Recent reviews by Satyric

I've watched this go from basically an alpha prototype to a very decent game. The pace is good, interesting without being frantic. If you play on the slowest speed you could even call it serene. It has enough complexity and progress to be interesting without being a numbers-heavy micromanagement factory simulator.
The progression of unlockable things is mostly good, though a bit unbalanced and mystifying here and there.
The simulated village is really well-designed and runs well, though part of the game is that you can gradually dig yourself into a supply-chain or economic hole that it can be easier to restart than get out of.
The quest and military systems are still pretty vestigial. The UI recently got an overhaul and looks and feels very nice.
If not a tutorial, it would be really good to have some in-game documentation for each building/need/concept, that also lets us know generally how close or far away things need to be from each other. This is the kind of stuff that seems really obvious when you've been living with designing and balancing it all, but players will make all different kinds of assumptions about and end up frustrated.
If you like city simulators that start out simple and slowly build up, this is one of my favorites of the genre.

Extremely solid one-player D&D game. I'm enjoying the campaign a lot, and wish the devs planned to sell more of them as DLC. At least by their wording in the launch announcement though, it seems like they'll do bugfix updates and work on the player mod tools until they're finished, then they're moving on.
Still, I'm 33 hours in, still on my first party (I usually reroll characters to fit an RPG at least once, if not a couple of times) and having a good time. The areas are all different enough to stay interesting, and the stories are fun. The combat is very close to D&D 5.1 with only a few minor issues (you can't really target area-of-effect spells in 3D, which is a problem in a few maps where things are above or below you). I'd highly recommend it!

If you like turn-based deck-building games with a repeating rogue-like quest system, this is great. The characters and systems are fun and well-designed, there's enough progress and variation that I'm not bored even with a static world.
If you don't like any of those things, this isn't the game for you.
It's coming along really well -- the devs update frequently, and they're just as focused on game fun and balance as functionality.

Some good ideas, and fun implementation. But it needs a lot of polish, balancing, and QA. The UI/menu structure suffers from Designed By Programmers. It's been abandoned with frequent crash bugs still present, so I'd recommend avoiding unless it's on extreme sale.
There's some real potential here, but it looks like they couldn't justify further development, which is too bad.

This is a stripped-down X-COM. The plot is railroaded and not random, and you can't make your own characters. But there are three major enemy factions, so you'll have a decent playthrough. The missions are set into bite-sized sections which is great. The maps are designed and scripted with the objectives. And you do get to choose which team members you recruit/use/build up.
Instead of the wold world, you worry about one city with multiple districts. You build up some infrastructure in those that supports you, while using extra soldiers to help with research and side missions.
I've finished one of the three major campaign objectives, and plan to do the other two. I don't know how much replayability it'll have after that, but there are always the older X-COM games if you need endless randomness.

With great customizability comes moderate learning curve. It's a well-built game, and the developers have been doing a good job at squashing bugs. It's more engaging to me than Planet Coaster, because I like animals. But it isn't as much about managing a zoo as using a developer-level editor to create one. The campaign is also the tutorial, and it holds your hand until it doesn't. At that point you either need to read a lot of help files or watch some tutorial videos.

If you want a simple business manager like Two Point Hospital, this isn't it. If you want to build and run some very elaborate stuff and curse at various aspects of the editor until you figure things out, come on in.

Good 4X game. Basically Civ in Space. I've been looking for a decent one of these since Master of Orion 2.