Recent reviews by knighttemplar1960

Rather boring, even for an idle game.

Boring

Amusing game. Good for running in the background while you are doing something else.

The immersion of the game is excellent. It makes you feel as if you were a real viking trying to survive a hostile environment.

A town builder game. The graphics are excellent. The game play is good. The only issue with the game is that once you have beaten it all further playthroughs are identical and the game becomes boring.

A political game that will remind you of Lemon Aid Stand. The devs did BOT do their research. Definitely slanted to the political far left instead of a balanced experience.

One of the top economic/trade games on the market. I wish that they would remaster and release this game.

Amplitude released what was clearly an unfinished game. The concepts are good but the execution has been terrible. Cultures are not balanced with respect to each other. The concept of a cultural shift is a good one but again the execution leaves something to be desired. There are also far too few available cultures in each era.

There are political and civic biases built into a game that should have been balanced out to neutral before the game was released. Some of the glaring problems with the game stem from that obvious bias.

A fantastic game! 11 of 10 stars. The developers have taken a great deal of time to create a bug free product. You are a brilliant engineer who has crashed on a hostile alien planet. Using your knowledge and what remains of your ship You must build a factory so that you can launch a rocket and signal for rescue. The game is a puzzle. There are production chains and usually in each chain a product that you made previously is one required for the next higher step. After playing for an hour you look up at the clock and realize that 4 hours have gone by. There are a multitude of ways to build your factory. No one way is the "right" way. The game is endlessly replayable, you can customize your experience even in vanilla, and if you have gotten so good at vanilla there are mods that you can get that make the game even more complex and absorbing. 2,000+ hours and I'm still learning new things every time it try a new design.

The good things. The graphics are excellent. The game concept is fantastic. The game would be a wonderful way to chill out if it weren't for:

The bad things. While the game concept is excellent the implementation of that concept is horrid. Many of the unique gimmicks the developers have created to try to differentiate this game from other games are clunky, immersion breaking, and are also inconsistent throughout the game. An example of this is the press "E" action. You watch the little circle sweep around for about 3 seconds to do a task that in any other game would be a simple click. When you earn an achievement you get a display covering announcement that can literally kill you if it happens at an inopportune time. You can hold "TAB" to clear it but once again it takes about 3 seconds for "TAB" to clear it. The story line of the game is thin and obvious. The developers continually release more content but that content is ALWAYS bug ridden and what little bug fixes are done usually have bugs in them too. There are still game altering bugs in the program from release and each update introduces more game altering bugs. The tutorial takes over 3 hours, and much of that is enforced waiting which drastically slows down the early game. There is also no way to skip the tutorial on subsequent game saves unless you use a mod or an editor to modify your save game file. If you play permadeath you can literally wind up doing nothing but the tutorial over and over again because you can get killed easily during the tutorial. Of course you can cheat a permadeath defeat by the simple method of backing up your permadeath game file before beginning your play session. So far 95% of my permadeath defeats have been due to the a fore mentioned game breaking bugs.

At release the game was single player and the now somewhat obsolete story line explained it. "Multiplayer" (dis)functionality has been added but the multiplayer features are essentially "play alone together." Multplayer functionality is not synced with the other players in your group. When one player experiences weather effects, such as storms, the other players may still see and experience bright sunshine. So while one player is frantically trying to take cover the other players are continuing their explorations.

At the time that I am writing this review I have almost 1,000 hours of play time in. I have to say that the bad things now outweigh the good things and I would not recommend this game until the bugs are patched out and the gimmicky attempts to differentiate this game are streamlined out.