Recent reviews by Alun, King of Wales

Offline Story = Still a great engine after all these years.
Online Enhanced edition, sadly has Aim-bot + Insta-kill cheaters running around trying to ruin your game.
Private Servers would be nice.

Enjoyable idle game

NEEDS MORE FLAGS
Great fun, all the updates to bring this to 1.0 have been awesome. Support was a joy to contact when a building caused a minor display issue and got fixed quickly and easily.

I just wish there was a Welsh flag option :-)

It was good. it started with a little grind game that was just playing with your brain making you think "Valve is making idle grinders now? Game must have gotten real lazy after moving to New Zealand" but its a trick to avoid making Half Life 3 by building better toilets.

Very slow, and quite dull. Micro-Manage your extremely limited population to gather resources from more buildings than you have people to staff. Lack of Water, Food and Housing is killing your people and you have to juggle them around until you have produced enough of each resource that you can start to expand your population to run each building with more than 1 staff member.

If the slow gameplay wasn't dull enough there are weird design flaws that make the more exciting parts feel worthless. By the time you build enough to go on expeditions, you won't need anything the rewards offer anymore. Some of the forum missions don't take into account that you have already met the requirements to complete them, for example when you need to produce 1000 "New medicines" but you already have a massive stockpile of 10k that will never get used. You can throw some resources away but not medicines, making it too boring to build more storage just to get a 1% back in reward loot. Another is to build a Graveyard and recruit 11 morticians, which is 1 more than a graveyard can hold. Why not just say 2 graveyards since that is the minimum needed to recruit 11 staff?

The combat / invasions or whatever you can call it is just an icon randomly entering the map edge and moving from one side of the map to the other, draining your resources as it goes. Given the wide-open landscape with few bottlenecks it seems pointless to build barricades when the enemy can just walk around them - barricades have a 1 square gap between their placement so they don't even stop the invaders from going straight through them. Your militia are completely static and won't respond to an enemy if it is 1 square outside of the watch towers radius. There are no manual controls or flags to drop to move your squads in combat. They just sit in their little hut and let the enemy walk on by. There are no proper walls, defensive or offensive tools, or basic mobile weapons. Its just variations of static short-radius towers.

Research is likewise lacking in any meaning. For the most part you either unlock buildings to provide new resources used to build more of what you already have, or they unlock upgrades to existing buildings to improve capacity. Electricity seems like an old trope of Wind and Solar power, not even hydro-power since the only water is static lakes - there are no rivers. Not sure how the fish get around. This does make the game significantly less micro-managing once you get a power grid working, but it still feels like its missing a more meaning purpose. Big security gates, flood lights, hydroponic pods, early warning radar? Nope. You don't even get a decent Tech-Tree of the usual "+10% production per tier of research" style improvements, or "+25% Watch Tower radius".

Other weird bits are when you release animals from pastures they seem to just disappear from the game instead of wandering the map as they did before you captured them. Doing expeditions / forum missions to find seeds for new food sources never revealed anything for me. I found some mushrooms but no way to plant them. I found some hemp but never hemp seeds. Its like they forgot to add research unlocks for when you discover these components. The same with unit skills. If you build schools the units can learn a few skills, but there's no research for the individual skills, or to add new skill options to the schools. The only research is to magically get all the skills at the same time. It doesn't feel like you are making a strategic choice, you're just mashing through the options one at a time until you have them all.

Everything just feels like its Early Access, 90% ready and waiting for the good content to come along shortly.
Disappointing and Slow. Needs a good content patch at least.

It's like somebody took a single room from the Sims, imported a single character animation for a small set of tasks, and then swapped out the practical user interface for one of those crappy VR infinite scrolling lists with no filter options.

Decorations are all one big list with no filter for Plants, Furniture, Frames etc
Pets are just a long list of cats and dogs. A simple filter for "Only Cats" (*website pending*) would really help to avoid boring scrolling. Some alternative pets would be nice, but there doesn't seem to be any plans for this. I'd like a tortoise, and a ferret, and a giant snail tank.
There is also a complete lack of tooltips. Click the settings menu it helpfully says in the intro, but doesn't tell you which of the icons is the settings menu.
There's a sliding bar next to the weather buttons, but it doesn't seem to do anything.

On the good side, the in-game clocks are real-time so if you run this full screen you can still see what the time is without needing to view the windows toolbar.

[- EDIT: It turns out the purchased clocks don't tell the correct time. You had one job game! -]

Needs more pets, bigger rooms, more animations, and a general purpose to exist.

Just as much team-based murder fun as CoD Warzone, but the zombies don't run wall-hacks and auto-aim to cheat against you!

Still a great game after all these years.

It has some major trolling moments where you have to fail a puzzle several times repeatedly to get an optional item, but otherwise a good and sometimes frustrating puzzle game that makes you think hard about what you have found and used so far.

You'll get a few hours of enjoyment trying to figure things out in each of the rooms. I'm glad I got this for free, but it is still a good puzzle room game.

What a pile of amature crap.
The controls are a random mashwork of keys/buttons and the menus are just a pile of embedded button mashing to find anything. It's like a 1990s console game that only has 2 buttons for controls. Speaking of 90's console style, the textures are bland repeating blocks with no variation or change. It's square tiles and they didn't even make the effort to have edge-tiles to hide the black background or border along the edges of the map.
I forgot how to save the game. It's that bad they don't even have a save option in the menu. Press 12 to instantly lose everything. Return to menu to instantly lose everything. There is no prompt to save your game. Press F6 and some buttons around that area to fiddle with the tiny screen size. Press F1 to get some generic Game Creator menu that doesn't explain what any of the acronyms mean. GM for game music? CM for combat music? I don't know. I couldn't be bother to play anymore.

If you want to play some ancient 1990s Final Fantasy console rip-off, this is the one of the worst and least enjoyable around. It's dull, miserable, and hasn't learnt anything from 30 years of console gaming. I'm glad I got this for free because £3.99 will get me a frozen pizza which is far more entertaining.

I'd really like to be able to click on the Blueprint icons to add a name (such as in a tooltip pop-up) or drag an item icon onto the blueprint logo to help identify what that blueprint set does.