Wastelander
Wastelander is a roguelike turn-based colony-building game. Explore a barren alien world and build a unique colony by unlocking new buildings, and re-activating ancient alien technologies while defending yourself from destructive atmospheric storms. Can you build a unique thriving colony, and find a way to escape this deadly predicament before it’s too late?
In Wastelander you’ll start from nothing as a castaway on an alien world. As your colony expands you’ll find alien artifacts and buildings, perks, technology upgrades, and consumable items scattered across the map.
START FROM NOTHING
Create a simple colony as you explore your immediate surroundings.
BUILD AN ECONOMY
Harvest resources and expand your base. Connect to alien ruins to unlock new buildings and alien technology.
MASTER THE WASTELAND
Create a sweeping colony that spans the globe. Connect your base to all the alien ruins to escape the planet before the final mega-storm buries the wasteland and you along with it.
KEY FEATURES:
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Simple turn based colony building gameplay that’s easy to learn, but difficult to master!
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Scan your surroundings to uncover resources and other hidden alien items.
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Build and expand your colony using your resources efficiently.
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Construct defenses to protect your buildings from regular destructive storms.
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Upgrade and unlock new buildings as you explore maps shrouded in mystery.
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Use powerful abilities granted by ancient alien buildings
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Unlock the secrets of the alien ruins to improve your technology and unlock a path to escape and victory!
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Compete with other players' high scores on the “Daily Challenge” leaderboard.
Read More: Best Colony Sim Turn-Based Strategy Games.
Reignfall
It is a buggy mess (late game), it crashes a lot and feels like tons of missed opportunities, it looks like… well… but as a concept it is really good fun.
So this game is a mix between tower defense, real time strategy, city building and 3rd person fighting game. You start a game on a procedurally generated map and you have to survive 15 waves of attackers to win. There are rogue-like elements in the sense that everytime you defeat 3 waves you get reward items which you can carry on in your next game (making it easier, obviously) providing a variety of bonuses from extra ressources to extra troops or bonuses and abilities for your lord like damage resistance, bodyguards and a variety of skills and spells.
– Real player with 43.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Gore Games.
Reignfall I think is an underrated gem that I wish a lot of people would discover and get into more. If your a big fan of strategy games like Total War, Age of Empires and also action RPG games like Dynasty Warriors, this is a pretty fine mix of those elements along with roguelite and city builders!
In Reignfall your objective is to defend against an onslaught of random enemies every couple minutes, in between this time frame you must build and manage your town to produce resources and gold to get defenses, soldiers, and heroes to fight on your behalf. Some buildings require chains in order to be used effectively, for example if you want to make a lot of food you’ll need to first get a wheat farm, where do you build farms? On fertile ground (dark green tiles) and you must build the farm plots on said fertile ground. After that you need to construct a mill to have that grain be turned into flour, and a bakery to turn it into food. These chains and production buildings all take gold which you will need to counter balance by building homes to increase gold flow and also purchase units. The game finely balances out and stresses that you can’t just be spend gold happy to get what you need and strategic placement of your buildings to get the most use out of them.
– Real player with 37.2 hrs in game
Per Aspera
It’s rare for a city builder / logistics game to have a good story, but this one sure does. Through monologue and dialogue options we follow the self-discovery and existential ruminations of the player character, an AI tasked with terraforming Mars. The planet visuals are beautiful. It’s incredible to zoom in and look at the contoured terrain and watch it change as it fills in with water and plant life.
Gameplay is less elaborate than most city builders and the logistics are not even close to the level of complexity of something like a Factorio style game. Managing the interconnected temperature and atmospheric composition is interesting. The end result is a casual, relaxing builder with a memorable story.
– Real player with 95.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Base Building Games.
===SUMMARY===
This is my favorite game of 2021. I like simulation games as a group, and this is a beautiful installment of this growing genera. I love what simulations teach me, being spoon fed facts off a list. I love that (having played Per Aspera) I know the landscape of Mars better. I know some of the names, sure, but grokking the SCALE, the oddness, sparking my curiosity about Noctis Labyrinthus, just from working on the planet is priceless. I became familiar with Mars in a way that Surviving Mars never did (though I played that a lot too).
– Real player with 68.7 hrs in game
Stonedeep
Needs some work on bugs, mechanics, and missing materials.
I recommend this game to people who have patience working with incomplete builds and like a challenge. Otherwise I would recommend waiting until some more kinks are worked out. The game has a lot promise. I’ve enjoyed and will continue to enjoy paying it. Below I’ve put some more detailed notes on challenges I’ve encountered.
After five restarts I’ve managed to create a fairly stable colony of over 100 dwarfs that I believe can grow further as long as I can get the dwarfs to live in a dwelling within a reasonable distance to their assigned job. Spreading out clusters of dwelling cells centered around their respective taverns works fairly well but the dwarf AI doesn’t always pick the closest dwelling to live in and when I try to choose specific dwellings I want them to live in they reassign themselves to another dwelling. This means I have the occasional dwarf dying of thirst because their job is too far from the dwelling they chose to live in despite the fact I have empty dwellings available that are much closer to their job.
– Real player with 52.7 hrs in game
The current state of this game has a lot of problems, most of it regarding the A.I.
Current Problems:
A.I. Dwarves will spend a lot of precious time idle even with dig spots and tasks needing to be queued
Due to poor A.I. and pathing, A.I. have trouble depositing and retrieving needed items from vaults
Due to this above issues, even with enough mushroom farms, a brewery, and a honeywell, they fail to create the process of beer
due to not creating beer, theres no supply to the tavern, which in turn causes your entire workforce to turn into dark dwarves
– Real player with 13.6 hrs in game
First Feudal
The game is cool but it has alot of polishing and quality of life improvements to go.
-Your dudes just seem to quit hunting and cooking despite the avaliable resources and tools. you’re just strolling along and suddenly you have no food. You got the tools. the animals, no food, your dude’s just standing around. there’s no explanation. I’ve been having to manually do all the hunting.
-Need to have more options for work. some dudes I strictly want doing things, once those positions are filled I just want to place orders, I don’t care who does it.
– Real player with 112.4 hrs in game
I’ve been playing this game non-stop for a while so i can make a review, so here it is.
Things i like:
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Has a great sound track
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Has a great art style
In general its a fun game to play, not just to pass the the time, its a game where you can put a lot of hours into and still have a lot to do.The AI is great, i haven’t experienced many bugs with them besides a couple of times which ill mention later. Its a very re-playable game, with every new world being unique from the last, which makes you rethink strategies to survive on that map.
– Real player with 94.5 hrs in game
They Are Billions
I have finish playing the campaign and its a learning process. This game is like a soul like RTS game, one zombie gets in or penetrate your defenses and the whole thing could get out of control. I understand on why some gamers gave a negative review of these game, you could have invested 2 to 4 hours in your campaign or survival building your city and thenone zombie sneaks in or overwhelm your defenses and the whole thing is game over. It has no backward save, so there is no second opportunity on your mistake. I know because it did happen to me several times, but I think its unfair to immediately give a negative review, because of being defeated. The hero mission on the campaign is actually good, but it takes patience and planning, also paying attention, so you can find all the treasure. Overall, I find the game very challenging, but in a reasonable matter. Its just you have to get good in playing this game.
– Real player with 214.8 hrs in game
Tedious and frustrating don’t even begin to describe this game.
I’ve tried playing this game several times. Each time I have, I find that my hours of investment are promptly wasted when I make one mistake that leads to an inevitable game over. This game is very very difficult, even on the more “accessible” levels; you have to balance manpower, energy, food, and material resources all while slowly expanding, and clearing out areas of zombies. The problem is that if even one zombie slips past your defenses they can infect your entire base in seconds.
– Real player with 127.6 hrs in game
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
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
Diluvian Winds
Diluvian is a 2D management/adventure game seen from the side in semi-real time, in a context of exile due to the rising waters. The player embodies the Guardian, an individual who, refusing to leave his lighthouse, will witness this mass exodus.
Expand your Community by Floating, Flying or even Submerging
Each Lodged Refugee will make changes of varying magnitude around the Lighthouse, making it more resilient to the gradually rising waters.
Enter a poetic universe combining Sail Punk architecture and Anthropomorphism
In order to survive, the Keeper will have to choose whether or not to house nearby Travelers in need of help.
Experience countless stories with procedurally generated events and characters
Different Survival Paths will be open to the Keeper to adapt his Lighthouse to withstand the flood.
Knights and Merchants
Great Nostalgia, as I played the original game ~2000 when I was a kid. If you already played this game, you can’t do much wrong buying it again, it contains both campaigns (The Shattered Kingdom [TSK] & The Peasants Rebellion [TPR]) which should take ~50hrs of raw speedrunning if you still know the concept of the game.
There is a problem though: This is NOT the original game from 2000! It’s a remake with a hell of new bugs and changes (esp. if you played TSK and didn’t own the Gold Edition)
Some things I noticed:
– Real player with 148.3 hrs in game
If The Settlers and Dark Souls had a love child, it would be Knights and Merchants.
I never got to play this when it was originally released in 1998, and I regret it, but the mistake has now been rectified!
K&M is an old school RTS/city economy builder hybrid. The concept is simple, the graphics a little dated, but still good enough, the sounds are simple and your minions make cute little comments when ordered to do something. The UI is easy to understand and on the surface, it seems a simple game.
– Real player with 140.4 hrs in game
Oxygen Not Included
I have been playing this game on and off during its entire release time, the base game as well as its DLC, and during this entire time I could see the work that has been constantly put into it.
Pros: Always a work in progress. You rarely run into a time in the game where you do not know what to do next. There is always the next project or problem that needs your attention. Not in a stressful way, more in a “it never gets boring” kind of way. There are tons of things to learn and build to get your dupes more comfort or to just mess with the elements in the sandbox mode.
– Real player with 566.5 hrs in game
Excellent simulation game with tons to experience and learn. Intimidating because of its complexity, but satisfying when things work. Lots of content, fun to start new games once you’ve learned how to handle different challenges. Charming, funny animations, great art style and music, always something new to try. Does take effort to learn all of the systems, probably the most complex game I’ve played, but also one of the most rewarding. One of my favorites purchases on Steam.
– Real player with 219.7 hrs in game