Recent reviews by Lecherous

Quickly becoming one of my favorites for when I want to blow off a little steam (ba-dum-chah). Resource management at its heart, with city-building/planning following close behind. Great visuals, decent voice, awesome soundtrack, and soul-rending moral choices (which matter less when you know what's coming). Limited replayability as of this review, but the (free) DLC map looks promising, and appears to feature an endless mode. Looking forward to what 11 Bit is going to do from here.

Buy it, play it, love it.

Amusing city-builder. Slightly more intense than Banished, but only because when things go bad, they go catastrophically bad. It does have some serious balance issues and a few gameplay issues, though. Production and storage of raw goods cannot be limited and will quickly fill up Storage areas, leaving little room for vital nourishment and forcing you to trade away your metals and plastics or exponentially expand (massive storage -> O2 generator -> water pump -> solar panel -> 2x batteries).

After the first 30 colonists or so, your base expansion is fairly linear, which becomes a little tedious, but random events, such as meteors and solar flares, still require you to pay attention. Each of the three planets has slightly different conditions, and 10 milestones for colony survival. Of the 24 achievements, only two should take any amount of planning; the rest will mostly likely unlock during the course of completing the game.

All in all, it's fun, but not life-changing. If you enjoyed Banished and are looking for a fresh tileset, you should play this. It's slightly overpriced for the amount of content, so you might wait for a sale, though.

Summary: Lots of fun for a city-builder, definitely worth 20 USD. Took me 50 hours of playtime to get all achievements.

Long Version: You remember the rabbit in Monty Python's Holy Grail? It's a lot like that. You start off with this cute little bunny of a village, then all at once, it lunges for your throat and leaves you bloody and beaten.

Banished is full of ripple effects: Everything's running smoothly and you feel confident in building another house? 20 years later, because of that extra house, everyone is dying of starvation, freezing to death or dying of diptheria.

My laborious little laborers have been trampled, stabbed, plagued, frozen, crushed, drowned, burnt, swept away, and one lucky teacher went ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crazy. And yet, humanity persevered and thrived.

It's a game filled with subtleties and harsh lessons, but definitely worth playing!


Edit [6/6/2018]: It's worth noting that whenever I play a city management game, to this day, I inevitably end up comparing it with Banished. This game has made as much of an impact on my mind, that it's nearly reached Civ-levels of comparison in its genre.

Little more than a flash game at this point (early access), but judging from the core concepts of the game, I don't see it getting any better. It feels like a knockoff of Ubi's "From Dust" with much, much less substance.

Good fun, excellent narration. Simplistic hack-and-slash/RPG, but engaging enough that it doesn't get boring through a few playthroughs. I picked it up in a Humble Bundle, but I would've paid full price if I'd known what I'd be getting.

Fun for what it is, which is basically a Mass Effect-type game. Only similarity to the original X-Com is the universe setting.

Update: After finishing it on normal difficulty, I was expecting a slightly less linear game. That is, the same open-endedness that Enemy Unknown had where you could just commit to not playing the last mission and play indefinitely. Given the option, I'd wait for it to go on sale, which will probably happen quickly.