For me it plays a lot like Settlers 2. The challenging part is keeping transportation of goods efficient. In contrast to Settlers 2, you can fine tune goods distribution. You can blacklist/whitelist goods from certain routes. You can even see the path that every goods crate took through your transport network. There are useful alerts about congestion and even graphs to look at! Combat is indirect, you won't command individual robots, but build watchtowers that fire at your opponent's watchtowers (if you supply them with ammunition). A map editor would be really cool and I am sure very welcome by the community. Since the relase the game has seem a constant stream of updates that include bugfixes and additional features like enhanced goods routing options and a sandbox mode. I hope they keep this up!
First, don't expect too much from this game: It's a hidden object game, you'll have to hunt little objects in pictures, and, from time to time, there is a mini game, like solving a puzzle game. That's about the whole gameplay. For what it does, it does beautifully. The backgrounds have a great level of detail and are drawn very nicely. The "background story", a little work being blown into puzzle pieces, was just enough to make me care about it, yet kept my motivation up. Finding all the objects can be a bit frustrating from time to time, but then, this is what the game is about. Technically, it's probably a bit dated, but that didn't hurt the game for me.
