Stanislaw Lem was an awesome writer and this game managed to grasp the beauty of his books. The full story i heavily pre-scripted, but the team did amazing job in creating an interactive novel. The main challenge of this game is occasional navigation in caves and other areas. Everything else is more or less linear. The graphics is outstanding. Everything in the style of 50-60th. Summary: I did not read the original book, but after finishing this game I will look for it in the library.
I loved the good old Settlers (especially 2), watching the carriers to move stuff around, but there you had to be quick, otherwise your opponents would kill you. And this is a thing I really like on Foundation - it has such a nice peaceful atmosphere! Foundation has a clever design and it will punish you for your design failures, but overall you decide the speed of your progression and you set your own objectives. Nicely done graphics and the gaming mechanisms are working well. The idea, that you may create customized buildings (churches, castles and ins) is not new, but you can re-size parts of the buildings and based on that the resource costs and effects of the whole building change, which is something I did not see anywhere else. I dislike the implementation of Christmas holiday, when the whole economy goes bankrupt for few weeks, and the seasons are not great either, but one needs to keep in mind the game is still in development.
This game was created with passion. The level design is fantastic and each mission has its own design aspect, that makes it different from one another. And there is a lot of the content. The story nicely fits to what is going on in the game, even if it is sometimes adjusted from the movies to be actually playable. The purists may complain, but it makes sense. I am giving just 3 stars due to the user interface though. The game was designed for consoles so when playing with a keyboard you break your arms. After two hours of configuring I was able to set playable keyboard mapping for one player. The configuration is not shared between the profiles so you need to remap it for each user profile. Also if you try to map arrow keys, you have a problem as they serve to move in menu, but they also get assigned to the key mapping even if you just want to move to another menu item.. Another good/bad aspect is the game is playable with two players at once. Your colleague either follows you and is AI driven (fighting but never hitting) or as a second player. While it is difficult to set your keyboard for one player, finding mapping for the second one is extremely difficult and you probably will never find a good one. Playing with just one hero is sometimes extremely difficult as the second player should apparently wipe out enemies, but the AI it does not do it so you then may have hard time constructing a thing you are trying to make (enemies respawn and reset your construction). You must also pay attention not to start playing with two characters accidentally. Pressing the F2 key appears to be start the game but it is adding second player to the game instead. Once you do it, you can not turn it off, you must quit the game and restart it. This was my first game I had to google how to actually start it due to a poor user interface. But once you go past those problems, you can have really inetresting time ahead of you.
