Founders' Fortune

Fun, albeit easy and a bit boring (but nonetheless pleasant). Unfortunately only up until mid-end content. When you reach that point, all issues become apparent and jarring. Task prioritization is either random or broken. Default behavior for villagers is atrocious, and there are no controls to legitimately affect it, apart from constant micro Fighting on a larger scale is tedious, constant micro of each villager is a must, and there are no RTS like controls at all, although you can control >10 units with varying equipment - no rally points, no battle orders (just move and attack). It's absurd how much the player has to fight with the interface and AI of villagers to get them equipped (which they are supposed to do automatically) and to actually fight a battle. Battles are easy to win in general, but even easier to botch. The actual amount of content, padding excluded (which is not an unpleasant type of padding if you enjoy management games), is super small. You have a quest log, which is almost always empty. You have factions that you can have very limited and repetitive interactions with. You have skill experience levels that you care about only during first few hours of play - they become irrelevant fast. Social interactions and wishes systems are just means to an end - game still plays exactly the same, you just reach a higher milestone, and can have one more villager, or unlock a trait (only few are really worth the effort). Happiness system is super flat - irritating in some cases, and almost invisible otherwise. I guess house building is cool, feels like Sims 1 with 1/3 the objects (still, many nice objects to play around with!). Game shows promise, but it's ultimately not satisfying in the long run, feels a bit empty and could really use some ease-of-use features. If the developers add more content, and add depth/rework/polish certain systems, this may be worthwhile. Right now, I would not recommend it to anyone.

A beautiful and colourful game with settings to suit several different types of gamers :) There are pirates and goblins that will attack your villagers now and again but you can set one or both to peaceful if you are more interested in the creative building, leveling and farming/gathering parts of the game. You can also pick if you want there to be many/some/few goblin villages, and what kind of look you want your island to have: mostly trees or mostly grasslands, or mixed, and you can pick the size of the island. The map layout is randomly generated so you'll get different islands every time you start a new game. The aging of your villagers can be changed as well, if you want them to age quickly, slowly, or normal, or even turn off aging completely. I like how it's not just a choice between Easy/Normal/Hard like many other games, you can tailor it to how you enjoy playing. Gameplay is smooth and so far I haven't come across any bugs. The music is beautiful and relaxing and fits the world perfectly. Founders' Fortune is one of my favourite managerial games. I like all the building options you can play around with, lovely decorative items like rugs and flower pots and furniture, and how pretty you can make your village look. And I enjoy the smaller things in the game as well, like villagers being able to dance, and making snowmen during winter :) The personality types are quite fun too, and you can remove traits you don't like and give them new ones by earning points :)

There are elments of this I like, and elements I don't. That being said, no game appeals to everyone. I enjoy the look and feel of the game and that I can turn off the military side, as well as the goblin villages. For me it makes it a pleasant village building game. I also enjoy the part of making sure people are happy through having them build various items. The research is well implmented, the vocations are also well thought out. As for feeding people, a lot of thought has been put into it and it works really well. BUT... There is no useful tutorial and the help pages in the game need an overhaul. It took ages to discover how I can get the people to mine iron. Wood is plentiful, as is food, but stone and iron are far too scarce. You can build a mine for each of those but the cost to do so compared to the amount you get out are unbalanced. You can automate the order in which jobs are completed, but there is nothing in the help pages about how to do so. Eventually I worked out it's via the 'star system' in each sims page. Navigation is a bit awkward, especially when trying to click on a pillar you need building so you can expand upwards. Which leads me back to the tutorial. I only discovered you can build upwards by clicking on the up and down arrows to the left after wondering what they were for. Back to some good points. The difficulty settings are near perfect. You want constant war and a battle for survival, you got it. If you just want to build till your heart's content, you got it. You can manipluate them to your heart's content. With only a few people, sim management is challenging, but enjoyable. I've spent 20 or so hours on this game and had some fun, but I'm going to wait for updates/additions before I play anymore. There's no demo version, so wait for a price drop, then try it.

One thing I'll say about this studio is their releases are pretty dang stable. Never crashed a single time, even playing the alpha and beta releases. Kudos. Unfortunately for this Colony Sim, it's biggest issue is that it doesn't have an identity. It plays like an RTS except on a smaller scale, you have to micro the workers. That's pretty much it. See, colonists can have personality traits. That's cool, right? The problem is, the traits are baked in such a manner that they act like permanent bonus/debuffs. For example an "optimist" trait gets that colonist a permanent +7 bonus mood, whereas the negative "pessimist" slaps them with a -7. PERMANENTLY. Sure, you can try making them happy by fulfilling their random wants, but that doesn't touch this stone around their neck. Ideally, moods should be like in The Sims games: something bad might happen, so you do things to mitigate it until it goes away. That's why YOU are playing the game instead of it running autonomously: because YOU can help your colonists. But with permanent traits you can't really help much, because a colonist with the pessimist trait will always be one bad event away from going into a funk (which means they'll be un-commandable for an ENTIRE DAY while they relax). You send someone to chop wood, oops they got hurt, bam bad mood, done, you're screwed. This extremely flawed trait system forces players to metagame by only accepting new colonists who have good traits and reloading when you get ones with bad traits. There's a skill system but it's so shallow everyone ends up learning everything they can. Pointless. Oh, and they learn more by reading rather than actually performing related tasks. There's a decent game engine here but it's let down by poor game design. This might entertain you for a couple hours but when you've played one game you've seen all it has to offer. Not recommended.