But I just watched the release date trailer that IGN China dropped for All Will Fall, and I am fully awake now. Game developers finally figured out how to make city planning actually stressful: they added gravity.
Here is the quick rundown before you go watch the trailer: It officially hits PC on April 3rd. If you are the kind of player who likes to balance on the edge of a total mental breakdown, this is going to be your new obsession.
The Core Gimmick: Please Don’t Let the Tower Fall
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic water world. There is no flat land left. You are forced to build your city vertically over the ocean using this completely unhinged 3D building system.
Here is the catch—and the reason I am going to break my keyboard playing this: the game uses actual physics. Newton’s laws do not exist in Cities: Skylines. You can build whatever ugly monstrosity you want. But in All Will Fall, if your center of gravity is slightly off, or if you don’t reinforce your load-bearing pillars, your entire 40-story mega-structure will literally snap and plunge straight into the ocean. Watching the buildings collapse in the trailer is insanely satisfying. (Unless it’s your own building, then it’s just pure pain).
Frostpunk but on the Water?
You aren’t just playing extreme Jenga. You are the leader of a floating colony, which means you have to scavenge the open ocean for resources to keep your people alive. The devs also teased that you have to make “difficult, colony-altering choices.”
So basically, your citizens are starving, freezing, and terrified that the floor is going to collapse out from under them at any second. Being the mayor in this game sounds like an absolute nightmare, and I am entirely here for it.
The survival city-builder genre is incredibly crowded right now, but weaponizing the physics engine against the player is a genuinely brilliant hook.
April 3rd is officially marked on my calendar. I am fully prepared to spend four hours building a massive skyscraper just to watch it tip over because I placed a water tank on the wrong side of the roof.
Who else is jumping in on day one? Let’s see who can build the most structurally irresponsible tower. 🌊🏗️💥
