Dracula’s Castle
Manage the castle by expanding it, then build and unlock new rooms granting new mechanics to explore. The Alchemist will allow you to equip Dracula with mystical tools, unlock the bat cave to improve Dracula’s Mist Form. The more you expand, the more your labour force can grow. You’ll need to grow your army of servants in order to accumulate enough soil to sail to England on the Demeter.
Travel Transylvania by night but watch out for Van Helsing. Stalk the towns of Transylvania, on the hunt for fresh blood, or attempt to overwhelm them to gain powerful bonuses. Feast, recruit laborers or “invite” a guest to the castle, the choice is yours. You’ll need to entrap Jonathan Harker to fulfill Dracula’s dark designs.
Grow Dracula’s power the way you want to. Dracula possesses different attributes such as Power, Cunning, Speed, Charm and Magick. Choose which ones to train and equip the right relics for your build. Build new monsters at the Alchemist’s Lab utilising recipes found in the Necronomicon! Craft or acquire new gear throughout your adventure.
Engage angry mobs, town militia and even dedicated vampire hunters in exciting tactical turn-based combat. Leverage Dracula’s powerful abilities and forms to outwit and overwhelm the enemy. The spoils of battle are yours! Hand over curios and materiel to the Castle Alchemist to craft new items and raise new monsters to join Dracula’s dark menagerie.
Follow the early plot of Bram Stoker’s masterpiece, the main goal centers around Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing and the trip to Carfax Abbey in England; but plenty needs doing in the dark corners of Transylvania. Engage in various side-quests given to you by Death and other denizens of the castle as you work on building up Dracula’s regional power.
Read More: Best Colony Sim Moddable Games.
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
Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville
A series that takes an inventive twist on the zombie apocalypse setting, Rebuild takes the “man versus man versus nature” struggle present in most games pertaining to zombies and reframes the gameplay from the more common action/shooter elements and turns it into a 4X game of conquest. The world of Rebuild is one in which the survivors are all fairly competent people. Nobody here is an idiot that is going to stand there and quiver in fear while the zombies take a bite out of their neck. The primary struggle is maintaining the flow of your resources and zombies are only really a threat when you spread your people thin. Fortunately the game manages to balance this well so that you’re generally never too comfortable that you don’t have to worry. Each map tends to follow the same flow of scrambling your survivors frantically so you can find food to eat that night to having a slight bit of breathing room so that you can begin to, as the title suggests, Rebuild and then challenge the AI factions present. Zombies ramp up their difficulty as time goes on as well. There are a few strategies that generally guarantee victory as long as you execute them well but I’ll leave you to figure out what those are. It has clever nooks and crannies and like any other good 4X you’ve played it’ll keep you up all night as you have multiple goals planned out at once, one of which can always be achieved in Just One More Turn. The ebb and flow guarantees that you’ve always got something to do.
– Real player with 338.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim 4X Games.
Summary: Turn based zombie survival
Multiplayer: No
Completion: 46 hrs
Cards: Yes
Cloud: Yes
Rebuild 3 is a real time or turn-based tactical zombie survival game with a focus on recruiting followers and expanding territory. The game offers two distinct modes of play, Quick Play, and Story. Quick play offers unlimited procedurally generated maps, with various settings that can be adjusted to your liking. Story mode is a whole campaign where you can carry over leader stats and a small group between missions.
– Real player with 81.6 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
Industries of Titan
There are already a lot of excellent (constructive) reviews here already for the 21 June 2021 Steam release but I’ll add my 2 cents here to talk more about the side elements of the game and offer some advice for potential players who are still sitting on the fence.
What do you get when you combine the macro-management aspects of SimCity 2013, with FTL-like micro-management in factory management and combat, then slap on a UI that’s reminiscent of grand strategy games? You get the absolutely fascinating city builder that is Industries of Titan (IoT for short).
– Real player with 115.3 hrs in game
My first impression of the game:
The beginning is a bit confusing. You have different management levels:
1. Production
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Collect raw materials (initially from ruins, later in mines)
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Collect artifacts (also from ruins)
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Produce fuel and electricity
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manage garbage (a lot)
2. Citizens and workers
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Buy and house citizens
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Earn money from citizens watching advertisements
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convert some citizens into 24/7 workers (who then stop watching ads)
3. Build on two different levels
- Inside buildings on a square grid (reminiscent of Tetris blocks :D )
– Real player with 54.8 hrs in game
Project Apocalypse
Not a bad game, from what i understand so far its limited being a new game and all so i expect alot more in future but for now its pretty fun and alittle addictive for me the only thing is dislike so far which really takes away form game is lack of instructions the base tutorial pop ups were great but going further no direction I find mysel asking
Why do my ppl keep dying even when i have food and safety
Do i need 20 homes for a large population or can i upgrade existing to hold more people. game lacks small details so im just doing whatever hoping for best overall great game and i have found little wrong with it so far.
– Real player with 7.9 hrs in game
I just started the game, but can see a lot of potential! The developer is very passionate and invested in this game and you can tell. It seems as though if you don’t get featured as a big indie game on steam, it’s hard to get reviews, and I wanted to give a shout out for this one. I’m looking forward to supporting the developer as he continues the game. I read a comment on one of the discussion boards that was pretty nasty, saying the game looked like another game, and honestly, you can say that about so many games out there. It’s the way in which a game is developed, and particularly when the developer cares and listens to feedback, that can make a game feel different and fun.
– Real player with 4.8 hrs in game
Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation
This is probably the game I played the longest while still being unsure if it is actually good. And I didn’t even finish it.
Story
J:A.S.S is a base-building survival simulation as the name suggests. There was a zombie demon apocalypse, you and a few others have survived the initial carnage but now you have to ensure your longterm survival. Maybe you can even find out what happened and if you can fix it!
Gameplay
Gameplay is divided between classic base building - farm food and resources, craft advanced materials, provide everything for your group of survivors, build defenses - and combat, which is itself divided between defending your camp and exploring different locations for materials and for clues about what happened to cause all of this.
– Real player with 176.5 hrs in game
TL/DR: Judgement simulator mixes Xcom’s unforgiving struggle for survival while capturing alot of the base-building and character nuance of rimworld. It’s intense and wild at first, but eventually becomes dull by not maintaining the level of challenge. Unforgiving, and not for the faint of heart.
I’m reserving judgement on this one for now (no pun intended). It’s a good skeleton of a game, but missing content in terms of story missions, and weak variety of enemies and gear. Awesome vision, but only good (read: above average, but not great) implementation. Sometimes I think I’m harder on good games with untapped potential, than on bad games; I may be leaning that way on this one. They say a full release is coming in the next few months with new enemies and story missions, along with a price increase, so I’ll probably have to re-evaluate this review after I see what it looks like.
– Real player with 122.1 hrs in game
SimPocalypse
UI has an unusal design to help increase the options for the massive number-growth generator applications that all idle-clickers are.
The demand for input from you as a player feels obstructive at a fair bit of time and the techs that allow you to automate yourself away are not clearly advertised with the tech tree being ‘shrouded’. This can add some frustration.
There is little else to add, the combat is mostly for show - my own ‘35K force’ tank brigade does not take any damage at all anymore when facing supposedly superior forces and development of my faction has pretty much gone to a standstill for the past 5 hours while I’m tabbed out letting the auto-combat handle conquering everything.
– Real player with 92.4 hrs in game
This is a ‘yes, but’ review, so. If you’re skimming, pass this one up. If you’re interested in details on why this MIGHT be for you, read on.
So. This is one of those compelling semi-idle games where you fundamentally click things on spreadsheets to make the numbers go up until you literally take over the world. And that’s pretty fun! However.
For the random store browser, there’s not much more to it than that, and I think there’s a lot of room to be disappointed with your purchase.
For people who enjoy the semi-idle thing…?
– Real player with 23.9 hrs in game
Startopia
Be warned that this game is old and the interface feels all 20 years of its age.
However, if you can stomach old games, this is one of the true classics from its era. A space station management/tycoon game with a lot of heart and humor. Numerous ways to build your station, several ways to challenge yourself or just relax and mess around.
I’ve played this off and on for two decades and still own the original disc so my hours on Steam only reflect buying it again here for convenience.
–-
Of interest to fans: The original development company obviously went out of business, the game transferred ownership for a number of years to Square-Enix who did nothing with it and then released the game back to the care of one of the original developers.
– Real player with 91.5 hrs in game
To date, I have purchased just over 15 games on Steam. Some of them have been complete wastenados of my money - one in particular I shelled out a lot for and only got a couple of hours of semi-enjoyment out of it. Startopia is the exact opposite of that game - I paid very little for it and, so far, I’ve gotten more hours of fun out of it than any other game I’ve purchased on here.
You’re managing a space station which is being visited by nine different alien types, each with their own preferences and skills. You have to build facilities to ensure these aliens are healthy, well-rested, well-fed, entertained and other things like that, make sure any aliens who cause trouble get rehabilitated, keep the station clean, and make sure you have enough energy to keep it all running. You’re aided by this artificially intelligent being called VAL who often peppers his advice with a degree of snark and you get occasional visits from a trader named Arona who I swear is a cross between a Vogon and Moneybags from Spyro 2.
– Real player with 74.2 hrs in game
The Universim
March 2019 Update
Population explosion has a limit now, which in a recent game (currently year 610) it seems to top out around 250-270. The spread of the nugget stone huts seems to work in small grid pattern, 8 or so huts in a small rectangular area. What determines where they start plopping huts i do not know. Its much more efficient in some respects, although you will get a housing block started far out of the city core at times. Eventually with Tudor Architecture the nuggets will upgrade the stone huts to larger multi family homes. This is great when it comes to saving space, its just being an automatic process, you cant turn off the control. Which means houses in areas you want to abandon upgrading, while next to the beautiful Town Hall is 4 stone age huts. This means duplicate services for those out of reach areas, this doesnt hurt early game too much, but you feel the crunch later. Especially when it comes to refined resources.
– Real player with 647.6 hrs in game
1. Early Access - A Preface
With any Early Access game, you need to make allowances. There’s going to be bugs and many features lacking and not everything will happen on time - after all EA is often something that small studios do to keep the lights on while they are developing the game.
That doesn’t mean you have to put up with everything. Early access makes it all the more important, that you have proper process management, a capable team lead, a plan and a time frame, that probably shouldn’t be longer than two or three years from EA start to release. During that time what’s there of the game should be playable without constantly running into gamebreaking bugs, because if people stop enjoying the game, they are not going to stay, not to mention that it’s very bad for the word of mouth factor.
– Real player with 82.4 hrs in game