Shadowbane
First of all, this game is absolutely worth playing if you are into oldschool PvP MMOs. No other game allows such in-depth character customization. Sandbox elements are present but are not annoying to the end of being “chop trees to gather lumber”. “Sandbox” here is actually building cities and demolishing your enemies' cities in sieges, hiring AI mercenaries to craft items which is another good part of this game, crafting isn’t about gathering 10 dragon scales and 1 mummy dust by repetitively killing monsters, it’s more about having mercenaries of right races placed in your forges and having resources from right zones in general, even city building (if you happen to own / manage one) is as simple as placing the building on the city grid and waiting several hours for it to go up in one click.
– Real player with 1573.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder MMORPG Games.
Overall an exceptionally poor experience.
So why do I have so many hours you ask? 1) nostalgia and 2) I played with friends, but neither of those points are positives to the game in particular. And also do not be mistaken, for an RPG 80% of this playtime was sitting afk while leeching experience from macro-bots which is what everyone uses.
So this game is mislabeled as a PVP title. It isn’t. It’s actually a zerg v zerg title and those battles are decided by sheer numbers. If it was a pvp game, you’d have skills which synergize with each other to allow for good and creative builds. Builds which later you can learn to play and get better as you get more accustomed to playing your toon. Not the case here. At first glance you have SO many races, professions and disciplines to combine that the options eem endless…until you realize that every profession has no more than 2 ways to build it if you want to be in any way viable. Yes, you CAN be a minotaur that uses unarmed fighting, except due to weapon skill restrictions (built into the races) and stat caps you’ll never be more than 20% of the strength of a proper polearm minotaur.
– Real player with 1121.8 hrs in game
Arcadia: The Crystal Wars
Arcadia: The Crystal Wars is an open-world, squad-based fusion of role playing and strategy, combining traditional RPG elements such as character skills, talents, quests, dungeons, and raids with strategic base-building, farming, and crafting. Explore the world of Arcadia in non-linear fashion as a single character, or recruit up to 20 characters and dive into the rich storyline while taking an active part in shaping the outcome of the Crystal Wars.
Features:
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Dive into the Quest Driven Story
Arcadia also offers a rich story that you can dive into at any time. The unique, hand written quests will take you from city to city, meeting unique characters, exploring dungeons and raids to retrieve artifacts, and helping to guide the outcome of the Crystal Wars as you see fit. Will you fight alongside Tech Commander Kyber, to rid the world of the Crystal’s corruption? Or will you seek out the Etir, to understand the Crystal at its' source? The choices you make will decide the fate of Arcadia.
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Explore an Open World
Looking for a non-linear experience? Then Arcadia is your sandbox. Just because the factions are engaged in the Crystal War, does not mean that you have to. Would you rather be a lone adventurer, seeking the challenges of dungeons and raids? Or a trader, developing trade routes and settlements and only using combat as a means to defend yourself? You have the freedom to make up your own story.
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Unlock Powerful Magic or Advanced Technology
As you explore Arcadia, you will undoubtedly encounter the power of the Crystal. Using special techniques, the power of the Crystal can either be consumed directly by your characters to unlock powerful magic or be harnessed and used as a power source to power advanced technology. Whichever you choose, your characters will gain new abilities as well as physically change. The more power they acquire, the greater the physical transformation.
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Character Customization
Each character within your faction has a set of skills related to Combat, Crafting, and Labor. It’s up to you how to train them and what talents they acquire. Do you want a solder, capable of wielding heavy armor into battle during war but also able to craft the finest armor in the game? Or how about a farmer, wearing light armor yet when combat calls wields the most power magic to heal your allies and decimate your enemies? The choice is yours
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Unique Character Races
Arcadia offers four unique character races that you can create and recruit into your faction. While each race has strengths and weaknesses in terms of starting skill level and rate of experience gain, the ultimate path of each character you control is completely up to you. Has a powerful Rhingar, who has trained with one handed weapons and shields to defend her allies, offered to join your faction but you need a armorsmith? So be it, recruit her and take advantage of her racial bonus in Armor Crafting, while also being capable of defending your settlements from attack.
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Develop Settlements
Whether you control one character or twenty, you’ll want to consider developing settlements to fuel your adventures. Perhaps you only need a single base camp, with a place to rest and to cook food? Or maybe you are ready to take an active role in the Crystal Wars and want multiple strategic base locations where you have farms to feed your troops and forges to craft armor and weapons.
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Explore Dungeons and Raids
It’s been said that great riches and power can be found in the most difficult of locations. Arcadia is no exception. Take up to five of your characters as you dive into one of five dungeons, each with unique enemy types and scripted boss fights or brave it all and take up to 10 of your characters to fight in one of five raids.
Read More: Best City Builder Strategy RPG Games.
Crystarise
The player becomes a guardian god apprentice girl,
We aim to rise up a sky island while going back and forth between the extremely vast field that continues to be automatically generated and the island that serves as the base.
First, let’s get down to the field to collect resources.
In an isometric 2D world, monsters, items, dungeons … various things are reflected on one screen.
Combine shooting and slashing actions to defeat monsters and get resources.
Once you have the resources, produce a variety of things and customize the island to your liking.
Read More: Best City Builder Open World Games.
Catizens
Herding cats is easy! Said no one…ever
Your main job in Catizens is to build your town around the personality traits of its inhabitants. Just like in real life, cats require personal attention and special treatment. Combinations of different personality traits and moods affect their proficiency and obedience. Catizens form relationships with each other and will occasionally issue personal requests, so you will need to learn what makes each cat happy in order to stay on their good side.
Create unique cats and design the perfect home
Pick from an assortment of facial and body features, as well as personality traits to create cats with distinct looks and temperaments. Design a place just for them by decorating the interior of their home with pieces of furniture, plants and other items. The better furnished a house is, the happier your catizens will be. So get creative!
Build and manage your settlement
Catizens can learn a variety of professions – from farming, to blacksmithing or offering protection from local wildlife. Different building types unlock depending on the traits and professions available. There’s no need to micromanage the entire settlement when it gets large. Invest your time and attention in a few outstanding cats and let them become town leaders.
Explore the wilderness
Develop your settlement, complete objectives and expand to areas with different environments that offer new adventures. Carefully examine your surroundings to find the best fishing spots, hidden treasures and quirky characters that may offer a quest.
Founders' Fortune
So, 40 hours in, and I think I own this game a review, As an avid Rimworld fan, I’m always on the search for colony building/town building type games. It was hard to know what to expect from this game, but the videos looked promising so I took a chance. My expectations were a Rimworld game, smaller scale in terms of pawns to control, with a 3d world, but many of the same aspects. After a few short runs of the game, it turned out to be not what I had expected. In fact, I was downright disappointed with the game. The survival aspects are very simplified, the crafting isnt as deep as I thought, some of the aspects like that storage piles dont do anything other than take up space and distance to build seems to have absolutely no bearing (no hauling).
– Real player with 115.1 hrs in game
I fell in love with this game pretty quickly. Hours pass by in a blink of an eye and my sleeping schedule is even more ruined since I bought it.
I’ve seen it described as a mix of Sims and Rimworld (which is what made me buy it, on top of my Sims 4 having gamebreaking bugs and fuck EA). It is.
Let me just say that this game gave me very strong Sims vibes for a non-Sims game. I’ve been looking for a Sims alternative for ages, and while this isn’t quite it, it fills that void in my heart better than any other “Sims-like” titles I’ve played.
– Real player with 54.5 hrs in game
Skyclimbers
Craftlands Workshoppe
Been playing this off and on since early access started and I’m gobsmacked by the negative reviews by people with very few hours played.
There is a TON of content, yes it’s a bit grindy to start with until you understand the mechanics with workers but there really is a lot of game here for the price.
Orig review below:
This is a delightful shop management game full of interesting mechanics and strong progress goals pushing you to become A Master Of All Crafts.
At present in EA I haven’t encountered any game breaking bugs and it feels like its 75% towards being an excellent time sink.
– Real player with 94.6 hrs in game
First Impressions - It’s fun but rough around the edges.
Craftlands Workshoppe dabbles in a bit of everything from gathering, crafting, consumables, trade, management, a semi-automated worker system, etc. There are a fair number of systems and game mechanics but, many feel hollow or half-finished at this stage in development. With that said, the current state of the game does show promise.
-Gripes-
Not a whole lot is explained well and pacing really needs work to make progression flow better. Most of the crafting is progress bar/timer based while smithing features a horribly annoying minigame, which I found odd and out of place. I also think workers are overwhelming and introduced too early in the game, although, they are a time-saver as you progress and earn more cash. The big issue early on being they cost too much upfront to hire and in continual upkeep considering the starting profits. Lastly, gathering and crafting in general require an obscene amount of clicking which could be streamlined to prevent pointless time waste.
– Real player with 41.0 hrs in game
Age of Wonders: Planetfall
This game is easily one of the best newer strategy games (i.e. 4X style game) currently available for single player in my opinion, period. I’ve had a lot of time to try several of these sorts of games that are considered the top games in the category lately. Civ, Total War games, Stellaris, Endless Legend, the list goes on, but I always come back to this one.
NOTE: Many of the reviews for this game were from when the game was released, since then they did a massive update that re-balanced the game and overhauled several mechanics. A lot of the comments in negative reviews were from a year+ ago using the old mechanics. This game is being actively improved / patched as of Oct 2020 from what I’ve seen and they’re still releasing an expansion.
– Real player with 1901.7 hrs in game
As the game is now, I do not recommend it.
I played the entire series extensively, over 4.000 hours over all titles of the series, for me personally, they changed things that were good about the game, and kept things that were bad about it.
City Siege
The first thing that is really noticeable and changes the dynamic of sieges entirely, they removed gates from city walls, those were replaced by militias and defensive towers, however these militias don’t have mods, and you can’t aim the towers, so any other troop that attacks the city will be stronger.
– Real player with 1383.1 hrs in game
Click and Relax
Just no
– Real player with 0.1 hrs in game
Well… it’s something.
The game only has 5 “game modes” which consist of something non-sensical and boring, there isn’t really anything “relaxing” or satisfying about them. The music cannot be adjusted and is pretty loud. Honestly it just feels like a school project from 2005 done by two students that just served to be presented infront of a class and then forgotten. Definetly not worth the money, I got it from a steam gift
– Real player with 0.1 hrs in game
Urban Survival
This game is Awesome! So creative and fun even for a early access game there is loads of content and the Devs. are constantly adding new stuff. they have limited-time seasonal updates were you can get unique holiday weapons and armour. Its stuff like that, that makes this game such a fun and fresh experience not to mention the humour keeps me laughing the hole time.
– Real player with 31.5 hrs in game
Great game! This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for! It has exactly what I want in a game! Open world (although its not so huge from what I can see but nonetheless feels great), base building/managing, crafting/cooking, looting (lots of looting lol), combat/gang wars and the power to pee on anything! lol. I’m glad I wish listed this game and then purchased it on day one, it was worth every penny! Its been keeping me entertained and glued to my seat. I look forward to seeing this game grow in development! Keep up the good work Helix Games!
– Real player with 14.8 hrs in game