I'm automatically psyched
People swimming in a pool and lying on floats
Planet Coaster 2 isn't the financial success that Frontier needed, according to a report, which means there's more pressure on Jurassic World Evolution 3 to bring in the big bucks
A flying city fighting off small airplanes
High-flying RPG city builder Airborne Empire has launched on Steam, and it's testing my balancing skills in more ways than one
Latest in News
Minthara BG3 looking upset
Another round of Baldur's Gate 3 unearthing reveals Minthara can end up living in a sewer, an unused beach ending, and more
A shirtless man rides a big fish underwater
Ark devs distance themselves from AI-generated trailer: 'we did not know that they were doing it'
Team Fortress Spy being shocked
An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo, but the dev insists it was actually the victim of a labyrinthine conspiracy
Neighbors Suburban Warfare screenshot a child aims a slingshot at a man from across a cul-de-sac.
A beta of backyard FPS Neighbors: Suburban Warfare is out now, and the balance discussion is hysterical: nerf trash can lids and children
Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer still - woman in the front seat of a car, looking out the back window while holding a wad of cash
The specter of a GTA 6 delay haunts the games industry: 'Some companies are going to tank' if they guess wrong, says analyst
Screenshot from Wreckfest 2
Wreckfest 2 has hit early access for your car-obliterating combat racing enjoyment