After Inc. Review: post-apocalyptic strategy fun

Ndemic Creations | $2/£2

• Streamlined 4X strategy
• Build a community following a deadly plague
• Marshall resources and fight zombies

What comes after a deadly virus that wipes out most of humanity? That’s the premise of After Inc., Ndemic’s long-in-gestation follow-up to the gleefully nihilistic 2012 hit Plague Inc.

Put aside the slightly uncomfortable fact that it was you, the player, who was guiding said virus along its destructive path in the first game. You’ve switched sides for the sequel, and now it’s your job to build the remnants of humanity back into multiple functioning pockets of civilization.

The action might have zoomed in from the previous global scale to something more intimate (think settlements rather than entire countries), and the playing pieces are now people and buildings rather than germ mutations. But this is essentially another attempt to condense the so-called ‘4X’ strategy (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate) genre onto a mobile screen.

After hitting the initial Settle button, you won’t be bombarded with confusing stats or fiddly little buttons here. Everything is streamlined to show you only the most important information for the current moment. Little water, fuel, and food icons will only appear when your growing community starts to need more of them, so it’s always easy to prioritize.

There’s another permanent icon to let you know how happy your people are, and it’s important to keep morale high to give yourself some breathing room when those resources start to dwindle. You’ll also need to make the odd multiple-choice decision, weighing up the pros and cons according to the current strengths and weaknesses of your community.

Expansion is handled by exploring new areas of each map, which in turn opens up new construction options – lumber mills for wood processing, farms for food production and the like. Occasionally you’ll encounter a gang of rampaging zombies (it was that kind of pandemic), which will require you to train up and deploy fighters.

All of these actions are paid for in stamina, which rebuilds over time and in a manner that can vary depending on the leader you select. More of the latter can be unlocked through regular play, but you can also buy them through an IAP if you’re impatient.

Another factor to consider is the passing seasons, with months whizzing along at an accelerated rate. Have you stockpiled enough resources for those snow-bound months when all your farms stop producing grain?

There’s a lot more to consider in After Inc. than initially meets the eye, but even as someone who doesn’t typically click with this kind of managerial strategy game, I never felt overwhelmed. It helps that you can select your difficulty before each level, but mainly it comes down to Ndemic’s excellent onboarding and streamlining.

It’s possible that After Inc. is lacking in genuine strategic scope and tactical possibilities, but that’s a question for the strategy die hards to tackle. For everyone else this is an extremely intuitive and absorbing game of municipal plate-spinning – with added zombies.