I've received this game for free in a beta period (roughly two weeks before release on Steam).
Prelude
First things first: if you are a solo developer, you should be proud of your releases. According to the Discord server, the developer of this game has released other games on Steam as well (which you can find), but they are released under another publisher and dev account, which is a strange thing for me.
Second things first: if you take a look at the current positive reviews, you will notice, that non of the positive reviewers have played the game after publishing the review. If they really liked the game, they would have played it more. So I think, those reviewes are friends helping out. But that's just my opinion.
Actual Review
I received a free Steam key to give feedback to the developer roughly two weeks before releasing the game. He asked me to play through the main content and fill out several feedback forms.
Honestly, I did play an hour and closed the game, fully disappointed by it. The dev questioned me, if "this is not your type of game?". A look into my steam games reveals, that I play (building) simulation games alot.
Here is what's wrong with it:
- All of the graphics feel like they are cheap royalty free assets (meant to be as a placeholder for the actual buildings). Example: the "saw mill" is a building which drills into the ground. No idea in which dimension that should be a saw mill.
- The progression feels very slow, most of the time you wait to get resources
- To "speed up", you can click resources for faster gathering, which feels like a mobile game
- If you expand your build area, you can only build 1 building per expansion on the predefined slot. A predefined slot is for example a "Gold haystack" or "Stone haystack" - which does not make much sense
- The UI feels like free assets as well. The in game ui is different from the setting ui which is different from the control mapping ui. And by different I mean completly different, other fonts, other graphics
- As pointed out by others, the people walking in the game are completly useless. They simply walk around somewhere.
- Some of the buildings have a medieval design others have sci-fi design. Again here: it looks like free cheap assets meant to be placeholders instead of the real buildings
- Camera controls are weird. It's a third party perspective camera, as you know it from any city builders, but the controls are for an FPS camera. Example, if you press W which in other city builders would move the camera north, in this game it will move actually the camera in the facing direction, like a FPS game
- The whole game simply feels like some assets are thrown into Unreal Engine, pour some very little mechanics over it and ship it.
Honestly, in the current state, I'd consider the game rather an very early access title than a full title worth $12.
I still think, that the game concept has potential, but it needs at least more than a half year of development before it should be shipped. Somewhere on the discord, the dev mentioned, it took two months for the current result. And that is what you get.
At the current state, I'd rather not pay for this, it's a 0/10.
