Lakeburg legacy is basically a small management game where you have to ensure that your villager are happy and manage to date and love each other. For the economy part, although not fully clear, it is simple, you have ressources (wood, vegetable, socks, ...) that you produce to cover both your consumption needs and your needs for purchasing bulding/upgrades. Some worker are more efficient at some task than some others because of their stats, and they progress. For the live/love management, your peeps have some taste they use for dating, where YOU have to check the peeps talk about the right thing to create a couple. In addition, the peeps will develop relations (romance, rival, ...) with others, which may influence their work, and may lead to some scene where for instance one offer the other to quit is partner to form a new couple. In addition, the villager receive properties (sick, loss of faith, ...) which influence their working and social stats. Lovers may get some kids which you can train for their adult time. And people die, and are to be replaced. This social part is based on a good idea in itself, however, it is wuickly overcomplicated when you have 50+ peeps, and YOU have to organize all the single dates and replacement. And the UI slightly helps you, but really needs improvement in readibility, no way to sort your worker by stats for instance when you need to replace your deceased thief. In addition to this there are some weird tweak issue, for instance with the faith: * Either you don't care, and some random villager will lose permanently lose stats * Either you keep in check (what the game make you think is the right choice) with your brothel, and as a side effect several villager will lose permanently intelligence, or you manually bug exploit by emptying your brothel once in a year * Either you do church which are not as efficient as the brothel, leading to the first situation In it current state it is not bad for a short game once every 6 month.
I buyed this game on itch.io because it was the only way to get it DRM free at the time. It was long time I was looking for a RPG with use of comic stripes, or even thought of making one for a game jam, and so my expectations for Wildermyth were high, and I was not disappointed. What you will find in this game: * comic strip style dialogs and story sequence * half procedural campaigns (I insist on the plural): you have a main story (fight against the cultist) and side stories with single event (will you pillage this old grave?) or multiple event (a friend of one of your character passed away, the character have to mourn) * a surprising solid writing considering the level of procedurality * re-use of your favorite character from a campaign to another * event which will help feel the character development (a character may get a tree-pet from a tree giant, another get a crow head for laughing at a weird prophet) * an overworld with some taking over by some monster progress * tactical RPG fight (like shadowrun returns or X-Com) * half-random level-up from 3 classes (you have to choose from 3-4 skills at each level up), meaning build from a same class vary * sad moments when a character die, but well integrated death mechanic * the possibility to play with up to 5 player, with each taking decision for the choices related to his character. And it is old school IP-Adress, so no platform limitation, but maybe headache with old school firewall/version. What you will NOT find in this game: * hardcore difficulty from the fight (if you like challenge, don't be afraid to raise the difficulty to max or one lower) * story defined playable character. However they have their own personnality * high tech graphics (the characters don't move hands or legs, but you have to see it as a statical comic picture) * lots of music (I think there is maybe less than 6 tracks in the game) * complexes stories with conspiracy and betrayal twist I personally recommend, but not to anyone.
I have read a lot of review comparing this game to settlers & age of empires. Settlers: Similarity: cute villager doing their job, map divided in regions, villager task Different: no complex economy (no ressource transformation), no logistics (common ressource pool) Age of empires: Similarity: send your villagers collect food & wood, and later stone & metal, build buildings, assign worker, different clans with common basis and slight or big differences on specific points Different: few units types and small armies, building limits. Actually, nobody explained that he emphasis of this game is building & worker placement, like in several board games. You have a limited amount of building slot per region, and some regions have specific ressources (stone, fish, ...), you need to expand to get new regions for new buildings. You also have a certain amount of worker available at some point, and you can re-assign them to task according to your current need: You have too much wood? let's convert your woodcutter into miner or warrior. In addition to this, you have some ressources (food, happiness, ...) which are critical for the stability of your village, and some other which helps to improve (metal, science...). In the case you under-evaluated your needs, or some event happens, you can be short on a vital ressources, and all your economy crash down: did not plan enough food for winter => people are unhappy and less productive, and could also hunger and are even less productive or die. No hardcore survival game here, but it happens sometimes and it is fun. Oh, the winter, an interesting game feature. Few strategy games included interesting cycle management (day/night by warcraft 3 meh). Here you have once a year (12 minutes) 3 month of winter in which your consumption of food and wood increase drastically, and your army attack capacity drop down. Last point, the games are usually 45-75 minutes, but you do not feel under time pressure for micro management or whatever.
If you are looking for something complex/challenging in term of fight, story, puzzle or crafting, do not buy it. To put in short, this is a light RPG, for beginner people, or for people who just want to have a easy game. Considering I have seen the review, I have set the setting to hard or very hard, and there is no big challenge. But, I enjoyed it anyway, Because: - The ambiance is good (remind me of LBA2 in some way) - Gameplay is easy to master - Story is ok and easy to follow (no "wait who is is this guy?"), even some few originality - It is light hearted - Puzzle never requested to go and check on internet, managed to find alone the solution - There is a bit of crafting (potions or arrows) but it is not too invasive - it is 10-12h long - you can pause anytime I will not recommend this if you are looking for diablo 12 or divinity OS 5, but if you look for something easy, or somewhat to recommend to some friends which are not nerds or new to video game, this is a good game.
So, this game get all the unit of command & conquer 1 (GDI only, for NOD you need guardian campaign), pack them with voxel graphics, and increase the game cadency that yu can spam several units a minute. That means game are short, and based more on economy so that you can spam more than your opponents. Even if this are concept I usually don't like, here, I don't know why I managed to have fun by playing the solo campaign (forget the story & cinematics of C&C, there is like a one liner). I am not multiplayer guy, so I don't know. always the -recon a bit> build refinery> build more refineries> spam unit chain > see them crushed by the defences > adapt your units to the defences > redo the spam cycle and the extension they have made with orcs & humans, aliens & marines, are also funny, but if you didn't really like the 1st one, it is not gonna change. Anyhow I had fun. But some in-game cinematics would have been funny.
The game itself is nice and relaxing, with the longest tutorial ever (30 missions). Then start the real game: flatten and hammer your enemies with storm, volcanoes or whatever you found adequate. However, from a map to a another, the differences are quite small (sometimes earthquake will happen, some power are not available, ...), no increase of difficulty. An average map is about 5 minute to complete. And that is were the game catch right. You should not see this as a full scale game, but more a coffee break game, or "wait that your potatoes are cooked"-game. In this role it is good. However only 3 stars because well, from the 1st to the last level, there are little differences.
