Initially I got the general hang of it. Much building and base management is quite quirky. gameplay consists of a jenga like balance of meeting the village needs, and a very small task force to do a bit of exploring, defend against occasional predator and invaders.
Great idea but things can get topsy turvy quickly, in addition to getting attacked …
Initially I got the general hang of it. Much building and base management is quite quirky. gameplay consists of a jenga like balance of meeting the village needs, and a very small task force to do a bit of exploring, defend against occasional predator and invaders.
Great idea but things can get topsy turvy quickly, in addition to getting attacked there are simple village problems... you can build things wrong and hang yourself too. This would be fine and satisfying city management challenge but several things are poorly calibrated (and nothing is really very well presented or communicated). hunger (slowed down by healers), food production. (way too limited, and no means to control birth rate) which can turn this from being difficult to just being Nintendo Hard to outright broken. In fact there are some mechanics that could outright just be removed because they dont make sense and its not clear how it works (like happiness, seriously, what the heck) because they just distract a player.
To further complicate things most missions in single player campaign have a unique hero with different base management styles, in addition to the scenarios themselves having wildly differing victory conditions. A very rudimentary UI and control scheme leaves a lot to be desired and doesnt make it any easier. (its also very hard to identify buildings and units visually or identify what needs to be done, so its a lot of aimless clicking) Some missions arent even that hard it would seem but messing with your village as you pursue any objective tends to make it a very drawn out slog when it could be faster in just about any other RTS, Because it becomes a small task force managed on top of that teetering jenga towering below :)
This game is a bit unique, while the basic management of the village is similiar to some other village management sims I've played in recent years, and the theme was nice, and i liked the section by section control points of the maps (a bit like a sid meir game even) and the general direction this game went with the various things it was inspired by is cool, and while lots of effort is shown in the design everything in this game is in a rather poor state. It feels like early access but doesnt call itself such. And imo it has a flawed underlying design. Even though it isn't a pure RTS, this is definitely one of those RTS that has a slick look but crumbles in upon itself.
I was curious to see it continue but I didnt really like this and after about 5-6 missions didnt find it in me to continue it. A CTD after retrying a mission a few times finally sealed the deal. A massive overhaul of and rebalancing of things imo probably would improve the game but it wouldnt be enough to give it another chance. (I would much rather play something like dragonshard or warlords battlecry)
I find I usually dont have a differing opinion from majority but i definitely do with this one. It's below average easily enough. An above average (especially multiplayer) RTS should NOT have these kinds of problems!
