I've seen a lot of word of mouth describing Patron as a 'Banished Clone'. It's not Banished. It's Anno. Patron certainly takes a lot of things from Banished, but the dev team either didn't know why Banished did them, or only did so because they liked the look and feel. I can't list all the things I've seen so far with only 2,000 characters, so here's an example of how the Banished ideas are implemented in Patron: Building in Banished is something you need to consider. The game heavily emphasizes logistics and travel time. So when you place a building one (or more) sides are flagged as 'road access' with small arrows on the placement 'ghost'. Those mean you can't overlap with another building, but *can* put a road there. Great for planning how people will get in and out of areas. Patron *also* has those small arrows. For no reason whatsoever. Access isn't determined that way, nor can you build roads on those squares. Every building comes pre-wrapped with a small access road. And roads don't seem to really matter anyway, because as far as I can tell people live at their jobsite. And the game is filled with that sort of "But why tho?" Things like warehouse inventory that can't be filtered or sorted, and doesn't auto-hide things you don't have. Want to sell excess firewood at the port? Scroll down to until you figure out where it is *every time*, because you can't set an auto-sell order. Otherwise? It's a poor man's Anno. And it's hurt by what it does borrow fully from Banished. Patron does model Banished's population growth fairly well, but even slower. Most of my time on x10 speed is spent waiting for the next generation of teenagers to become adults so I can quickly jam them into whatever job type I've just unlocked, and then back to waiting. In summary: Don't expect Banished, but do expect the influences of Banished to grate against your expectations of Anno.
Hired Gun's developers have obviously played a lot of very good shooters. The game is filled with design influences from recent entries like Doom Eternal, to older titles like Crysis. Their problem seems to be that the team knew when they saw a mechanic or feature that worked well, but don't seem to understand why any of those things worked. So the final design doesn't feel coherent. Instead it's a 'if we put enough things that are cool in the same place, the result *must* be cool too.' And it isn't. The final straw for me was being in a dark cave, surrounded by a respawning horde of big, fast melee enemies that were *also* black, firing the gun the game had just given me that filled the screen with bloom and particle effects, and spamming the melee button to regen health in between shots. And when I finished with that? Going into a platformer puzzle level in a game that uses a lives system instead of saves. The game is reasonably stable, and looks very pretty when it isn't trying to blind you with sfx, but there are so many options that do the actual gameplay better that there isn't any reason to spend time with this if you aren't desperate for the setting.
The tease of a narrative focus where you might get to guide the attitude of a planet spanning AI is interesting, but this game is let down by poor implementation of basically every mechanical decision. Resources are random, but the demand is skewed to need some far more than others. You can get a tiny trickle of new resource nodes by scanning, but not enough to keep your base going (and they're random). New resources can be spawned by producing another lander, but that requires a steady supply of relatively high level products to do. So you spend your time constantly on the threat of annihilation by starvation. And constantly waiting for resources to be produced to allow you a small measure of new raw materials. Until you progress in the campaign and discover a massive zone of high density resource deposits. Which is in a sea bed your own terraforming efforts will drown and make inaccessible 20 minutes later. And that's assuming your base isn't choking to death on its own traffic jams. So you have a choice between a story campaign that's crippled by the poor city builder, or a sandbox mode that's *just* the city builder. If you want to make Mars habitable, play Surviving Mars. If you want to be constantly worried about resource income, play Banished. If you just like a sci-fi city builder you have Planetbase or maybe Aven Colony. There's no reason to bother with thus until there are some massive overhauls of the core city building mechanics.
The game is fighting you every step of the way. First you have to deal with a death penalty system that sucks away the grind-currency. Second you have a parry system that gets introduced, but the only attacks you have to practice on are unpredictably timed, with unreactable startups. The block also only works in one direction so you won't usually be able to block anyway. Third, the controls are unresponsive. The first boss is a "Did you read the run tutorial message" gate. Except somehow the idea of 'double-tap a direction' got screwed up and only actually works about 1/3rd of the time. There are a lot of better brawlers on GOG, you can let this one just float on by.
