Recent reviews by Tim in Ruislip

This game is an absolute shining gem in a sea of mud crusted rocks. It nails a fusion of city building, colony simulator and RTS that let's you progress at your own rate. Many city builders use population thresholds where you unlock new features, and in turn, raise the expectations of your people to coerce you into using these new features. This can be overwhelming for new players, and irritating for an under prepared or poorly planned city designed by a disorganised player. Songs of Syx tackles this by not introducing new city building mechanics, and instead introduces you to the RTS side of the game (world map). This includes means to train divisions/armies, diplomacy and means to administrate other settlements you conquer on the world map, and the great thing is none of these are strictly necessary. This means you can simply live out your days defending your mega settlement from raiders, and engage in minimal trade with your neighbours.

Any new mechanics or production upgrades you want to explore/add can be done through a "knowledge" mechanic. This is done by assigning "knowledge points" to unlock and maintain technologies, this is a fluid number that fluctuates depending on how many laboratories and libraries you build and staff. Investing knowledge points is necessary if you plan to build a large settlement, I will explain this in the next section. I will also warn you that laboratories are lower priority than most buildings, and if you suffer from a labour deficit, your research will be the first to suffer from unemployment to fill up other industries, sometimes causing a penalty from decreased knowledge.

The game has a unique take on pop happiness which I thoroughly enjoy toying with. It scales with the amount of pops you have against the amenities/services you provide, this makes sure that you don't neglect the morale of your citizens in your pursuit of building industry and exploring "pragmatic" aspects of the game. At the start of the game you can easily support a population of 200 with starting technologies, however, to build something larger and substantial it's recommended to invest in new technologies that offer new ways to keep your citizens happy (stages, battle pits, jewellery etc).

There are about 6 starter species that all have different preferences, and of course tolerances for other species. Each species has strength's and weaknesses when it comes to types of industry and combat, which gives an incentive to diversify your settlement, however you can easily build settlements sticking to only 1 species.

Building structures is also very straight forward. For industries, you draw an outline for the building you want to build, and then decide how to place work stations, storage, and auxiliary items inside the building. You can then place roads and decorations around the structures/doorways. It's even more straightforward placing housing for your citizens which are essentially boxes you just place around, no skill needed. Farms, fisheries and pastures are possibly the easiest to build as you just click and drag out a box.

Overall this game let's you take it at your own pace without any real rush to "progress". There's also an element of learning from your previous games, which is consistent with a lot of colony builders. But this usually comes down to streamlining processes you tinkered with in the past, and progressing to the point you finished at faster. This game is carving out it's own niche very decisively, especially with only one dev who faces no pressure from publishers, it's fantastic the amount of love that's gone into this game, I believe that when 1.0 release is nailed, and big content creators pick up on it, this game will earn it's status among the gaming community as a brilliant gold standard of indie game development.

This game is quite interesting. Straight away, you're pitted against 6 other factions that pursue their own interest, some closer to your own than others, with one overarching ally/enemy. From day 1, you must plan your strategy that will unfold over the coming decades to combat (or help) an alien race with unknown intentions, while factoring in multiple variables that you cannot control, as well as dealing with consequences of the actions you take to fulfil your goals. You start off seizing control of various nations through subversion, infiltrating establishments or government positions, whilst simultaneously preventing other factions from undermining your own position, within nations under your partial or total control.

As the game progresses, you and the other factions are beginning to venture into space, onto other celestial bodies within the solar system. This starts off with a slow burn of different technologies, with larger "theory" technologies that are collectively researched, and unlock or lead to "practical" technologies that are independently researched and give you actual new toys or bonuses to play with. At a certain point in the game, every nation is more or less under the control of one or more factions (some have multiple levels of control), and the alien presence within the solar system has significantly expanded. Thus the real struggle begins, and all eyes turn their gaze up at the cosmos.

This is perhaps where the most intricate and complex phase of the game begins. With nations staying mostly under control of the same respective factions at this stage, it's incentivised to "hunker down" and begin to focus on colonising the solar system, all while avoiding aggravating the aliens that are by all means superior. This is where I found myself bogged down due to my lack of knowledge, and was promptly outcolonised by the other factions, who possessed a far greater understanding of the game mechanics, mostly due to them being AI.

All in all, this game is scaling up to be a wonderful strategy game, despite lacking flavour and depth in some areas (cross-faction communication, nation management, councillor loyalty system all need work imo). However, due to the grand scope of the game, and the linear progression of it's narrative, it offers a rare simulation where each save can be unique in vastly different ways, without drastically forcing you to switch up your strategy thanks to the equal-footing starting position. I'd argue that the linear narrative separates this game from being a conventional strategy game, and it's pacing definitely sets it apart from almost every strategy title I know of. As an early access game, this is truly phenomenal work, and I absolutely look forward to following along the development into some kind of release.

I must mention that this game (despite my measly 15 hours on it) helped me get through a particularly low point in my life, and in retrospect it was a perfectly good use of my money. Writing a review is the least I could do!

Yeah I guess it's alright. Doesn't feel as significant as the other 3 DLC, even though I guess this is bigger, I recommend only getting it after the others and if you've got overtime pay. The mechanics are cool but so far none of my games have been as impacted by this DLC as by the others. In Biotech, you get kids and the gene system, Ideology basically religions and druids, royalty psycasts and empire stuff. This DLC just feels like a different playstyle I might interact with once in a while, as it doesn't have any features that impact the overall game like the other dlc's, and because of that I'm struggling to see the price tag justification. I also wish the cultist aspect was a bit more player sided, it would be cool to be able to form a cult, and not just fight them as enemies, since I guess you can worship the same entity later on?

This is just my initial impressions, and I imagine they will add more cross-interaction with previous dlc's over the coming months. I think I only played for a few hours, and a few colonies during that time, so I may be talking out of my ass about some things, but I assume that if you read this review and buy the dlc, you're first few games will lead you to the same conclusion.

Good fun. Wait for release

So much to do... but none of it matters. 2.0 better make this game worth it

It's great game but no point getting dlc's unless you want specific mechanics, there are mods that will give you so much more... FOR FREE, unique focuses, improved combat modifiers, there's practically a mod for everything. The only dlc you need is man the guns and death or dishonour. Base game sucks without dlc, play only for achievements, road to 56 is the best for focus trees and extended tech. Kaissereich is the best imho.

Easy at the beginning, more confusing the further you get.

map game

After playing this game a year later, it has definitely improved, the developers are giving a lot from themselves to make this game really full of content. Can't wait to see how this game is with multiplayer, as well as with more content/DLC.

if you like getting headshotted and getting blown up in an APC every 5 seconds then get it.