Recent reviews by Balthorne

Great game, loads of fun!

BORING AF!!! Not much else to be said. Run forever at extremely SLOW rate to find anything to fight. No maps (accept crappy little pencil drawing that doesn't show you where your at). No mini map. Hard to find ANYTHING to harvest accept stone and that takes 4 minutes just to deplete one node. Then your too heavy to carry it all. i.e., 4 minutes harvested one rock, had to basically crawl to the place to process the stone. Then stick it in the machine to process it.. now sit and wait 90 seconds for the 50 grains to be delivered to your inventory! That's 50 grains out of 3978 pieces of stone!!!!

I would ask for my money back if I hadn't let the game sit and cross the 2 hour cut off point. This game sucks. Boring boring boring. Period.

So while I love the game and it's fresh idea, the game is sorely lacking in both it's matchmaking capability as well as the company doing anything about the mass cheating going on in the game.

The cheating completely takes the fun out of the matches and the company seems not to care.

We are into patch 3 already and still the matching making is horrible. Full of bugs. Sometimes you will wait 5 minutes and still not get into a match. I have found the quickest way is to stand at your enter match spot in your camp and spam the hell out of "Enter Match". Even then you may be able to join a match and sit 10 minutes or more waiting for the teams to fill up. it takes this long because people join the match and get tired of waiting so they leave before it begins therefore creating another empty slot that needs to be filled.

The game has potential but it's lack of content, unbalanced characters, cheating and poor matching making cause me to suggest not purchasing this one. Check back in a year and see where it's at.

Ok, so having purchased the game this morning and played about 8 hours worth today here are things I've experienced and thoughts on the game.

For those who think this is a banished clone, to some degree it is. Same concept, basically same building types also. Better graphics for sure.

Campaign mode: if your a reader and like lots of story line content then campaign mode will please you. Personally I found the story dialog banter wanter to long and tedious. Some story cut scenes required 20+ OK button clicks to get through it all before you get back to building.

Free Play Mode: As expected a sandbox mode. Where it lacks is that it only provides 5 different maps to choose from. Unlike Banished where your world terrain is generated dyamically. Once you try all 5 map scenarios returning to the game is repeat. Not only is the world terrain the same for each map, so are the resources allocated to your game session. So you will nothing new replaying a map.

Potential bugs I found:

After playing one free play map for about 3 hours at 5X time speed I STILL haven't progressed passed 20 villagers. I've built just about all the types of building that could be built. Half of them sit empty because by the time an infact grows to adult hood 1 or 2 of your working adults dies from one reason or another. Usually natural causes.

Merchants arrived only 2 times within the first 30 minutes of game play. Once I upgraded my fishing pier to level 2 not only did the trader boats that were passing by stop coming by completely so did the land merchants. So Gold income has completed stopped. Thankfully I purchased some livestock before that happened.

Speaking of livestock, I purchased two chickens and two pigs. Chickens are supposed to reproduce rapidly but I have found the pigs repoduce more than the chickens and within the hour I have a barn full of pigs and no chickens because the shepard killed them all for no known reason. I checked and had plenty of food so it wasnt due to food needs.

All my villagers complain early for wanting a bath, which by the way is maybe the most expensive building to erect resource wise. With a quarry built on a a stone outcropping that contains 150 stone resources, once my total stored stone resources reaches 40 no more stone is mined from the quarry therefore never allowing me to build the bath which requires 70 stone in total. I have a town hall that currently holds 0/15 stone resources, a warehouse that current holds 12/30 stone resources and the quarry itself which is maxed out storage wise with 32/32. I have 3 warehouse workers allocated but noone ever moves the stone from the quarry to the warehouse or townhouse so the quarry just grinds to a halt. This is a bug with AI I am very sure.

SO... first impressions are mixed. If the developers continue forward with this release, adding omre free play scenarios or a dynamic worl generator that will do alot for game play longetivity. Clearly there are bugs needing resolved. Lastly the game is badly in need of some game balancing such as I pointed out previously, population increase TEDIOUSLY slow to the point of making the game almost not enjoyable once you've got around to building enough resources to support the 15 - 20 villagers you manage to expand to. BTW.. thats a total of 20 villagers after 3 hours of game play and the free play mode starts you out with 10!

While 16.99 isn't a lot of money I found myself wondering if I my money would have been better spent on another less than 20 dollar game here on Steam.

All that said I am hoping for an looking forward to seeing if the developers continue to expand on it.