Desktopia: A Desktop Village Simulator

The "city-builder" aspect of the game is unfortunately less present than I would have liked in a game like this. There's also an unfortunate emphasis on battling to get to a new level rather than just having a peaceful village in the bottom of your screen. For something which could be a nice idler, watching villagers do their thing as you build or don't build homes and amenities in the medieval setting, you're instead using WASD controls to move a character around and can swing a weapon with LMB or shoot a water pistol with RMB. You're chopping down trees to get gold, until your residents start to do it for you, and then it's just sitting there waiting for the gold to fill up so you can put another building down. Rinse, repeat. You're limited to a set number of buildings, so you're forced to leave certain buildings you might want to have behind in later stages to get to the higher tiered buildings. That's not really the kind of city-building I was hoping to do. I'm not saying it's not fun; it can be fun to roam around a bit, smack some enemies over the head, rally your army with a war cry, and so on. But it's limited gameplay for a limited game which mostly sidescrolls and repeats itself over and over. I would have personally been more amused if it had been a little town in the bottom of the screen. No side scrolling, no player character, no combat. Just some rudimentary AI characters doing their thing as they go from one building to another. The ability to build or destroy buildings, shaping a little desktop town the way you want it. Potentially with camera zoom as more buildings get built so you get some fake tiltshift depth effect to it. Maybe an idea for a different developer to pick up. This is not that. Fun for a while, repetitive in the long run, but definitely dip some hours into it to explore it. It's a unique game concept which is worth exploring, personal opinions left aside.

It wouldn't be so bad if it saved every so often on its own, but when it crashes after idling all day while I'm at work it just erases all that time and makes it so frustrating to try to play.

I can't imagine who would release an Idle game in 2022 without an autosave feature? Played for 2 hours (and mostly played, because this isn't a very "idle" game) only to open it up the next day and find all my progress lost. No warnings about saving before closing, nothing. Progress is gone because you didn't think to manually save the game. Absolutely ridiculous for a game released in 2022.