I used to have the old CD copy and am glad there is a version updated to run on modern systems. The rush to take over and develop the resources in the new world while needing to gain more territory in the old world for ultimate victory creates interesting dilemmas, though you can run into situations where a bad start leaves you running on fumes trying to get the resources you need to develop. I bought this on sale and had a great time revisiting the past. Shame no one build more on this formula.
Easy 5 star game. This is a rogue-like town builder with resetting world maps with various challenges and a plethora of difficulty and challenge options. You try to gain points through meeting the crown's demands and making your citizens happy before the queen becomes impatient and you lose the map. Difficutly starts out very low at Pioneer difficutly but as you get into the Viceroy difficutlies and extra prestige levels, each of which adds a new penatly, you will have to start learning to min-max your play and really make the best of the limited building and cornerstone buff options. Each session last long enought that it never overstays its welcome, you will win or lose the map and be able to move on to a new challenge right before you get tired of a town. There are a variety of viable strategies to meeting the goal. There is a definitey push to complete maps quickly as the storm becomes harser and harsher each year, but you can still play a town after you won. Though TBH, for some of the harder ones, I pretty much barely kept things together just enough to win. I feel sorry for the Viceroy who gets stuck with the town after I ride off into the sunset ;-)
Great dungeon keeper like gameplay with a more modern system and some extra doo-dads like alchemy and beneficial rituals. A weakness is it leans more towards rush style gameplay instead of slowly building up a devious dungeon. The My Pet Dungeon levels from the DLC or Ultimate Edition, do let you play it slow and buildy your dream/nightmare dungeon. Overall good quality and good time, though I am convinced the last hidden achievement to gather a huge amount of gold is bugged >_
Not exactly the spiritual successor for the Caesar series but it is a good and fund but not amazing city builder. Cities look very nice and the game works well but city building never really deviates from using an optimum build. The game leans a bit more on the easy side. There is alot of waiting on plebs to slowy migrate, you will be bottle-necked by workers until near late game on a map where you have a surplus you don't know what to do with. All of the resources are present on each map in sufficeint quantity so you end up building pretty much the same way each time. The strcutures feel a bit too metered on the city level system and in some maps, you can screw yourself by discovering barbians on the region map so they have a chance raid you but you haven't unlocked military structures set. Fortunately, raids generally don't cause alot of damage to begin with. The battle system is kinda mobile gamey in feel. You can game the AI a bit with good unit builds and strategy invovling some cavalry kiting and tailoring a legion to counter each specific barbarian army, but I eventually just started auto-resolving once I had a good economy setup to refill my legions. The barbarians do not attack outside of raids, so the barbarian armies just wait for you to attack them while increasing the risk of a raid while they still exist. That said, I 100%ed the game and had a pretty pleasant time. Fun, but this won't replace the Caesar series.
Looks like a cute cozy colony builder, but it is actually pretty harsh! You play as colonial mice sent by the cat crown to set up a colony on some rocky islands with harsh winters and a race to obtain enough resources to pay the crown's rising taxes while meeting the also rising expectations by your mouse colonists. Fail to make tax payments multiple times and the crown will send a man'o'war to periodically blow up random buildings in your colony. Fail to keep your colonists happy and you won't have the happiness to bring in more colonists and use policy boosters - happiness is a currency in this game as "approval". The endgame of rebellion and declaring independence doesn't seem to be in yet but the core gameplay colony builder, survival, and tax loop is in. I enjoyed the verticality offered by the islands as you can build buildings on top of each other, linking them by stairs and platforms as well as go underground in the search for ores to refine or pay as taxes. I am building what I call the "shackscraper" with multilevel housing/work places with bridging over to the mountains where I have farms and mines. Looks like a Dickensian industrial nightmare ;-) The devs are active on Steam and discord, taking in tickets and making bug fixes and balance passes. They wanted the game to be harsh and with some of the balancing it seems like they realized they went a little too harsh - I strongly recommend toning down the difficulty settings in your first playthrough until you get a feel for the game and start acquiring some of the mid-late game automation tools. Once you start obtaining more advanced structures, you will probably feel like you want to bulldoze and rebuild your colony. This is a great start and I am confident that the devs with Hooded Horse backing will make this into a great game.
