Ymir
I whole-heartedly recommend this game with a few caveats.
-The game is early access and is being worked on my a single developer.
-This game will not be completed quickly. The game will not always be updated quickly (although he has been doing quite well so far. An update every couple weeks usually).
-There will be bugs (although generally not game breaking, they can be a challenge and if you do not want to deal with it, I would wait).
-While there are official servers. They are usually quite full. So, the other servers are entirely player run. They can be hit or miss. So, until there are more official servers / there are better server hosting tools / more dedicated server hosts are better equipped to handle the job, you may very well sink 2-3 weeks into a game and one day it is gone. This can be avoided by doing your research on servers before joining. Some server and their hosts are amazing such as Age of Porcos run by Shem and PigsLands run by Jey.
– Real player with 5283.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Economy Games.
New changes and recent major update have slowed the already awful pace of the game and made the overall progression and experience worse, to name off a few problems. I am giving this a negative just based on the early neolithic stage of the game alone, it is that fucking bad.
-You are now locked into where you spawn, you use to be able to move your starting tribe around a bit and maybe find a better spot at the risk of losing some or all of your tribe; you could even force settle onto another primitive tribe if they had a better spawn and after you reached a certain size you would have to fight them for the land. This ruins Arid players who spawn in the desert and rely on river networks to farm crops during agriculture and ranching phase of the game. Already players are just straight up abandoning and respawning if they get a godawful spawn.
– Real player with 3036.9 hrs in game
Colony Survival
With almost 500 hours, I now feel I can give an honest review of this game. This IS my first review, hence why I see so much potential in this game because i normally don’t do reviews. Also, 1/3 of these hours are from me being afk in game while working on additional content for the game and my server, so keep that in mind. (This will be updated in the future if nessecary)
Here are some of the conerns I’ve seen from potential players of this game:
1. It’s expensive
- Keep in mind, this is an early access game. To continue development on a game, you need funding, funding that will overall improve the quality of this game and allow the developers to potentially get better gear for developing the game, hiring more staff to work on it, and allow them to live off of funds so they can put more time on the game.
– Real player with 794.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Base Building Games.
I first got this game for my son, who enjoys Minecraft and similar building games. I got a copy for myself to play with him. Turns out I liked it more than him. My main beef with Minecraft was that I didn’t feel like I had a purpose. Ok, I’ve gathered a zillion chests full of various resources and built a cool house to store them in. I don’t find the combat in Minecraft enjoyable after playing too many MMORPG’s with quality pvp and pve so now what? With Colony Survival, I have found that purpose. I have endless zombies to plan how to slaughter to defend my city!
– Real player with 505.9 hrs in game
Castle Story
OK, so a while back I did a review on this game. I still said it was positive, but I basically said “It’s buggy but it’ll get better”. And now I feel is the time to re-review it.
Let me start off by saying this is one of the coolest and prettiest castle builders I’ve seen in a long while. It has a near perfect arrangement of blocks to suit all of your construction needs, yet it simultaniously keeps you materials as basic as possible. You can build with Stone, or Wood. There are a few other materials that can be used to make useful structures, but those are the two things your castle is really gonna be made of. Yet in that simplicity, you can make very cool-looking castles with ease. And what’s even cooler is that in the survival gamemodes, all of the castles you built for purpose and purpose alone still turn out looking amazing.
– Real player with 233.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Building Games.
Game is worth 10USD. If that is what you’re paying I think it’s worth it. Unfortunately it isn’t 10USD.
The game lacks content and barely works, but it is quite fun for what there is. The devs have left it alone rather than milking it for DLC so they have my respect for that, but they fall short in most other categories.
My gripes:
1. Instead of optimising the AI, pathfinding, job finding etc. they made a limit of 15 units. There are videos of people playing with 130+ units and having no issues.
– Real player with 179.6 hrs in game
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
Northgard
There aren’t many RTS game nowadays. So, this one is like… a rare gem. One of the most brilliant contemporary RTS out there.
The objective is simply to win, by which means though is entirely up to you. You can choose a mercantile clan and obliterate your enemies from the map or a war-mongering one and wins the wisdom victory, for example. It’s possible, but not ideal, but again we have to make do with what we have. The game offers like so many clans to choose from (many of which are DLCs though). Your town hall, the main building, regularly generates your population. One at a time. You construct a building and assign a worker to it. You explore the map, each zone in tile with designated resource(s). You colonize a tile and construct a building you see fit. During winter each year, you suffer production penalty. And everything moves along the passage of time until one clan rises to supremacy, or everyone else falls. Oh, and all the while some special events occur: Kraken attacks, abnormally harsh winter, annoying earthquake, etc. One of the best things about this game is that you don’t have to micromanage your resources and workers so meticulously. The town hall only produces one person at a time and each production building can hold but a few assigned workers, so everything is easy to put under control.
– Real player with 636.7 hrs in game
gave 250 hours of my life to get an extra chromosome very worth
– Real player with 263.0 hrs in game
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
Craft The World
I had my fair share of fun in Craft the World, only matched by infuriating frustration it never failed to induce.
Dwarves are beyond dumb. They run from fights they would win and they stand their ground when they should flee. When equipped with ranged weapons they tend to get in close then run away in direction the enemy is coming from ending up in the middle of a horde of hostiles, then obviously being unable to get to safety without your intervention (open a portal if you have mana or take control of them, go through the enemies and hope for the best). This also occurs to melee characters as they flee.
– Real player with 536.3 hrs in game
At the Time of Writing
Game: Craft the World
Price: $21.99*
Genre: Simulation/Building
Time Played: 95 hours
Personal Enjoyment Rating: ☺☺☺☺☻
Links I Found Helpful**
A Youtube lets play by paulsoaresjrhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FF8kgUIy-U
This video pick might seem strange since it’s episode 18, however I felt that it would give you a good idea of what the game is like. If you enjoy exploring a new game for yourself, then you perhaps don’t want to watch it!
– Real player with 244.7 hrs in game
The Guild II Renaissance
The Guild II Renaissance is a game that is most fundamentally about money management. You use your funds to build a number of production facilities - everything from your basic farm to buildings producing high end equipment, armor and artifacts for trade or use. In addition to a typical strategic “god view” you control 3 individual characters. You can engage in a variety of activities with these characters like having them run for office, enage in special actions with the buildings they own like goading the workers into action, and so forth.
– Real player with 118.2 hrs in game
TL:DR; Steep Learning curve. Old Graphics. Buggy Mess. One of my favorite games.
So I want to start off by saying if you’re interested buy this version of the game and only this game. This is a stand alone game, and it is the most up to date - bug-free version. Also, getting the MegaMod pack doesn’t hurt either, adds a lot to the game and fixes a bunch of bugs.
It took me 4-5 times on separate occassions to get into this game. Until I finally found my stride and went deep in, and man I feel like I was missing out. If you’ve ever played Civilization games you know the term ‘one more turn’ - well this game gives you exactly that same feeling.
– Real player with 95.3 hrs in game
Kingdom Two Crowns
I do not have the capacity to explain it in detail at this time, but the quick takeaway is I cannot recommend this game. Good concept, but having to fight glitches/bugs and the occasional bit of anti-player design ruins the experience and makes it drag into terribleness. If you have hearing issues, please be advised that there are key cues that are audio-based without any caption options. If you are colorblind, you will find the visual design even more challenging/impossible and again, there are no accessibility options. Considering that settings rarely stick between game loads, I’m not even sure that adding them would even fix anything. Also, adding new achievements at a later time and locking them behind a paid DLC is not great. In any case, sorry, but I would advise avoiding.
– Real player with 239.1 hrs in game
Short version:
- Basically tower defense done at its best.
Long version:
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During the day you explore the current island (yes, there are several).
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Build up your defenses in the form of recruiting peasants for your army and build walls/towers.
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Survive the night when the Greed come (a well named enemy that steels your coins).
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Unlock new building/peasant tech and rid-able mounts on the current island.
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Build a ship.
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Move to the next Island.
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Repeat former steps until strong enough to return to the first Island.
– Real player with 116.3 hrs in game
Anno 1404 - History Edition
Pros: This is a fascinating game of city-building, managing multiple medieval cities and colonies on various islands connected by ships. The economics are elaborate. The music is beautiful. The graphics are good without being beyond the abilities of a mid-range video card several years old.
Cons: What you get here from Steam is “Anno 1404 Venice”, which is enhanced from the original but with the original tutorial campaign suppressed. You can get access to it only by starting the game up in a special way. Be prepared for a LOT of micro-management, especially the need to start and stop farms and factories when an island’s storage is empty or full. It’s a pity that the designers provided no way to automate this adjustment. I recently received an “achievement” for having halted my production units five hundred times in a single game! Trade routes are a crucial part of tying your economy together but are not sophisticated enough. (I’m told that this shortcoming was rectified somewhat in Anno 1800). All in all, optimal play requires slowing the game down to the slowest possible speed, which in my experience cannot be done with the ‘-’ key that is supposed to control it. Instead you must press F11 and click on the left arrow on the bar at the bottom of the screen. With this done, the game is much less nerve-wracking, but a conscientious play-through of any scenario will require many hours.
– Real player with 885.7 hrs in game
I love this game. I own the DRM-free version (Dawn of Discovery, Venice). I stopped playing that one for good in 2015 because of the well documented crashing to desktop memory related problem blah blah.
That problem is now gone. I have loaded my old profile, I have loaded my old game, I have played for 8 hours straight without so much as an FPS drop on ultra settings. Nothing in terms of gameplay has changed; this is still a well balanced economic city builder that I can lose hours in. If you’re new to Anno 1404, I highly recommend this game for its resource management, quest system, endless game mode, and city building. If you’re returning to Anno 1404, it’s as glorious as ever.
– Real player with 334.8 hrs in game