New Cycle rewards meticulous efficiency and foresight. You may have saved or doomed humanity with your first few actions decades in the making.
Core Engage is a relatively new game developer. They were founded only two years ago in Istanbul, Turkey. The studio has not released any other projects, making New Cycle their first official foray into the game’s industry. They are backed by publisher Daedalic Entertainment, who has helped release many other titles, including Barotrauma, Godlike Burger, and Unrailed.
New Cycle’s story begins sometime after an apocalyptic-level solar flare has ravaged the earth. Most of humanity was wiped out, and the remains must rebuild society. Technologies like engineering, electricity, and manufacturing are still known. However, settlements will have to start from the ground up, gathering basic resources like wood, stone, and water.
It becomes very apparent that the game is only launching in Early Access. Many features are promised and teased in the menus and other user interface. New Cycle includes all the basics for a city builder to run, but more quality of life and balance changes will be constantly rolled out.
New Cycle can be played as an open sandbox with most technology and features unlocked or as a campaign where concepts are more slowly rolled out. Two other modes are planned for the future: Sanity, which introduces a deadly disease into the starting scenario, and Old Ways, which will focus on combat and defense. Once a game type is chosen, it cannot be changed.
Several map types can also be picked from. This currently includes meadows, steppes, and tundra. They alter the resource yields, weather, and overall space to build. A mountain map is scheduled for a future update, where players will be disadvantaged in most avenues.
When a new campaign mode starts, you can opt into a tutorial or decline, which cannot be reaccessed. One thing to note is that New Cycle cannot be saved while the tutorial progresses, so be sure to finish it in one go. The tutorial includes basic concepts like gathering raw resources, shortening workloads by building roads and making finished products like meals.
After the tutorial ends, you are left to your own devices to figure out what to do. The game includes an extensive encyclopedia to help explain concepts, systems, and progression. However, it doesn’t cover everything, and you may often find yourself going between gameplay and the index.
New Cycle’s overall goal is to get to the next “Cycle” by building up the settlement to a minimum requirement. For example, Cycle II is achieved by having a population of 40 and gaining a knowledge score of 700. There are eight Cycles currently in the game. By the final one, the settlement may be approaching a way of life closer to our current century.
Each Cycle introduces raw materials that can be located and new building options. In most cases, these technologies also have to be researched. The cost typically includes knowledge and other raw materials like wood or minerals. It also takes a set amount of days to finish researching.
Events can also occur where people will ask for a certain number of resources to be procured. These rarely have deadlines and may have goals that cannot be achieved for many in-game months or years. You also always have the option of flat-out declining an event, though there may be some penalties.
The first oddity of New Cycle is the game’s speed features. Pause mode completely freezes the game – no plans, buildings, or actions can be made while paused. You cannot even check logs or past messages. Core Engage seems to intend that the game instead be played on slow settings, which cuts the time down by 10% speed. However, even at normal speed, the action can be agonizingly slow, and many will opt to play at triple speed to feel like tasks are even progressing.
Another strange choice is that the clock only ticks by in hours, not minutes. This can further make it seem like time is not moving, and then suddenly, the clock jumps a full one, two, or three hours. In slow motion mode, it can even come off even more disjointed as it takes ten times as long for the clock even to tick.
There are three classes of citizens in New Cycle: Workers, Craftsmen, and Specialists. Workers are the most general class and tend to focus on tilling the earth by farming and mining. Craftsmen are better suited for better at forging manufactured goods, and Specialists are for running businesses and highly focused jobs.
New Cycle has some basic elements of survival. All citizens need to eat, as well as withstand weather conditions – including possibly minor solar flares. The latter can include making clothes, building housing, and providing fuel. These personal resources can be distributed differently among the three classes. This can make some parties happy, but the other two may be upset about being excluded.
It is also important to keep citizens in overall good health, as death can cripple the workforce. It is possible for children to grow up into adulthood eventually, but that takes years of time and resources. A more reliable method is to allow quick immigration. Wandering bands will be roaming various parts of the map and can be asked to join the settlement with goods or future promises.
Citizens in New Cycle also automatically build up knowledge – the main currency to create new technologies. Knowledge can also sometimes be used on events or a need to get to the next Cycle. Specialists will help the most with this passive knowledge yield, but sheer numbers of Workers can still be helpful.
Citizens need to be allocated manually, choosing which class is working on which task; classes cannot mix together on one job. For example, a Gathering Camp might have specific slots for gathering mushrooms, fishing, and hunting. It would have been nice if there was some kind of prompt or auto assignment similar to what is in Thriving City: Song.
Outside of constructing buildings directly, ruins of the fallen society also exist. These can be outright destroyed to make space or salvaged for potential parts. After a ruin is cleared out, there is little reason to keep it around.
It is important to connect buildings with roads to increase work productivity. Roads cannot be independently placed and must have a direct connection from at least one entrance to another. Planning out a structured neighborhood like other city builders like SteamWorld Build can make it feel odd. Each road built is also its own separate object instead of merging extensions into one visible continuation.
People, for the most part, just come off as human drones. So many characters are just generics utilizing the same art and a random name. They have no ambient sounds, only speaking a few canned lines when directly clicked on. There is a pure detachment from any humanity, and it is clear citizens are mostly just statistics in an ongoing machine.
New Cycle follows much of the same philosophy of Anno and IXION – city planning is all about efficiency and not creative freedom. You are here to solve a logistics problem with charts and spreadsheets. Once that solution is found, there is no need for deviation or change. The game could use a bit more randomness or alternate gameplay methods.
The art direction is a bit mixed. Character portraits are memorable, showing off the steampunk aesthetic of a society rebuilding from the brink of destruction. But the actual world map is rather bland. Nearly every map is the same washed-out brown and muted green. It can be hard to differentiate buildings or tell where roads were constructed. This view somewhat changes in a winter snowstorm where everything becomes pure white instead.
You may want to play mostly in layer mode instead. This changes the topography only to show resource yields such as water, minerals, or wind. This makes planning much clearer and removes the more garish aspects of the art style.
New Cycle doesn’t utilize sound or music that well. The tracks are serviceable, making the world seem desolate, but are otherwise overly generic. It is rather odd that there isn’t more ambient noise from the population or wildlife; the only thing that is constantly audible is industry. There is very little voice acting, but even that small amount is amateurish.
The above factors also result in a lackluster user interface. Most other citizen builders bombard you with audible pings and constant pop-ups to inform you that progress is happening. New Cycle, on the other hand, has almost no notifications or automation. Instead, you have to scour the whole region and check the log to see if something has just been completed.
New Cycle has a good foundation for a city planner with strong survival elements. But it still needs polish, balance, and lots of quality of life improvements. It is very clearly an Early Access title. For fans of the Anno series, investing in the game now might be worth the risk. For others, it might be better to wait and watch when New Cycle eventually hits its full release.
