Unimpressed with the gameplay and art. Short game and a large portion is repetitive. Perhaps just not my kind of game...
I did not expect to like this game so much. The lack of pretty graphics and large amounts of text made me wary, but it's such a well-made game that an hour in it didn't matter anymore. It has a gritty, realistic feeling to it, where you often go in blind when making difficult decisions or deciding who to trust, slowly extract clues from your surroundings and rely on your notes, and constantly are in danger so you make sure to greedily snatch up every advantage you can get your hands on. I loved it, and got really invested in the quest lines and characters. If you like story-driven games and playing strategically, this game is just the thing. I am already looking forward to replaying it, and hoping I forget everything about the story until then!
A really nice game in many ways. A bit punishing (it doesn't give you all the info you need about controls for example - the amount of time it took me to find out about the speed-up button for sailing... Consulting a walkthrough is recommended) and the graphics are sometimes comically bad, but it is challenging, fun and has decent variety of plot and gameplay for an older game. Sadly, this version is too bugged for me to keep playing. The game freezes at times when I enter buildings, for which the only solution is to close down the game, and when I start it again it has deleted my latest save file.
It was an interesting challenge to get the first village to survive for more than a few years without the villagers starving to death. But from the point where I had a functioning community, it became rather dull. There are no goals to achieve, or reward from creating a bigger city. For me it was a nice game to spend a couple of evenings playing, but I much prefer e.g. the Anno series in terms of variation of game play and replay value.
