Recent reviews by Shalix

Where to begin?

I will add specs on the hardware used to review this on, as it does have a big say in how you might experience your own game.

Ryzen 7, 3800X
RTX 3080
16GB RAM
Installed on a Samsung 1TB 970 EVO.

Fair to say, the hardware is high-end and there should be no issues what so ever to run this already 5 year old game. Completely maxed out settings and Large/Huge map sizes should not be a problem at all.

(DX 11 & DX 12 tested for all of my thoughts in the Review)

The Good:

* A beautiful new art-style which will make the game look as good now as in 20 years.
* More interesting city layouts as there are more planning ahead of time to fit all the districts and wonders you might want
* The new Secret Societies, Monopolies and Corporations & Barbarian Clans modes are excellent additions to spice up your game
* It's a CIV/4X game, that does what it does very well, it is still as addicting as any other entry in the series
* Interesting new leaders to play
* Two Tech-Trees, one to cover your Culture (Theater District) and one to cover Science (Science District)
* The modding scene is amazing as always


The Negative:

* Their "Updated EULA" update now asks for a LOT of information that is not necessary at all to the game, and will nag you every single time you open up the game to accept it - Do not accept it
* The same update also forced their 2K launcher to be used. They do not allow you to close the launcher while the game is open - For no apparent reason
* The update that came WITH the new EULA & launcher completely broke the game performance
* Crashes or freezes happen frequently (with or without mods)
* Extremely poor performance after the update (Forget Large & Huge maps as it will crash or freeze your game regardless of Hardware)
* The "EULA" Update increased time between turns by a lot
* The AI is really struggling to figure out how to use Religion
* Civ AI is really strange, if you play peacefully they will freely attack you not gaining a Warmonger penalty, yet if you defend yourself you get a Warmonger penalty the moment you take over any of their cities. - They will keep attacking you on a loop until you destroy the other Civ or they kill you
* Said self-defense will make all the other Civs hate you, preventing diplomatic options and sometimes beneficial trade deals you had earlier with them
* A lot of Civ AI's really hate City States and will wipe them off the map really early on
* After building a District, you can not remove it (Fixed by mods, but should have been in the base game)
* Hovering over a tile, the tile information is really slow to show up
* It is a very expensive game to be able to enjoy the entirety of it - Which is how it should be played


Summary:

Plagued behind recently added performance issues, is a really good game with near endless replayability.

Some will be more forgiving, and some will not. The new performance problems, makes me feel the game has lost a lot of it's enjoyability.

I hope this gives you some thoughts about the current state of the game (5, July 2021) if you are considering getting it.

A game that by default does not work when installed. It also needs the Ubisoft Launcher, which will launch steam, which will launch the game. But also works the other way around, launch it on steam, which opens the Ubisoft launcher, which again will.. You get the gist. Terrible through and through with overcomplicated DRM.

Game is broken, highly recommend avoiding it. You have to do a workaround to get it to STOP crashing on start-up because of their lazyness.

---------- Original Alpha Review further down ----------


Intro

I've been wondering how to re-review this for quite a while. Should I keep recommending the game? I mean, I have played over 300 hours in total, so saying I have not enjoyed the game at all would be a lie. But, there is a big but. Stonehearth has as a base idea that is amazing, it is by design a city builder with RPG elements. It let's you build and design buildings, promote your Hearthlings (villagers), create different decorations and furnitures, mine, farm and cut down trees. A mix between Minecraft and The Settlers (or The Cultures) in feel and gameplay.

The problem is that if you are lucky enough to have a pretty strong computer you can only make a small village with some buildings. It seems like the way the game handles rendering is extremely inefficient, making it more or less impossible to make an actual city to run at an acceptable level.

Hardware & Settings

i5-4670K @ 4.7GHz
GTX 1070/1721MHz
16GB RAM

Settings down to the bare minimum
Shadow Details: Off
Maximum Number of Lights: 1
Maximum Number of Shadows: 0
Draw Distance: 600
No Ambient Occlusion or Anti-Aliasing

Even with the hardware, which is still running pretty much all newer games on either max or high settings at or close to 144FPS (144Hz monitor) it still can not deal with Stonehearth.

Problems

With the settings turned down as much as that only puts my CPU at a 56.6% load and my GPU at 20.2%. What it spits out is 36FPS. If I change over to the fallback renderer it spits out 44FPS to say the least, it runs really badly. I even tried it on a i7 7700K and a GTX 1080 and it barely ran any better

For a game I paid 25 USD for back in 2015, I got 12 hours per dollar, in that sense I would say it was worth it. But considering that a lot of the time there were gamebreaking bugs, had to constantly start new towns because performance was tanking whenever a few buildings got made? Even with a beefy computer it will not solve the fact that the game is so poorly optimized that you will not be able to make a bigger city/village.

I've normaly tried to build a simple wall around my villages to controll the flow of enemies, nothing fancy. Adding in a farm area with a storage building and a farmhouse itself. And around 4-7 buildings. This coupled with up to 22 villagers (more and it crashes more often) gives a low framerate (35 with stutters while also not looking particularly pretty. No lighting effects or shadows.

Besides technical problems and bugs, it is a very slow game. Things takes ages to be done. Be it building, leveling up your Hearthlings (villagers) to the point where they can make new items or change job from something like a Trapper to a Shepherd takes an insane amount of time, even if you fast forward it is going to take hours. By the time I have a Shepherd I am more or less done with building a "large" part of the city, tanking my performance. Keep in mind that this can only happen if you have the professions needed to create the tools they need in the first place.

The banner system is a neat little thing that gives you bonuses, the problem is that they are not even slightly balanced. There really is only one worth getting which makes all your Hearthlings run twice as fast on roads, all traders buy things from you for double the price and has double the amount of gold. The other two banners is just faster growth of plants or more ores from mining which really is not needed.

I have never ever seen the endgame, because the fun vanishes when your performance keeps tanking when you are around the stage where you can fight off bigger and stronger groups of enemies and a boss of sorts.

I highly value a game that I can keep on playing, not having to restart simply because I have a amount of villagers and buildings that really should not have been a problem running or have such a high impact on performance.

If their grand plan was to make a "City builder" and then limit it to maybe 10-15 villagers, why on earth would there even be a need for a city? It's more like a glorified tiny village simulator with some RPG elements. Based on all of the issues the game has, I can not recommend it since they stopped the development of it and called it "Complete" after cutting down a lot of their promises regarding content.

If you are however going to get Stonehearth, I highly recommend getting the ACE (Authorized Community Expansion) mod for the game, which you can find on Steam. It is a mod that tries to fill in the gaps of lost content because of the dropped content the developers did not add into the game.

---------- Alpha 10 Review under ----------


TL;DR:

Do you like games like:

• Cultures
  
• The Settlers 1-4 (Before the serie was butchered)
  
• Castle Story
  
• City/Town Management games
  
• Designing things

Then this is for you.

More about the game:

This is a sweet little gem of a game. The play-style is very much as a Cultures-like game, where you give your citizens a profession, which they get better at/more experience with. And then they can learn the next step of the profession tree. As an example Trapper(Hunter), who get's the bright idea that, "Hey, i can just have animals in a pen, don't have to run around setting traps". Much like how it works in Cultures, but you do not have any direct control over your citizens besides assigning them jobs. Some jobs, needs a workbench placed (Click on the citizen you have assigned a job to set a workbench), from there you can order items that the worker will make over time. The more they make, the more they can learn to make, some items can also be "Fine" which looks nicer.

Any citizen that dosen't have anything to do, will help build buildings, mine, gather items and cut trees if given the general order (You select areas to mine/cut trees, which then whoever got time for it goes to do it). The games building system is pretty smart, tho still needs some slight work. Easy to build, place the floor. Auto-snap walls, auto-snap roofs, manually placed windows and doors. But the game also offers building templates, so just click and drop more or less(Works well if you don't want to use time building fancy buildings).

There are currently two game modes, one which has enemies (Normal) and one without any dangers (Peaceful). The game is not very challenging just yet. Tho it might be a good idea to try out peaceful, just to get the general hang of things before heading into normal.

The game itself looks great, very aesthetically pleasing, the characters look charming, smooth animations, pretty great character variety, trees have different ages and sizes. Terrain looks nice, eventho slightly plain right now. Will be looking forward to a bit more variation.

Currently the game is in need of optimization, but that is something that will come along, especially since this is still in a early alpha. Alpha is all about adding new features and stuff for you to do. Optimization mostly comes from the beta. If you get a low framerate, i highly recommend turning down shadows if you have some performance problems.


Conclusion:
Personaly i really love it, it is a solid city-builder/managing, with some added rpg and combat. I know city-building isen't for everyone, but this is a great entry into the genre.

Worth buying, if unsure, take a look at some gameplays!