Mercury Fallen
This is a fun little game in early development. Start by awakening in a small ruins underground on an alien planet. Dig out rooms and gather resources to build the base that was supposed to be awaiting you, but something went wrong. But you do get a few friends to help and a little spidery robot. More survivors and robots can be found burried outside your base. The only food at this time is potatoes, that can be made into mashed potatoes (This must be heaven for the Irish), but more crops and items are planned. Water pipes and electrical is not very intuitive, but a little trial and error will teach you all you need to know. After a game week you will have all the tech tree filled and have built all there is to build, but with an elevator to the surface and more content planned, this game has a ton of potential. This game is hours of fun, but not days of fun. Only buy now if you are willing to get it cheap and wait for more content to follow. I had 2 crashes and a bug where a survivor became stuck until I reloaded. Compared to other early releases this is pretty minor. As more content is added I am sure most people will find this very enjoyable. I recommend this game.
– Real player with 1003.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Base Building Games.
The game is in the early stage of EA which means it is not a full game yet and bugs, crashes and lag can happen.
That said, in the 30+ hours i played, the game has crashed once and never had any lag issues even on the highest possible settings.
So is there anything to do already?
For the stage MF is in yes.
It has the basic items to build your base and with research you can add new rooms, equipement and other options.
You can refine the raw materials from mining and farming and use those to make building materials, food, bots or refine them into next tier materials. Besides the production of bots you can also clone colonists.
– Real player with 158.8 hrs in game
Clanfolk
Clanfolk is an elaborate life sim set in the highlands of medieval Scotland.
Live off the land using historically accurate tools and processes to survive while building a growing settlement for your Clan. Every tile on the map has a purpose. Where you place your settlement, and how you build it, really matters.
Clanfolk will execute your grand building plans while also intelligently fulfilling their own personal needs. Get to know your Clanfolk as they live their entire lives in your care.
The world is fully simulated, and the largest threat is nature itself. Initially, food will be plentiful and the nights warm. There is lots of time to plan and enjoy the medieval homestead atmosphere. As the seasons change, resources will dwindle and careful planning becomes critical. Surviving your first winter is highly unlikely.
Colony Sim
The Clanfolk’s homestead will begin as a wilderness surrounded by mountains, forests, grasslands, and lakes. Over time it may develop into an industrial farm, or a livestock ranch, or a bustling trading post, or a quiet forest Inn, or maybe a hidden mountain fortress.
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Build sealed structures out of Floor, Wall, and Roof tiles.
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Structures track lighting, warmth, beauty and various unhappy smells.
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Windows allow ambient lighting into rooms.
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Use wall torches and fires to heat, light, and occasionally burn down straw houses.
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Venting system to allow fire and body heat to travel from room to room.
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Door locking system to keep Clanfolk, visitors, and livestock where they belong.
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Storage container objects to keep the ground clutter under control.
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Crafting can be prioritized, scheduled daily, and also controlled by maintaining a desired supply.
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Till the land, plant seeds, water them, add fertilizer, harvest, re-till the soil, and start again. All automated to the level you desire
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Care for livestock from birth. Keep them warm, dry, fed, watered, and clean their stalls.
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Learn just how hard it was to make a linen shirt. Grow the flax, thresh out the seed, throw the stalks in a river, let them rot for months, strip the loosened fibers from the stalks, spin the fibers into thread, weave the threads into cloth on the loom, and THEN sew your linen shirt!
Life Sim
Clanfolk live their whole lives on the Clan homestead, from birth until death over multiple generations. Clanfolk follow daily schedules, waking up before sunrise, taking their morning meals, washing up, and maybe having a conversations before the day’s work starts. Throughout the day, they will work as hard as their mood and health will allow. In the evening, they finally all come back together to eat, drink, have a chat, maybe play the flute for a while, then off to bed, hopefully a little better off than the day before.
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Clanfolk needs include: Hunger, Thirst, Sleep, Warmth, Cleanliness, Bathroom, Social, Fun, Beauty, and the inexplicable need for Plaid
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When needs are not within safe ranges, then afflictions may result. These afflictions can range from having a bad mood, to a cold that slowly deteriorates into pneumonia.
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Clanfolk have many skills which are improved through use. Skills can be prioritized or disabled to give Clanfolk different job roles to best utilize their skills.
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Babies inherit some skill proficiency from their parents. They are mostly time vampires, but they are cute and keep everyone’s' mood up (during the day)
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Babies grow into Juveniles that begin to provide labor. Juveniles are idea sponges, working slowly but learning much faster than adults.
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When Juveniles become Adults, their learning slows, but Adults finally work at full speed. Ideally, their childhood will have been spent on jobs that they enjoy, making them experts by adulthood. Another benefit of adulthood is the ability to have children to grow the Clan.
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Eventually Adults become Seniors. Seniors work and move more slowly than Adults, but they have the highest skills and provide learning bonuses to others working near them.
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Finally the Seniors will be unable to work and will need to be cared for. Clanfolk are able to understand the needs of other Clanfolk and are able to take care of the sick and injured, fulfilling all their needs when possible. Once the Senior dies, they can be buried in the family plot, and the cycle continues.
World Sim
The seasons in Clanfolk never seem long enough. Winter is always approaching and your time needs to be spent wisely. Each Season has ranges of temperature, rain, snow, wind, and even windchill. Some seasons are for growing and others for harvesting. Winter is for staying inside a warm room and processing the materials collected throughout the year.
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All four seasons have smooth transitions between them, ever advancing and changing each day.
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Sparks start fires that spread throughout the environment based on moisture and object flammability.
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Plant growth system that is aware of ground moisture as well as fertility level, which can be changed with watering and fertilizer.
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Overlays to quickly show fertility, moisture, heat, and beauty.
Neighbor Clans
Visitors will occasionally arrive from neighboring Clans surrounding the homestead. Over time your reputation with these neighbors can grow based on how they are treated as guests, workers, or traders. As your reputation increases with these Clans, contact will strengthen, providing better opportunities.
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Each neighbor Clan comes from a different Biome with different products and desired items for trade. The savvy player can run a profitable trading post if there is enough trade traffic from different Clans.
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As seasons progress, different items become more scarce and therefore more expensive.
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Neighbor clans have intrinsic skill bonuses based on their Clan type as well as their Biome. When looking for the best workers (and potential partners) keep these in mind.
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Neighbors do not send their best and brightest visitors until relations between the player Clan and the neighbor are strong.
Read More: Best Colony Sim Medieval Games.
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
Read More: Best Colony Sim Base Building Games.
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
Songs of Syx
TL;DR: Paid full $25 USD. Definitely worth it, great balance between DF and Rimworld while doing it’s own new thing. Saves not migrating versions stinks, but understandable for a complex EA game.
Amazing. Still EA and some missing features, but what is here is very well built!
I was initially turned off this game because I played a much earlier demo, but this game has grown into something truly impressive! Games in this genre tend to fall under “Dwarf Fortress” or “Rimworld”, and often fail to measure up to either. Songs of Syx strikes right between DF’s sense of scale (but then skyrockets past it as your city-state grows), and Rimworld’s friendlier UX allowing you to actually enjoy playing (but UX scaled for a massive city-state, not a couple dozen colonists).
– Real player with 242.7 hrs in game
TLDR: 8/10 (Humble aesthetics, clunky UI, but does the game play have a real arse on it…)
Songs of Syx is an increasingly curious city-builder. Though it clearly has a bit of development to undergo (0.56 is the version I am reviewing), it is making leaps and bounds with each update. Sure, maybe it’s not a whole lot to look at and things are a bit muddy and cluttered, but that’s forgivable since its function is handled with such care.
Concept
This isn’t your typical hands-on city-builder or village survival game. While it shares a lot of ground with games like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, it’s functionally its own game thanks to your inability to manage individual citizens. Which is kind of a blessing, since you don’t want to be able to nit and pick when you’ve bloated to a city with 1,000+ people.
– Real player with 214.6 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
Imperium Romanum Gold Edition
English :
This is a great game. The “Grand ages of Rome” is the sequel of it and has somewhat better graphics, comes with a plague of fires all the time. In Imperium Romanum that doesn’t happen. You have a lot of time to put up the fires and enjoy your city view & achievements. In this game you can relax but not so in Grand Ages of Rome. Tips: Plant trees near the wood cutter’s cabins, this way you’ll have a continuous flowing supply of wood. Extend your aqueducts to the maximum they can reach and build wells where fires occur more often. If you have enough money anything can be built in a flash. Don’t harass the barbarian tribes until you are really ready to face them. Build wooden walls around your town center to avoid attacks. I give 10/10 for this game and I am very pleased to have bought it!
– Real player with 50.0 hrs in game
A true successor to the game CivCity Rome, this simulator carries over many of the familiar features of the classic game with numerous improvements. Most significant is that a lot of the micromanagement has been removed, and game is not bogged down by de-evoling houses who don’t get every supply they need, even though for instance they live directly next to a butcher, tailor shop, and fruit store yet cant get meat, tunics or fruit. With that said, warehouse management is a bit too easy, since in the old game warehouses had to be watched carefully and supplies “donkeyed” between them to serve other parts of the city. This is now gone, and simply building a warehouse and marketplace next to a cluster of houses magically supplies all their needs.
– Real player with 24.6 hrs in game
Patron
Coming from Banished, and particularly modded Banished with RK, or North 7… there is a lot I like about Patron, a ton that I (hopefully just currently) dislike about it, and hope to see what it may become. So everything in this review should be seen through the lense of a long time fanatical Banished player. As what I like and dislike about Patron as it currently stands are so closely intertwined, rather than a list of like/dislike, I will discuss various aspects of the game and what I like/dislike about each of them.
– Real player with 150.5 hrs in game
Despite promise, Patron needs baked a little longer.
You know those game dev sims, where you have to wait a little while after a game is “done” to work out some bugs before you release? I don’t know that that happened with this one.
Nevertheless, I have worked around the bugs that have caused it to crash (and crash… and crash…) enough to get it to work at least in windowed mode and given it a try. And so far, it’s kind of just making me want to play some Banished with the Colonial Charter mods in place.
– Real player with 49.7 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
The Wandering Village
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In a world where mysterious plants are spreading all over the earth, emitting toxic spores as they grow, a small group of survivors seeks shelter on the back of a giant, wandering creature they call ‘Onbu’.
Become their leader, build their settlement and form a symbiotic relationship with the creature to survive together in this hostile, yet beautiful post-apocalyptic world that now surrounds you.
Build your village
A functioning village is the basis of your survival. Build your settlement and expand it over the creature’s back. Plan production chains and optimize them to utilize the limited space as efficiently as possible. Create a society that can overcome any challenge.
Live on the creatures back
Living on the back of another organism comes with its own set of challenges. Will you live in symbiosis, bond with the creature and survive on mutual trust? Or will you become a parasite, only aiming to ensure a better life for your villagers? The choice is yours.
Discover different biomes
Travel through a multitude of different biomes and adapt your village to their unique opportunities and threats. Scout your environments and send out foraging missions to gather rare resources and ancient artifacts.
Research new technologies
Remnants of the old world hold knowledge that has long been forgotten, but can be unearthed by your villagers. Find and research these technologies, but use them wisely, as progress can be a double-edged sword.
Survive the wastelands
Ensure the survival of both your villagers and your Onbu, even though poisonous spores, merciless weather, bloodsucking parasites and many more challenges mean that the odds are often stacked against you.
Zeus + Poseidon
One of my favorite childhood games to play, though I’m not quite certain it works as intended, be it because of steam or windows 10. The game launches in fullscreen by default and messes up my screen resolution when doing so. It does feature an in-game windowed mode that fixes this…but this renders the user interface on the right (through which the game is played) mostly unreadable, and it also squishes the text to make it difficult to read.
Additionally, I am uncertain the gods are properly rendered. I remember them when I played the game on disk them appearing instantly; it can take them over a minute to appear now and their animations for anything (be it attack, curse, or blessing) are equally as slowed.
– Real player with 179.9 hrs in game
Oh boy, oh boy…
It finally happened. One of my top 5 games of all time recently got released on Steam. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent playing the main Zeus & Poseidon campaigns, let alone the custom-made ones.
The pinnacle of city builders that started with Sierra and ended with Impressions Games: The Caesar series, Pharaoh (& Cleopatra), Zeus (& Poseidon), Emperor - Rise of the Middle Kingdom, and even Children of the Nile (even though I never quite got into it). Pharaoh is also available in Steam now, so make sure you check it out, too!
– Real player with 94.5 hrs in game