Desolation Tycoon

Desolation Tycoon

The world has ended, but life moves on. Your home is a wasteland scoured by winds blowing in from a caustic sea. Most large mammals are extinct, and insects have filled their roles.

You are a merchant traveling this land in search of profit. Each character you play starts with a randomly generated history and traits. And eventually, each character’s career will come to an end — whether through successful retirement or tragic death.

The game remembers everything you do, and the world is persistent across characters. As a consequence of your actions, civilization will slowly grow and rebuild. Accomplishments accrued across any number of characters will unlock new cities, new crew units, new challenges, and so on.

There is no fixed storyline. Instead, you have a setting, a set of gameplay mechanics, and complete freedom to do with that what you will.

Core features:

  • Travel, trade, and defend your cargo from dangers.

  • Improve your skills through usage.

  • Find and explore places that are worth plundering.

  • Build relationships with city notables, and co-operate with them on various schemes.

  • Rebuild a persistent world across multiple lifetimes.

  • Make trade-offs in encounters that are purely decision-driven, and avoid grindy minigames.

  • Enjoy a high-information user interface that doesn’t ask you to remember things unnecessarily.

Example challenges:

  • Local climate calamities.

  • Giant insects, bandits, and much worse.

  • Each character will automatically retire if they live long enough; this does not leave enough time to develop all possible skills.

  • Networks of supply and demand are randomized between playthroughs.

  • You can’t stay in a trade route rut, because trading with the same cities too much will make it less profitable.

  • You and your crew can become injured or sick — and possibly die as a result.

  • The locals that you trade and scheme with have minds of their own, and may betray you.

  • Performance-enhancing symbiotes may seem like a great idea, but can lead to unfortunate side-effects.

  • Oh, and there are also demons. They complicate everything.

This is not an action-oriented game. Time doesn’t pass unless you’re doing something, and there are no real-time challenges. Instead, gameplay is strictly about the making of intelligent trade-offs in an open-world setting with many potential courses of action.


Read More: Best Resource Management Trading Games.


Desolation Tycoon on Steam

Heliotropism

Heliotropism

Loving the game! Super fun and challenging.

Real player with 22.7 hrs in game


Read More: Best Resource Management Sandbox Games.


Simple yet elegant with addictive do or die qualities. Truly a must have for the steam collection.

Real player with 13.3 hrs in game

Heliotropism on Steam

Dome Romantik

Dome Romantik

Dome Romantik is a roguelike mining game, where you go on a run to strip multiple planets of their minerals, while the native creatures furiously try to stop you. They come in waves, so you have to carefully consider your mining activities to return just in time to defend you dome. Greed can be deadly, information a viable tool for survival. Powerful upgrades will help you stay alive and be productive until you can move on to the next world.

Your Dome

Choose a unique dome that will shape your run. Each dome has different weapons, abilities and upgrade paths, each bringing their own challenges along.

Your Task

Extract minerals and use them to improve your dome and yourself. Install shields, new weapons, or facilities to generate powerful fuel for your jetpack or even ammunition. Improve your mining abilities with stronger drills or innovative ways to retrieve minerals.

The Worlds

You’ll meet many strange lifeforms as you progress through the worlds. They are as different as the worlds they live in, so you need to learn their tricks and focus to stay alive.


Read More: Best Resource Management Action Roguelike Games.


Dome Romantik on Steam

Plushie Dungeon

Plushie Dungeon

Plushie dungeon is game about difficuilt time management, where you must choose between your Bossie and your Plushie. Idea is to make the game complex enough that you will have to know what is your priority before every action. But as time goes far, priorities will change..

Ah, who turned of the light?! Well, me!

Plushie Dungeon is game with the dungeons, obviously. So be prepared for darkness and things that crawling in it. You can put the fire on, but even fire is not going to last forever. Every time you sleep ( or you try to hide yourself in the MENU ) fire goes off everywhere.

Plushie Dungeon on Steam

Corpoct

Corpoct

The advertisement videos shows gameplay that isn’t consistent with the actual choices/options/theme of the game. Buyer beware. Other than that, it’s a simplistic wanna-be “FTL”, but its not. It could be good for small children who just barely know how to read. In fact, it should come with an expected player age of 7 years old. This isn’t insult or malice, I just think that the target audience should be an upfront aspect shown to the buyer.

Real player with 18.5 hrs in game

This is a neat game. It combines some travel elements of FTL with combat similar to a pared-down Gratuitous Space Battles. There’s some resource management, cardplay to influence battles, and satisfying meta-progression. It’s worth checking out

Real player with 9.3 hrs in game

Corpoct on Steam

Don’t Give Up: Not Ready to Die

Don’t Give Up: Not Ready to Die

“Don’t Give Up” has relatively simple mechanics, but they work very well within the game context.

The game raises existential and philosophical questions that make you ponder but without being too pretentious.

Even with a high challenge level, the game keeps you engaged and makes you want to go forward to see what happens next. Recommended!

Real player with 6.8 hrs in game

This is an adorable game with a lot of bugs. I would recommend it to others under the guidance of prepare for things to suddenly not work for inexplicably no reason. I honestly love the story enjoyed the visuals and find the concept engaging.

But if you dislike mechanics blowing up be warned. At one point one of my inventory squares was inaccessible meaning that 10 mins into the game I could not craft items that required all the inventory squares. But I am a determined person and taking the name of the game as an instruction “I did not give up” and decided to push through playing until I had 10 mins left on the clock.

Real player with 4.3 hrs in game

Don't Give Up: Not Ready to Die on Steam

Tribal Wars

Tribal Wars

I have been playing this game since 2007. Most of the gameplay is still the same from back then. But now with a lot of QoL improvements. The game is well balanced overall, but sometimes a little too much luck based. I have a lot of great memories from this game and made a lot of friends aswell. The game is easy to start with but hard to master.

However the developers do not know what to do with this game and destroyed this beautifull game the last couple of years. The game has become too much pay to win in my eyes and it’s not doing any good. I don’t mind to pay for extra premium functions, but buying resources, cheaper buildings, instantly finishing buildings, with your own money to get an advantage over other players is just plain wrong in my eyes. Also the addition of flags is only benefitting the older players and not the newer ones.

Real player with 803.9 hrs in game

This was mostly a trip down memory lane for me. I played on World 18 and 19 about 12 years ago. And, by the way, the game on their international server is currently on World 117. This is on the Tribal Wars US server. But, the game is more or less the same.

This game requires a lot of baby sitting. Everything runs in real time. And, it is highly recommended that you get in a good tribe early–or that you join one that is very good diplomatically to become aligned with the winning tribe. If you start later than a few days after world launch, you are already in trouble and could end up continually getting conquered and restarted.

Real player with 368.4 hrs in game

Tribal Wars on Steam

Business Simulator

Business Simulator

Overview

The last time ol' Il Pallino had to review a low budget tycoon game, things got as ugly as the game this author reviewed! (You can call me a disgrace, but you’ll never call me a liar for writing a negative review.) Thankfully, Wenay Studio came up with an enjoyable game in Business Simulator. The game is characterized as a poor man’s This Grand Life with the main differences being that Business Simulator is a real time strategy, has an XP system, and no depth outside of occupations.

Real player with 17.0 hrs in game

First, I am giving a recommendation as the game has promise in the near future. What changed for me was the developer actually implemented a patch once feedback was given. That is very important and i respect that.

Second- Yes this game has bugs and quirks that might make it unplayable at certain points as of today. I am sure with the bug feedback I am giving, it will be fixed soon.

Its actually not a bad game at all, just a rough start. If you like sims, and business sims, its worth the $5.

Real player with 13.4 hrs in game

Business Simulator on Steam

Poly Pirates

Poly Pirates

A true modern masterpiece.

Real player with 2.3 hrs in game

Poly Pirates on Steam

Insurmountable

Insurmountable

IN A WORD: COMPELLING

IN A NUTSHELL:

WHAT TO EXPECT: Adventure rogue-like. Turn-based strategy. Hex-tiled maps. Graphically beautiful. Layers of themed mechanics. Ironman style saving. Challenging gameplay. Permadeath. Singleplayer only.

ACHIEVEMENTS: NOT EASY OR QUICK TO GAIN.

STATUS: COMPLETE. CURRENTLY SUPPORTED

WHEN TO BUY: FOR A DIFFERENT TACTICAL CHALLENGE.

More info below….

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2519624284

Real player with 26.1 hrs in game

Insurmountable is a good foundation for a potentially very chill roguelite. Its slow pacing means it compares more readily to autobattlers like Loop Hero than to action roguelites like RoR or Hades. It’s a good time if you fire up a podcast and get climbing.

I bought this game after watching a bit of a playthrough on YouTube. I watched it at 2x speed with no problem. The game absolutely should at least have the option to go faster. The current speed options are either “intolerably slow” or “slow.”

Real player with 10.4 hrs in game

Insurmountable on Steam