Recent reviews by MsBarrows

Weirdly enjoyable (I was side-eying the fishing boat sim part of it initially). Creepy, but cartoonish enough to not be too scary for my adrenaline disliking self, so more relaxing with occasional 'aw crap' moments than anything else. Mostly ended up absorbed in running around solving the puzzles and upgrading my boat, which I'm already a big chunk of the technology tree through for the boat itself, though there's still plenty to reseach in the way of things to have on the boat. I like it!

On my third or fourth map, and I'm enjoying it very much now that I've gotten the hang of it. I was initially concerned about what the military aspect would be like - nothing infuriates me more then just getting in the groove with a city builder game only to have attackers come along and destroy vital infrastructure - but this game has handled it in a relaxing format where you send your military units out on distant missions, without suffering from any more local turmoil.

I like the organic way a lot of the game is structured, such as how the inhabitants carve out their own desire paths between new structures, rather than you having to lay out roadways. Though since they seem to generally prefer following existing well-travelled paths over less well-trodden ones, you will sometimes find they've decided that a scenic route is their preferred walkway, and you either have to live with it or throw down some fencing to change their tiny digital minds.

Overall I'd rate the game as highly enjoyable.

It reminds me of decorating houses in The Sims games. I like that I can switch between doing jobs for clients where the choices are made for me apart from how to arrange everything, and buying places where I get to make all of the design choices myself, right down to knocking down every interior wall and redoing the layout entirely. I also enjoy being able to move around and interact with things.

Ridiculously addictive for such a simple game. Very soothing to play. I like all the little touches like the trains and boats moving around on their respective courses, and the way the biomes shade together across the map.

Enjoyable! Took me three tries to get my city's economy thriving well enough to make it all the way to the end, but even the failures were fun to build. There does seem to be some randomness in when you get some of the technology, which can make it a little harder to progress - for example I found street lighting in the first area the first two playthroughs, and then not until I was in the second area on the third one, and it's one of the things needed to keep your inhabitants happy beyond a certain population threshold. Had fun, and do plan to play it again some time.

Been playing around with it for a few weeks now; before I got the hang of using dams, levees, and so forth to control water flow and keep areas sufficiently hydrated I found it extremely frustrating, but once I made it over that learning curve it switched over to extremely addictive. I've had fun trying to get most of each map well-watered and covered in fields, forest, factories, and housing. Even tried out making custom maps already in order to have more variety. After the first week I've mostly played on easy, as I find on normal the droughts become too frequent and too long too fast (without allowing enough time to get water systems properly established), and drought-related population crashes are infuriatingly common once that kicks in. But that's the sort of issue that'll hopefully be addressed as they work on game balance. Also tried out the secondary type of beaver, and while they were also fun, I found them quite challenging because of the difference in power systems and resource use (they use SO. MANY. LOGS. to power stuff, and both the better waterwheel and the engines have a considerably larger footprint to tetris in to a settlement than the windmills do).

Overall enjoying it immensely. Looking forward to some day giving the finalised game a whirl.

Pretty enjoyable if you like all building, no invasion, low disaster frequency playing. The biggest hurdle I found was getting the food-producing vs non-food-producing jobs balanced. Especially once you get into larger population numbers, it's very easy to go all-too-quickly from fully packed storage barns to famine. But overall I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

Very addictive. Also at times very frustrating, since so much of how well your colony is able to progress initially depends on randomness... what resources are randomly in reasonable reach of your starting point, what random order the research tree is in, what random good or bad events happen... and even if you luck out on nearby resources, they're finite, so it's still a bit of a race to find more, to research the stuff that allows you to consume less, and so forth. Enjoying it immensely when not rage-quitting in frustration. Sounds about right for settling another planet.

An oldie but a goodie, at least if you love city building. One of my favourite parts of the Impressions City Building series was how much building you got to do *without* having to constantly be building up defensive forces, a problem many other city builders of its time had. While there's always some combat, it's not the focus of the game, and there are often player decisions you can make that influence how much or how little combat you'll have to face.

Very simple interface, figuring out where to place buildings requires enough attention to be absorbing, overall I find it a very soothing game to play.