ALL WILL FALL, an Upcoming Physics-Based City Builder That Left Me Feeling Surprisingly Optimistic

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If we overlook the doom and gloom game title of "ALL WILL FALL", we'll find that the story here, although quite bleak, is actually one of hope. In a post-apocalyptic world where the planet has been overrun with water, you take control of a small group of survivors who are trying their best to harvest what resources they can and rebuild a sustainable living environment.

ALL WILL FALL - Gameplay Impressions

As the game title alludes to, ALL WILL FALL is a city-builder with physics. As you start to build your city, you'll need to construct walkways between the structures left behind after the apocalypse in order to access more resources and space to build on. These walkways have a stability rating, and if you don't build them sensibly, the whole structure will collapse. Leading to a loss of resources, or worse.

Now, in the demo, this isn't such a big deal, as there's a big "undo" button, and you won't actually suffer a penalty for making the mistake, but we're assured that there will be difficulty levels where you can't simply undo, and you'll have to face the consequences of over-extending.

But beyond this interesting premise, the game itself is a competent city-builder. You'll quickly need to organize methods of acquiring the basics such as food and water. You can do this by ransacking food piles that have been left over from the apocalypse, but for a long-term solution, you'll need to build a research lab up and discover more sustainable methods, such as fishing or rain collection or even how to build a dock so you can send out boats to gather resources.

Not to mention, that as the game progresses, the sea level will continue to fall, revealing more land and resources for you to build on and claim, which keeps the sense of discovery going, wondering just what will be uncovered next.

ALL WILL FALL isn't just about gathering resources and surviving either, you'll also need to manage your own influence and the loyalty of your colonists. As you play, events will occur in the game world, either positive ones such as another group of survivors finding your colony and wanting to join, to more troublesome ones such as quarrels breaking out between the factions, forcing you to make a decision who you will side with.

The whole game really comes down to a balancing act. A lot of ways of gaining one resource require you to spend another. Events that give you loyalty with one faction, will often harm the loyalty of another faction. It's up to you to keep a close eye on your resources and the factions of your colony to make sure everything is running smoothly. Despite this balancing act, I never felt stressed at any point, and you can pause the game at any moment and take your time with a decision.

While the full game will have several levels, the demo just has one available, but that was plenty to get a good feel for the game. There's also a generous amount of content available, with around half of the buildings in the game being available to research during the demo.

If this does sound like your kind of game, you should head on over to Steam and give the playtest a go.

ALL WILL FALL - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Unfortunately, perhaps the most negative part of ALL WILL FALL that I encountered during my time playing it, was the performance and optimization of the game.

Playing on the Steam Deck is impossible, as the game fails to even break 20 FPS on the lowest graphical settings. Even on my gaming PC, I was frequently playing in the 30 FPS range, admittedly I was playing at 1440p with high settings. But even so, the game is not particularly impressive graphically, so the poor performance was unexpected.

As you can disable shadows, which has no effect on performance as far as the Steam Deck is concerned, I can only imagine the issue has to do with rendering the water, and sadly, there are no options to adjust the quality of the water in ALL WILL FALL, meaning there's not much we can do to fix the performance.

Conclusion

ALL WILL FALL is an interesting city builder. The physics mechanic isn't fully fleshed out in the demo, but in the final release, I could see it being a major gameplay mechanic that will liven things up. Right now, the act of resource gathering and expanding your settlement feels good and well-balanced, and I can't wait to see where this game goes. You can wishlist ALL WILL FALL on Steam, or check out the playtest running right now. The game is due to launch later in 2025.

My only gripe right now is the fairly poor performance that the game runs at.

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