Summary

All Will Fall is a post-apocalyptic survival city builder set in a world consumed by an endless ocean. Players must construct and manage a vertical colony, balancing resource management, exploration, and societal needs while dealing with unpredictable events and moral decisions. With both structured scenarios and a sandbox mode, the game offers a mix of challenge-driven gameplay and creative freedom.

Plotline

Similar to most city builders, there isn’t a storyline that you’ll need to follow to the end. Instead, the game is more open-ended in the sense that it allows you to craft your own story based on the decisions you make during events and incidents.

Gameplay

Similar to most survival-style city builders, the gameplay in All Will Fall mostly focuses on scavenging, resource production, and, once you’ve got all the basics down, expansion. Scavenging here is fairly straightforward - you just need to highlight which salvageable items you want your people to go collect. There are various types of resources in this game, ranging from the necessities like food and water, to crucial building materials like wood, stone, and eventually, metal.

Some of these salvages can be a bit tricky to get to, requiring you to build a series of walkways and ladders to reach. Others are submerged under water, only appearing for a brief while when the tide is low. At one point, you’ll also get to build ships that can be used to salvage items far beyond your little concrete island, including flotillas of resources that will sometimes float by, as well as fish shoals to fish for… well, fish!

The raw materials obtained can sometimes be processed into other equally crucial resources. For instance, you can burn wood to desalinate seawater and produce drinkable water for your population. You’ll also need to build homes to house your people and keep them happy (or at least content). There are three groups a.k.a. “factions” in this game, namely workers, builders, and sailors, but thankfully, there’s no need to build separate housing for each faction. The factions may sometimes have differing opinions on certain situations, though, which can complicate things for you.

Note as well that although your population doesn’t reproduce on its own, you will still get requests from the occasional survivors who would like to join your growing town. However, this all depends on your influence.

Influence is a bit finicky in this game - it's easy to consume but hard to gain. The game will occasionally (or at certain milestones) present you with incidents that require your immediate attention. Your decision to resolve these issues - and you do get a variety of choices depending on which faction you’re leaning towards and what resources you can spare – will then affect your influence gained… or in some cases, even subtracted. Although not all of the events you get are moral dilemmas, in a way, this aspect of the game reminds me fondly of Frostpunk since your decisions do have an impact beyond just the resources gained or deducted via this influence metric.

Like any self-respecting city builder, there’s a research tree where you can invest resources and time to unlock new technologies that can help improve the survivability of your population. Granted that not every research is super helpful, there are some, like the fishing hut and wood boiler, that are critical to progression and survival – best get those as soon as you can! In other words, follow the quests, and you won’t find yourself soft-locked. After all, some resources are finite, especially in the beginning, when you can’t access other buildings, and there is no way to produce them.

As you progress in this game, you’ll also notice that the water level will go down over time… permanently. This also means that anything, resources or event crates, that remained on higher floors of buildings can sometimes be trickier to get to if you wait too long. FYI, crates are like reward chests that sometimes require enough resources or manpower of certain types to open. They typically contain harder-to-get items, so they are pretty coveted.

One of the game's main highlights is its physics-based building. In this game, there’s no such thing as a bridge suspended or supported by thin air. Everything you build, especially those over water, needs to be properly supported, or it will fall like a tower of matchsticks. The priority system is very helpful as well, since you may want your people to focus on gathering a specific type of resource you’re running low on, rather than just every resource you’ve marked out.

The AI pathing is surprisingly good here, too. I love that the game visualizes each person's path to a given place. That said, there are still some instances when my people couldn’t reach where they need to go despite having the right ladder or platform to do so, but usually, creating a new route or editing the current one will fix this up real quick.

Graphics/ Sound

All Will Fall presents a gritty, semi-realistic 3D visual style, shaped by its post-apocalyptic, ocean-drowned setting, that gives it a distinctly industrial and survivalist aesthetic. The verticality of cities adds another layer of visual identity, with sprawling multi-level settlements rising above the ocean in complex, often precarious formations.

In terms of sound, the soundtrack in All Will Fall leans toward a mix of melancholic, ambient, and slightly hopeful tones, reflecting both the desperation and resilience of humanity while creating a moody, atmospheric soundscape that complements its survival themes.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, All Will Fall stands out by combining realistic physics with a stark, atmospheric presentation. Its industrial, ocean-bound visuals emphasize fragility and survival, while the dynamic building system turns the city itself into a living, unstable structure. The result is a city builder that feels less like controlled planning and more like balancing on the edge of disaster, where every decision quite literally holds everything up or brings it crashing down.