RecommendedSteam player
TL;DR: - A mix of elements from Anno, Factorio and Kingdoms and Castles - It’s got that game loop in place: discover > improve > discover > improve. There’s always that one new thing you want to build or line you want to change - Very active dev, daily responses in Discord and weekly updates - Already a large amount of content, even in its current state you’ll get your money’s worth in playtime Disclaimer: I’m one of the early beta testers, probably the 3rd or 4th wave. So I did get the game for free (although I’ve since abundantly made up for it with feedback & bug reporting etc). I’ve also been bumped up to mod on the Discord (come say hi!). So you know, this is a sliiightly biased review ;) You will probably hear a lot of people saying it is “another Factorio, but different”. I beg to differ: to me it starts off as a variation of Anno, where you set up production lines to provide goods for your town, which ever grows in size and complexity. The logistics in these production lines do have a lot of belts and rails, so that automation aspect and line balancing of Factorio is present as well. And it’s got an overall pleasant atmosphere that reminds me of Kingdoms and Castles. I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t buy into early access based on promises of things yet to come, but instead based on what's currently on the table. As you can see, I have played it a lot so far. Steam says I’m currently at 450+. I'd say even if the development would stop now, in the current state you'd still get your money's worth in playtime. While actual gameplay time for myself is less, more in the range of 250 hours, that’s still a lot. The other 200 hours I had the game open while discussing things on the Discord, creating small test setups to help people with a design problem, working on stuff for the wiki, and I’ve even made a bloody calculator for the game. Yes, a production line ratio calculator. No, you don’t need it to play the game, but it becomes useful when you want to make fully optimized endgame production lines. And that’s the part of the gameplay loop I like about the game. On the one hand, there’s a lot of discovery: a lot of research and base upgrades that slowly unlock the game and change your playstyle. When you researched belts, it’s quite a challenge to set up your first belt production line. Then: how does this affect all your other production lines? Do you remove the roads and wagons and replace them with these belts? What new stuff can you do with all these freed up workers? The same goes for logistic blocks, such as splitters and sorters, how can you use these to improve your lines? Do you rebuild things again once you unlock rails? By this time you’re really short on iron, so those starter lines really need to be improved and expanded. And so it goes on. There’s always something new to do, either trying to produce a new type of good, or changing something you already built. And no matter how you play, on your first map you will always end up with spaghetti lines. And ideas start brewing on how you can untangle this mess… And I want to reiterate that the dev is very active. I got my key something like 8 months ago, and I’m really surprised by the content that has been added since then, especially for a single dev. He responds to questions and feedback on the Discord on a daily basis. The game is roughly weekly updated, sometimes a bit longer when it’s a large content update, after that multiple in week to address new bugs (important hotfixes in a few hours usually). And yes, of course there are still things missing from the game, but these are becoming smaller QoL things, like large scale deletion or copy/paste blueprints. But I’m confident all of this stuff will be added in (see the roadmap). Looking at the excitement around launch, I’m guessing he’s going to get a nice budget for all the stuff he still wants to add to the game. But again, even without all the planned additions, it has got hours and hours of gameplay in its current state. Sheepy_Gorilla out!Show moreShow less
470 hours at review222 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access · Received for free