Paradox’s New Grand Strategy Game Is More Survival-RPG Than You’d Expect

There's no denying that Afterworld is a traditional grand strategy game in many ways--big foggy maps, territorial clashes, macro and micro decision-making--but its end-of-the-world scenario presents an opportunity for Paradox Studios to elevate the genre further still. Even in the brief glimpse we had during a hands-on play session at Gamescom, a number of differences are already showing. For a start, Afterworld has a very clear focus on lore-building, which is something the more historical games often take for granted. If you're playing as a Roman General or a post-industrial capitalist, the player tends to know what happened before that point, as a rough approximation of historical events can be summed up in an info screen before moving on. Afterworld is very clearly the outlier: Taking place some 100 years after a mysterious fictional apocalyptic event known only as The Fall, there's a lot to unpack. When you start the game, you're given a vague choice of how you'd like to conduct yourself during the early hours of the campaign. For the demo, we were the de facto leader of a band of newly emerged vault citizens (where have we heard that before?) and our reactor was about to exp…