MicroTown

MicroTown

Very fun village builder, easy to learn, on my second run I got to the end goal (Monument). Not much random so not a lot of replay value at present. Highly recommended but don’t expect it to keep your interest past one solid day at the present state. I really look forward to new developments in this game! Some specifics:

1. Nice easy to learn mechanics

2. Tutorial needs to teach balancing, in particular (a) how do you tell when to add workers at a building, and (b) how do you know when to build more houses, and © show how to change the number of builders & carriers

Real player with 56.1 hrs in game


Read More: Best City Builder Base Building Games.


Worth the $8, a good game to mindlessly play while listening to music or a podcast. I recommend turning on background play so i can click away and do other stuff while the little guys idle away. I’d like to see a better graphics option and more content as it is updated but you get exactly the kind of game you expect. It’s quaint and relaxing. I’m satisfied.

–-{Graphics}—

☐ You forget what reality is

☐ Beautiful

☐ Good

☐ Decent

☑ Bad

☐ Don‘t look too long at it

☐ Paint.exe

—{Gameplay}—

☐ Very good

Real player with 21.1 hrs in game

MicroTown on Steam

Kingdoms and Castles

Kingdoms and Castles

–-{Graphics}—

☐ You forget what reality is

☐ Beautiful

☐ Good

☑ Decent

☐ Bad

☐ Don‘t look too long at it

☐ Paint.exe

—{Gameplay}—

☐ Very good

☑ Good

☐ It‘s just gameplay

☐ Mehh

☐ Starring at walls is better

☐ Just don‘t

—{Audio}—

☐ Eargasm

☐ Very good

☑ Good

☐ Not too bad

☐ Bad

☐ Earrape

—{Audience}—

☐ Kids

☐ Teens

☐ Adults

☑ Human

—{PC Requirements}—

☐ Check if you can run paint

☑ Potato

☐ Decent

☐ Fast

☐ Rich boiiiiii

☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

—{Difficulity}—

Real player with 110.0 hrs in game


Read More: Best City Builder Building Games.


Extremely fun. Easy to pick up and put down AND come back to.

Real player with 71.9 hrs in game

Kingdoms and Castles on Steam

Banished

Banished

Great game. It’s not so much about managing towns, more about whether or not people survive your town managing skills. Have fun.

Real player with 2342.5 hrs in game


Read More: Best City Builder Survival Games.


To me Banished set a golden standard for city builder/ colony sim games. There wasn’t anything especially new or innovative for the genre, but the mechanics and elements of the game just came together really well and the end-product was so polished. The graphics were something different, most games in this genre don’t focus on that much and usually have more simplistic pixel type graphics. This had a much more realistic look, which I thought was pretty cool.

A lot of city builder/ colony sim games have enemies that attack every so often or land you have to conquer. I like some of those games a lot, but I was also really intrigued by this one NOT having that and instead having nature as your enemy. Hunger, weather, temperature, natural disasters, etc. were your enemy instead. This focus on natural survival felt pretty original, though there are probably games that have done it before.

Real player with 308.4 hrs in game

Banished on Steam

Kingdoms Reborn

Kingdoms Reborn

I played this way too much. It was really easy to get in to, but had a LOT of depth. There’s definitely room for massive improvements around trade & AI players, but that alone isn’t big enough of an issue for me to stop playing. I found enough to keep me happy and occupied.

Real player with 246.5 hrs in game

Kingdoms Reborn is a new take on the generic medieval city builder with a card system where you buy cards to place buildings, and a progression system to boot. This game is still in beta but once it releases don’t be supprised to see that 59 H go up. Since this is beta though I still can’t give it a rating, check it out though, if you like the genre, you (probably) won’t be disapointed

Real player with 59.7 hrs in game

Kingdoms Reborn on Steam

Dawn of Man

Dawn of Man

I love a lot of this game. But what genius makes a game of superhuman raiders that march through winter and blizzards but your dudes decide its just cool to sit in the hut while the town in destroyed. Go ahead and slice my head off while is sit here with yellow thermal condition. Spend hours building and surviving only to have a uncontrolled illogical game issue ruin it. Congrats in your inability to handle this issue in beta.

Real player with 555.2 hrs in game

Dawn of Man is an excellent educational game. It’s a quick way to teach children how difficult it is to build up a town, society, and people. Farming, Hunting, Building - all skills that all humans should know the basics of how to do it - For REAL - and do with their own two hands. This game gives students a way to experience decades of development in only a few hours.

Real player with 539.6 hrs in game

Dawn of Man on Steam

Cliff Empire

Cliff Empire

It’s quite a decent game for $15. There is a lot of unlockable content in the mid to late game that the sheer scale of the world makes you think that you really got value for money. The game starts off slow but picks up the pace later so in the beginning expect to wait around a lot for your production to catch up with your construction needs.

At the start, you can get whatever you need from your great “supplier” in the sky as long as you have money but in the later part of the game, the “cheat” in production closes and you’ll start to need to produce everything by yourself. This slowly ramps up the difficulty. Expect to lose your first 3 or 4 games before you learn the mechanics of the game and it becomes easier, if you go in with preconceived notions of “how the game MUST work!!”, you are going to be in for a rough time. Remember to save a lot if you’re still learning if you don’t feel like restarting from the beginning often.

Real player with 175.9 hrs in game

Wow. This game is my surprise packet of the last 5 years.

Bought game in very early access for about $8.00 - could see potential, but it needed work and content was limited. Thought it was a good concept and small amount of money well spent. Never expected what I got for that paltry $8.00.

After playing about an hour and moving on, I noticed that the game was constantly on the update list, so started taking notice of developer updates - man these guys, whoever they are, or whether they are “guys” at all, work very damn hard.

Real player with 92.7 hrs in game

Cliff Empire on Steam

Surviving Mars

Surviving Mars

A new developer took over in September 2021 and they have trashed the game with bugs; just the base game, I’m not even talking about the disastrous expansion (85% negative reviews!!). 2 months and 4 ‘hot’ fixes later and the game is still so broken that I would prefer a rollback over anything the new developers have done, if only such an option were available.

They have started working on ‘content packs’ now.

I was in the middle of a game, trying for some outstanding achievements when the mandatory updates applied. I would remove this negative review if I had a way to roll back to the previous version.

Real player with 955.9 hrs in game

Abstraction Games is ruining this game. It is my favorite game - even now. Yet, as time progresses, Abstraction keeps introducing more and more bugs into this game - at least for the Linux version. They also seem to just add more features that don’t really contribute to the overall experience.

If Steam would let me roll back to the pre-March 2021 release, I would.

Real player with 296.3 hrs in game

Surviving Mars on Steam

Make Your Kingdom: Prologue

Make Your Kingdom: Prologue

I like this game I love the style of it, but it does have a ways to go. I have played this game for 8 hours straight and i had to restart the game play over 10 times on easy level. It is very chalanging even on easy. there isn’t really any guide to playing the game just some controls and a build menu. I would like to see a tutorial section to this game.

For the berries that you can harvest there isnt really anything that you can build to harvest these said berries. I have built houses near them and highlighted them to be harvested, but even then the numbers dont go up. and its very rare that you see the villagers go out to get them. Maybe add like a hut that harvests these barries? and maybe have a building that you can set villagers to be the builders so you know how many you have to so any building tasks so you dont have to guess. Other wise it is a very good resource managment game.

Real player with 10.2 hrs in game

The game is very cool. But it would be very cool if you added multiplayer and a variety of vegetation such as cabbage carrots and so on. Add a variety of professions so that the airship can descend for example a cook to cook a variety of dishes and improved residents with professions for example so that the improved archetector can build faster. Add an itinerant merchant from whom money or food could buy improvements for buildings such as improvements for a butcher’s house or a farm with each improvement production became faster and 1 more was created from one bundle of resources and the improvement of the architect’s house would provide a high recovery rate and a lower resource requirement.

Real player with 7.7 hrs in game

Make Your Kingdom: Prologue on Steam

Aven Colony

Aven Colony

Aven Colony, from Team 17, is a colony manager / city building / spinning-plates game where you need to juggle multiple responsibilities simultaneously. Some of the scenarios are interesting, if a bit contrived. But it may be a bit overwhelming for the un-prepared.

The colony ship still has a ton of people in orbit, and you need to establish a colony so you can get them down to the surface by juggling responsibilities such as power, housing, food, water, employment, crime, air quality, health, and morale.

Real player with 63.5 hrs in game

I bought this off humble bundle for around Au$10. Great deal. At the time I am writing this review, there are still two more days to get it at that price from humble.

I like city builder games that invite me to mellow with a glass of wine or cup of coffee while I ponder where to put my next building. This is exactly that type of game. It is playable on pause - the game will allow me to place buildings while it sits on pause and then I ramp up the speed while the buildings are building.

It’s a nice little compact game. It all happens in a very small screen space. After a day of playing Banished, I’m scrolling across screens and screens of farms and pastures looking for where my next buildings go. A day of playing Aven fits in a fraction of a screen.

Real player with 56.9 hrs in game

Aven Colony on Steam

Planetbase

Planetbase

REVIEW AND GUIDE

This review will basically criticize bad reviews of this game and hopefully provide insight for those seeking it. I am not affiliated with this game.

I’m thoroughly enjoying this game. It looks to have good replayability. Like every other builder I’ve played once you have built everything there is not as much to do except to keep it going. In other games, for me building up is the most fun and the building-up part of this game is a blast. It is challenging(!) and keeps me on the edge of my seat. I checked guides before playing, but still had things to learn.

Real player with 273.8 hrs in game

In short:

You can barely interact with anything. There is not enough content. Haven’t noticed any update. The game is way too simple. Once you complete the initial tutorial the game has nothing more to offer.

How do I spend most of the game time?

  • The speed of the game is almost always at maximum, yet still have the bored feeling of having to wait for way too long (half an hour?!) for anything to happen.

  • Turning on or off structures to reduce electricity usage.

  • I can even ignore emergencies as I can’t really interact with them and a redundantly built base just survives anything.

Real player with 71.0 hrs in game

Planetbase on Steam