Recent reviews by Samwich

My favorite game of all time, and it isn't even close.

I'm a sucker for a good, provocative story. I like when stories rip my heart out and piss on it. This game isn't for everyone, that much is true. It's not a feel-good kind of game. You're going to get mad, frustrated, impatient, sad, and you'll probably need months to recover before you can play it a second time, but you should play it a second time.

When people experience chronic fear and loss, they tend to become apathetic to the people and world around them. Its why dictators rise to power, why people join cults, why children grow up to become terrorists. It's an ugly thing, and it can happen to any of us . The journey these characters go on throughout this story is one where they lose and attempt to regain their humanity. And yes, it's a story that's been told many times, but it's also one that is rarely understood.

"Perhaps the only thing worse than fear is apathy. Fear makes us do horrible things to people. Apathy makes us allow horrible things to happen to them." Beth Revis

EDIT: grammar

City simulator? More like traffic simulator.

I really do want to love this game because I play a lot of different city builders and love a good challenge, but the challenges I faced with this game are, frankly, irritating. When my city reached >10k in population, I stumbled into a huge traffic problem. I spent hours building new roads, establishing public transport, and replanning my city so that the traffic could flow smoother. My city went from looking modestly organized to looking like an absolute mess. The roads I built would put an average American city to shame, which is saying a lot.

The only way to really reduce traffic in this game is to build a lot of roads and spread your city out so its not as dense. But this creates other issues because the people in your city hate driving more than 5 minutes anywhere. If I'm able to drive 30 minutes to work every morning, then so should my cims. The cims also love taking the highway, even if you have side streets that will get them to their destination just as quickly, which causes traffic on the highways, blocking all of your other highway entrances and exits. These people clearly do not have google maps.

Cims also don't like public transport. I discovered that the maximum amount of cims I could get to use buses and metros was about 10% of the population. It doesn't matter how state-of-the-art your public transit is, because your citizens are too busy guzzling gasoline like its an olympic sport. After awhile I got really sick of dealing with the traffic and decided it just wasn't worth the headache. If solving traffic cunundrums is your thing, you might actually like this game, but it just wasn't for me.

Played this game for 10 hours straight the first day I had it, it's great as far as automation goes. The graphics are also excellent, and in the 50 hours I've played so far, it has only crashed once and that was after I had about 300+ people shuffling around in my town. Sometimes citizens and animals get stuck, but it's fairly easy to fix by restarting the game or just simply waiting. The strategy/battle aspect of this game is... lacking. I'm sure the devs have more plans but as it stands right now, there isn't much about the fighting that is enjoyable or interesting.

Also, people need to stop complaining about the frequency of updates. This is an early access game and there aren't many devs, so be patient. The game is honestly fantastic considering how few hands are working on it.

Keep in mind that this is an early access game, so there's a lot more to be added and adjusted. For the devs, I want to recommend some things just based on what I've experienced so far (spoilers ahead):
1. It would be nice to able to relocate families. I know we can specify what building to assign a family but I find myself wanting to move the families to a different burgage plot sometimes.
2. The trading between regions is a bit of a headache, I think being able to trade with currency would make some things easier. But also, having separate regions in general is annoying most of the time. I understand why it may be necessary from a development POV but once you have more than two regions under control, you naturally start to neglect older regions.
3. Animals should unassign when buildings are paused too, not just families.
4. It would make things flow a lot smoother if we could automate the pausing of buildings for specific seasons. So for example, we can set it up where the farmhouses are unpaused during autumn and paused for the rest of the year without having to go in and do it manually.
5. The "tab" menu is super useful when towns get really big but it's annoying not being able to see which buildings are paused and which buildings have waiting families while in the tab menu.
6. It would be interesting to see a passive population growth from families already living in our towns (instead of or in addition to immigration), which would force us to expand overtime and this rate would increase as the population grows until a cap is reached.
7. I would like to be able to move families from one region to another, in case I want to lower the population of one region or increase the population of another, and you can cap it at like 1 family a month.
8. It would be nice to be able to reset/reuse our development perks, I didn't realize there was a development point limit of 5 before I had two regions almost fully developed.
9. It is currently IMPOSSIBLE to get a steady supply of meat in large towns, which is annoying for regions that have poor fertility or for when you want to expand your town and not waste so much space on crop fields. And for some reason, hunting on a rich deposit gets me more meat per year than sheep farming? Doesn't really make sense. If there were more development perks that would enable us to focus more on meat production (in addition to the ones we currently have) over crops and other food products, then that would be nice too. As it currently stands, having the pig/goat and butcher backyard extensions are sort of useless because there's no way to get a steady supply of meat without importing. I just find myself always adding the vegetable garden or orchards cause it's truly the only way to get food in addition to crop fields.

After 1,500 hours, I'm finally leaving a review. I haven't touched this game in a couple years, but I came back on it recently so see if anything had changed.

I love the look of the game and the weirdness of the creatures. There's plenty of blocks and building mechanics to mess with and create some really cool structures. I love the blueprint system, it makes building massive structures or cities so easy, and you can access the workshop to use other player's blueprints if you're looking for inspiration.

Unfortunately, I won't be going any further with this game. Accessing multiplayer is too much of a headache now, it used to be simple and accessible to any casual gamer. The game is not worth the money it costs considering how outdated it is, and the devs have essentially abandoned it. It's a damn shame, but I guess every game dies eventually. Some sooner than others.