...is a survival city builder. Following a cataclysm that brought civilization to its knees, rebuild a settlement and recruit survivors while scavenging the ruins of the broken world.

You begin with an Oxygen Center, a warehouse with some resources and a few settlers. From there, you build shelters, facilities to collect water and fish, and scavenge empty buildings and derelict vehicles for more resources: basics such as coal, metal, or stone, as well as more advanced material such as metal plates, gears and plastics, among others. Using research points, you eventually unlock mines for stable supply of base resources and a few factories to create more advanced material (although most facilities are locked because this game is a demo).

Survival of your settlement revolves around your need for oxygen. The more population you have, the more oxygen you consume, which requires power. Supplying oxygen to buildings, whether mandatory (such as housing and medical stations) or by choice, requires power. Power can be achieved by burning coal, building gas extractors (on randomly appearing gas cracks) or by using up stored energy. Additional sustainable power sources are unlocked later in the game. Increasing productivity of various facilities requires supplying oxygen to those buildings (so your inhabitants don't constantly stop working to get their oxygen tanks filled). However, you can plant a limited number of trees which, once restored to vitality, will create an oxygen dome to supply close-by buildings for free.

Population determines how large that a settlement can expand, how much resources you can gather, and how much manpower you can dedicate to extra activities, whether it's research, exploration or manufacturing more resources such as metal sheets, gears, bricks, vegetables, etc. Population increases through children being born, the speed of which is determined by the housing quality: Container Houses offer low fertility, Shelters offer medium fertility, etc. The other source of settlers consists of attracting other survivors, either by building a Submarine Dock from which you'll get a few people every couple of days, or building and manning a Signal Tower that scans the regions for broadcasts to unlock areas to send expeditions, resulting in finding a bunch of survivors and free resources.

It's a fairly easy game to get started on. A quick series of tutorials explain how the game works and the purpose each building serves. You're then thrown in a map packed with resources to scavenge. You assign settlers to various tasks, and plan according to the weather forecast. If a poison wind storm is coming, stock up on energy and coal to keep people inside as much as possible during the storm. If a frost period is about to begin, stack up on fish and water before lakes and rivers freeze over. There are little to no cheap surprises or random events to ruin your day if you're prudent.

The user interface is easy to navigate and use. You can see exactly how many resources you have, and even get a short-timeframe average consumption rating for food, water and power, helping you figure out exactly where you need to improve production. Tasks, short objective-based quests, will guide you on what to build or research next, while awarding valuable resources and points to increase your confidence rating, a metric you must achieve once a "year" based on population, settlement expansion and people's happiness. It's all fairly explicative.

While I don't find fault in the game mechanics or gameplay as a whole, I am fairly disappointed in its application of the genre, and how oversimplified many of the aspects are. It's ok for a survival city builder game to only have a few basic resources, but when the game's setting has electricity, radio towers and submarines, and it expects you to manage the minor differences between metal and metal sheets, fish and canned fish, etc., then it becomes ridiculous, immersion breaking, even, to be limited to a dozen or so resources. There's no trade or barter system either, so what you can scavenge or make yourself is all you get.

I can't help but feel this game is taking steps backward. Population management is supposed to be the main struggle of the genre, keeping you on your toes as you’re keeping up with resources to maintain your population supplied. Here, you can't see the age of your settlers except "young" and "old", with no way of knowing when your children will be of working age. There's no household or family structure, people just bundle up in a house until it's full, then start filling the next one. If a full house has a child, that child will live in the next house, maybe on its own! Banished, which popularized the genre a decade ago, had a much better and more realistic approach to population management.


While it doesn't break any new grounds, the full Oxygen appears to be as good of a game as any to get introduced to survival city builders, and this "First Breath" standalone demo covers enough of the basics within its 50 in-game days to determine if you'll enjoy the game enough to purchase it. I certainly don't see any reason to avoid Oxygen: First Breath.

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This was just my opinion.

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