New strategy game Chains of Freedom mixes XCOM combat with survivalist crafting

Your priority in any city-building game is to expand outwards - more roads, more houses, more businesses. Anoxia Station turns that against you. As the leader of a mining operation deep, deep beneath the Earth’s surface, every time you drill into an untouched rock face you risk hitting a pocket of radiation, releasing a geyser of magma, or disturbing the sleep of a gargantuan, subterranean terror. Generators. Refineries. Water pumps. Everything has to be pushed together and built on top of one another, such is the intense claustrophobia of your lightless, airless underground sepulchre. Condensation drips down the screen. Static and VHS tracking lines disturb the picture. In principle, Anoxia Station belongs to the same genre as Cities Skylines 2 and Frostpunk, but it takes the city-builder’s mechanical staples and twists them into something terrifying and unique.