Buoyancy is still far too "Early Release" for a proper review, but I like what I see of it so far... This Waterworld-inspired city builder tasks you with sending your crew of ten hopeful raft dwellers out into an oceanic world littered with relics of the past. It's actually quite a clever bit of genre mash-up.

On the one hand, you have a standard city builder - try to construct a balanced economy, with food production, building material generation, and defenses all vying for your attention. Make sure to lay out construction of your floating city intelligently to minimize time spent racing around the place. Try not to place too many flammable structures by your more pyro-focused industries, or you'll see everything go up in flames in no time. Your raft denizens will breed at a horrifyingly rapid pace, and further survivors can be rescued from lifeboats or enlisted from other cities, but make sure you're developed enough to handle all those mouths to feed. There are clear signs that the devs intend to add research options, social planning, and all sorts of other niceties to the mix eventually, but for now this side of things is pretty basic.

On the other hand, you have a mobile city cruising along in an endless ocean. As you wander, you'll come across various little prizes, like floating crates full of resources, or natural phenomenon that you can take advantage of. For example, by parking your fisheries over a school of fish, or your foragers over a kelp forest, you'll vastly increase the output of those industries so long as the resource lasts. Once you use it up, well, it's time to fire up your motors (or set your oarsmen to rowing) and move on to the next ripe spot to harvest.

Additionally, you come across trading posts, other raft cities, and hostile pirates. The trading system is pretty basic right now, as is current diplomacy with other rafts - for the most part you're just swapping loot back and forth, or charging in and murdering everyone so you can take their stuff. That's assuming you have some military, mind you. The pirates behave similarly, except that they jump straight to trying to kill you whether you have a military or not. While everything's still a bit buggy and very basic, there's something satisfying about swinging your raft city around so you can let loose on the enemy with a barrage from your Junk Cannon turrets...

Right now, Buoyancy does very little to take advantage of what could be a narrative-rich setting, and you're left with a resource efficiency problem on a boat that, with a lot of love and effort, could turn out pretty good. Along with adding more personality and flavor to the world at large and my crew in specific, I'm eager to see what they add to make the natural world more exciting and hostile. I picked the game up now knowing it'll only get more expensive with time, and I'm hoping I don't regret that choice, but only time will tell.