I like games like these and saw this one in the gog-sale. But after reading the reviews I was skeptical. I tried it anyway - and played it for many hours. I can confirm that there are severe bugs in this game but after knowing about them it is possible to work around them. The most annoying thing was employees or animals frozen in a location. In that case I had to reload a whole day. Extremely annoying. But it only happened three times. Despite that I am glad I bought this game. I played it for a few dozen hours and probably will again at some point. The story is intriguing and the game mechanics are not bad.
I was sceptic at first but after many hours of fun I can say that this is one of the few games that delivered what they promised right from the start. The mechanics work just fine, the balancing is already good, the story and the atmosphere are great and so are the characters. I have read some negative reviews but I could not find any severe issues as described. There are several smaller issues however like the cursor not focusing on an object you want to open but no reason to dislike this game.
If you think about buying this game you will probably not be surprised when I say that this is a sim city variation. It is focused on a slow pace and has a low complexity in the long run. Like every sim city game it took me a few hours (~5) of trial and error and research to get a settlement running. It was fun including the next ten hours or so of slowly expanding the settlement and introducing the more complex buildings. But after that you experience its limits. Unfortunately I do not see any long term appeal in this game. There are mods but they mostly focus on making the game easier which is definitely not necessary. The game is ok. Not bad and fun to play for a few hours and maybe even more if you enjoy slowly expanding a settlement without unlocking new mechanisms.
I liked the genre and bought the game on sale. It seems like a good new idea for a game at first. But after two hours it becomes very repetitive. The title should have been a hint. In what could best be described as a minigame you watch the hero run in circles fighting monsters and there is little else to do but watch. But you have to repeat it over and over and over again in order to collect stuff in order to improve your base little by little in order to collect more stuff in the minigame. I continued playing for 12 hours in the hopes that building more buildings would make i more interesting but after finishing half of them the game basically did not change. There are indeed several nice ideas for such a simple game and it feels promising but I doubt I with ever play another hour of it.
I like the overall quality of the game. The graphics are good, the writing is good and I have not met any bugs or even glitches. Unfortunately after a few hours I realized I did not enjoy playing it anymore. Maybe the team was so successful capturing the state of futility and tragedy that you start to feel the same way. Somehow every achievement leads to a new problem and I have not found a way to catch a breath. For example you need to collect wood but as soon as you have it you will have to give up large parts of it. So you collect more wood. But the more is being collected without a break the more exausting it gets working in the logging camp. That results in higher negative modifiers and possibly death. So you send an exausted worker to have some rest. But because he is resting he gets bored. Which results in additional negative modifiers. After a while you are juggling storage, buildings, battles, natural resources and character modifiers so much that the game progression itself becomes very slow. You take ten steps forward and nine back over and over again. After some time it also became exausting for me. Maybe the game is more fun if you buy the expansions. Also it may be possible to set the difficulty (which offers one of the best custom modes I have seen so far) to a more appropriate level but I am not sure if I will try either of those.
