Magicademia
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1302150/Magicademia/
Welcome to the enchanted lands where magic is real and flourishing! Build your very own magical academy from the ground, hire the best and the worst teachers that the magical world has to offer. Manage disasters and celebrate your victories in this brand new enchanting tycoon game!
Build your school
Create the magic school of your dreams! Use money and resources to create new rooms and hire staff, but be wary of trouble and irresponsible adults ruining your establishment. Solve the oddest mysteries and help your students achieve their best (or at least a pass) at school!
Build rooms and customise them to your heart’s content with just a few clicks in our creation tool! There are over 10 types of classrooms there to be created, but watch out for overcrowded classes and teachers lacking the skill to tame a hoard of students!
Do not worry! Every teacher and student will learn in due time! You can also pause your game and just hire a new banch of less incompetent ones! Or speed up the game and manage incoming disasters on the go! You (literally!) have all the time in this world!
Hire the staff
There is a big variety of teachers you can hire in your brand new school. Their abilities, skills and teaching power will determine the fate of their students and the amount of… misadventures they might have during the class. But not to worry, with every lesson they learn something on their own and they come closer and closer to becoming the best teacher!
Not only the teachers are vital to life in the academy, you need crystal engineers who will manage and fix your power sources. There are also janitors who will take care of the mess after a failed alchemy lesson or a ghost roaming the school.
Your trusty staff will take care of the most unusual occurrences that may happen in your school and celebrate graduations of your students with the proper fanfare!
Meet your students
Your students are not only the source of your pride, but also your income! The more students the more money, but can you manage that hoard of teenagers?
Every student has a different set of skills and dreams, so having a lot of classes will let them flourish! Your best students will become your pride and joy (and also a great source of school’s prestige)!
Let them study day and night, but do not forget to build dormitories so they can also have some rest, and enjoy watching their first attempts at wizardry!
Students are divided into classes by colour so it is easy to recognise where is which class and how are the students by the neatness of their uniforms.
Let the magic guide you!
Read More: Best City Builder Building Games.
Mythos: Slavic Builder
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1732910/Photography_Simulator/
Before the missionaries came to the Slavic lands to start writing down the known history, there was the Age of Mythos:
Forests, valleys and fields are full of creatures from Slavic beliefs. Even though they may look like monsters, you don’t have to fight them all. Make proper offerings to them and you will gain powerful allies.
Give your workers a roof over their heads and a good supper and they will build a thriving settlement for you. Do not disappoint your subjects, because dissatisfied people may leave you.
A long spear and a sharp sword will always be useful - your settlement is threatened by monsters, other tribes, Vikings or even demons from distant lands.
Follow Slavic traditions to earn points that you may spend on special blessings from the gods - the warlike Perun, the generous Mokosh and the mysterious Veles.
CHECK OUR OTHER GAME:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1573280/WW2_Rebuilder/
Read More: Best City Builder RTS Games.
Driftland: The Magic Revival
Yet another ‘neutral’ rating. I’ve leaned on the positive side as a heads up for the developer, but see below.
Driftland is a nice original RTS with quite novel mechanics. It shows a lot of promise, yet often fails to deliver.
Let’s start with the good sides.
First, the active pause system works like charm. Basically, you can start any action while on pause, it drastically decreases the usual for RTSes time pressure.
The island positioning subsystem is probably the most important feature in the game, and it works, too. Forging an empire from fragments is fun, requires planning, and so on. There is a room for improvement (no flexible joints, no island rotating, no group movement…), but it is already good, and you might want to play the game for it alone.
– Real player with 131.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder RTS Games.
An interesting adaptation of Majesty but lackluster campaign
If you’ve played Majesty, this is basically that except:
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The game world is made up of islands that you can move around and build bridges between.
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There are flying mounts that your units can combine with to make them stronger and let them traverse freely.
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There are more resources and most are all can be gathered through mines that you build after discovering the resources with a unit from your castle.
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There is a skill tree that unlocks a goodly array of economic, magic, military, and utility perks.
– Real player with 51.9 hrs in game
SpellForce 3: Fallen God
TLDR: Overall this was a great pick up and really nails both the RPG and RTS elements to it. The story can be immersive the music is incredible and I can’t wait to try out the other games and the co-op element as well. The puzzles are well thought out and engaging which is really refreshing and unexpected for this type of game.
Background:
I came into Spellforce 3: Fallen God with literally no previous experience from the franchise, I thought this was a new standalone game coming out and the story looked interesting so I picked it up. I would like to clarify this is a Standalone DLC for Spellforce 3. After playing I will be picking up the original and the other standalone DLC as well.
– Real player with 45.3 hrs in game
We all know why you are here. Tired of all the mediocre writing in other games? Fallen God contains more of the excellent writing and world building you’ve encountered and loved in Spellforce 3 and Soul Harvest. If you haven’t already: go play those titles first. This series punches well above its weight.
As before there’s equal parts RTS and RPG, but this time with trolls in the main lead. Grimlore succeeds in giving these trolls humanlike emotions. It’s far from savage grumping, although they still crush their enemies with their sticks too. And they crush hard. So what are the differences? There’s some crafting involved (trolls can’t wield human weapons), but it’s really not that pronounced. There’s not that much loot to begin with; Grimlore wisely decided to focus on other gameplay elements. The trolls are certainly sturdier than the human protagonists and consequently the game feels easier, especially in the RTS part. Perhaps this was due to playing Fallen God coop (which works great btw!), because most RTS missions could be accomplished by just rushing the opposing base. Is this a problem? I don’t know. Most importantly, we had fun! But Spellforce veterans might want to push the difficulty slider up a notch. On a technical note: the egregious long loading screens are finally gone!
– Real player with 42.5 hrs in game
Scorchlands
Become the leader of a magical bird folk, and discover the possibilities that come with the new land. In Scorchlands, a large-scale city building meets a serene logistics game, where you’re never pressured or rushed.
Perform powerful rituals to reshape the world, and work on new technologies to save the decaying world. Create new biomes and empower existing ones with the use of magic. Discover unique resource veins and use them to expand your creative range.
Start with one colony, create more, and see them expand. Unlock unique environments and dozens of technologies that will bring new aspects to the gameplay. Experiment with building placement, and manage laser-based logistic networks to connect everyone and everything.
There’s no pressure, no time limit, no enemy nipping at your heels. The game instantly reacts to your decisions. The pacing depends on you and you alone.
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Experience a relaxing city-builder in a world of magic technologies.
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Terraform the world around you with powerful rituals.
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Get creative and amaze at the scope of your civilization.
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Never wait for anything! Play as fast or slow as you want.
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4 biomes, 21 buildings, 36 resources, 47 technologies - and more to come!
Dark Gnome
This is almost a decent F2P. With a little more love, and a lot more respect for the player, it might even have been good.
The pixel aesthetic is fine. The progression is decent in some areas, though rather linear. I managed to keep the music on for a day or two, and the sounds are decent…
The main problem is the grind. There are no passive gains, and within a few days, the rewards quickly become few and far between. I understand that grind and diminishing returns is mandatory for this kind of game, but here it quickly becomes absurd, and there is a general aversion to good math.
– Real player with 671.5 hrs in game
this is a really good game
the music and artstyle are great, the characters and enemies look fun and i love the creativity of some elements.
while the game does contain microtransactions, they don’t ruin the game as with some patience they can be completely ignored. i saw people complaining about the “constant advertising” of the microtransactions but all it is is a pop-up after opening the game or a textbox in a corner of the screen which rarely appear and don’t get in your way.
(pointing out exaggerated reviews): i saw a review from someone with 0.2hr’s (12min) in total who compared this to a mobile game because of they way it plays and the microtransactions. while the game does look like it would work on mobile, this is a PC game and thats what the devs want it to be. they also mentioned how you have to pay money or wait an hour and a half to play, which coming from someone who played for 12 minutes i can assume that they bearly finished fighting Charles and are still in the tutorial. the only wait times they could encounter would be from the medic or resting periods but you need like level 3 or 4 and its only like 30 seconds. wait times only get in the way later on with higher levels and health of your gnomes. (also this is an RPG, of course things have to take a while)
– Real player with 140.9 hrs in game
CountryBalls Heroes
For this review I’m considering three things:
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this is a new game (so bugs are expected)
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the developers are indie so they might take longer to patch and update the game
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if this game is on your radar you probably enjoy polandball/countryball meme comics.
So, I want to start off with the negatives. Nothing I hate more than reading through a review, getting hyped for the good, just to see some stuff that’s a deal breaker for me. We’ll start off with bugs/design issues:
SAVE GAME BUG
Probably the worst bug in the lot. It basically makes saves a pointless feature. Basically, if you load a save game all/most of the settlements disappear. They disappear from the map, from the quick bar to the right. Essentially destroying your save.
– Real player with 50.5 hrs in game
As an old Heroes 3 Fan, CountryBalls Heroes was a must buy for me.
Graphics are nicely drawn, animations are ok and the music is nice too. Nothing spectacular, but not bad either. I like the basic idea of HOMM 3 meets political incorrectness and the game has humor and charme. I got some chuckles here and there.
The gameplay is 100% HOMM 3, but a bit simpler and more shallow. You build your base, ride around the map with your hero, fighting for resources, producing more units until you’re strong enough to attack the opponent.
– Real player with 11.6 hrs in game
Frontier of Fortune
fun enough game thats simple and straight forward, and very repeatative. There’s a single means of controling the battle, a slider. unfortunately it’s of limited use once troops start fighting as even if you’re fighting at the enemy’s gates and then disengage a good portion of your troops will continue to fight the enemy, and even those who have disengaged will often immediately rush back towards the enemy once they reach the point you’ve set, compounding how horrible this is is the fact that your troops won’t fall back all at once and instead will go back is in clumps of 2-4. additionally spawning in more troops happens in a similar manner, resulting in frequent situations where player troops are picked off piecemeal.
– Real player with 3.3 hrs in game
Hero Park
Edit Weeks later, still broken steam achievements. No real improvements.
It’s okay for 8 bucks. But it gave me tendonitis in about 2 days and the Steam achievements don’t seem to be triggering? I have a level 10 Temple and a Rank 2 statue. Is there something else I need to do to get them to go off? Nothing in the Wiki about it, no google search will answer the question. Pretty pointless game if you can’t get the achievements to go off.
Also sometimes the number of heroes goes negative. -3/20 for example. Not sure how this effects anything or if it’s just a UI bug. Might be exploitable to hire heroes without paying for them till you are full up sometimes.
– Real player with 36.6 hrs in game
I love it, though it is far less ‘idle’ than I thought, but I think that’s beginning game, not later game? Since you can automate making the items needed for the shops as you level the shops.
I find the game very enjoyable! I like lots of moving parts and re-stocking shops, and I love the monsters! I’m having a lot of fun :D
EDITED FROM NEGATIVE REVIEW: Responsive developer fixed the game-breaking problem. THANKS!
– Real player with 28.3 hrs in game
Becastled
I really wanted to be able to recommend this game as I did enjoy it, it’s fairly well built in it’s core.
The main issue is lacking content. There is only basic skirmish mode, not story, no setups, no challenges, nothing at all. There is absolutely nothing to work towards. It’s fun to unlock all the technologies but it gets boring quickly as that doesnt take long.
I also had a tremendous amount of trouble trying to get archers positioned on my walls. Constantly getting stuck in annoying ways and not completing the commands. I realize it’s an alpha so thats not that big of a deal.
– Real player with 75.0 hrs in game
This is the game I always wanted. And it lives up to that wish for about 2 hours. When is the polish and refinement coming?
– Real player with 25.4 hrs in game