HIGH Nuking the dragon with an array of archers before it torched anything.

LOW Wounded swordsmen taking space in my army without ever returning to action.

WTF This is obviously a fantasy world, yet there are no fantasy buildings or units?

The past decade has seen a flood of creative city-builders setting a new standard for the genre. It’s unfair, of course, to expect every indie team to turn out a Frostpunk or The Wandering Village, but the bar has been raised. That means some reasonably competent titles that don’t stand out will be forgotten, and unfortunately, that’s the fate I expect to befall Becastled.

Becastled is a phased-combat city-building game. The player’s forces can only build, recruit units, and gather resources during the day. Every night, “Lunar” enemies attack from a nearby spawn point and follow predictable paths. On each fifth night, a more powerful force attacks. At the edges of the map are a few towers that, when destroyed, provoke a more powerful attack featuring a boss. Destroying all of these towers grants victory.

There’s no campaign to speak of – the closest thing Becastled offers is a series of tutorials – and the meat of the experience is the freeplay mode described above. There’s also a sandbox mode that feels somewhat pointless, as it removes the core resource management aspect of play. A limited map editor is also available. For purposes of this review I tested the sandbox mode, made a few maps, completed the tutorial, and played five full rounds of varying difficulty in freeplay (each of which ran 2-4 hours).

Becastled’s maps are made of irregular polygons of territory, each of which can have a resource and trees, and one curious feature about these resources is that they don’t really deplete. Even on higher difficulties I never had a mineral or food resource run out. Except in the winter season, forests regenerate completely every day. This bounty eliminates the typical progression of city-builders, and among other things, it leads to oddities in city planning like massive stone walls that completely enclose a forest. Another curiosity is that the world of Becastled is clearly one that’s full of magic – the game’s “Lunar” enemies include a golem, a dragon, and a necromancer – but the player can’t create a building or unit that has any obvious magic capability — the closest one can get is an herbalist.

That herbalist building is not initially available, and must be researched on the rudimentary tech tree, which is only about two steps deep on average. Researching new techs is instantaneous and requires only that the player spend resources, primarily wood. This points to a significant resource imbalance in Becastled, as the need for wood is awfully steep since it’s needed to create every early building and also research every tech to get additional resources. Even obtaining the ability to trade other goods for wood requires 2000 units of wood in research, not counting what’s needed to recruit and sustain manpower and gather gold.

The lack of any other resource can be worked around, but if the player spawns in a map with no wood next to the initial position, they might as well restart. Strangely, the bare-bones map editor has no method for adjusting the position or density of forests, so even when creating a specific optimized world, one is utterly dependent on the RNG to get enough wood in the early game to survive.

I also noticed that units sometimes had trouble getting where they needed to go, or that they would make strange movements. This was most notable with the military units — archers would sometimes teleport outside of walls and troops would sometimes get trapped by a cluster of their comrades. Workers would also sometimes get stuck on terrain or be mysteriously unable to reach their work sites, even when nothing had changed from the previous day. Also, walls laid out near lakes would sometimes simply not get built.

During my time with Becastled, I noticed it being patched almost daily, yet each patch seemed to make pathfinding worse. The last time I played, military units would regularly fail to move at all when I clicked on a destination, and numerous workers failed to reach their work sites every day. This leaves me with some doubt that the pathfinding problems will be addressed.

While those are serious shortcomings, the fundamental problem with Becastled doesn’t really lie in its systems — the key issue is that there’s just no hook here. There’s no unique resource, no unusual mechanics, and no unexpected interplay between units or buildings. There’s not even anything approaching a graphical twist. Becastled is simplistic and straightforward to the point of being generic, and the magic that’s missing from the player’s build menu is also absent from the experience as a whole.

Becastled is certainly a game a person could spend hours playing, but in a genre crowded with unique and fascinating takes on the concept, I can’t think of a reason why one should put time into a title with so many annoyances and so little to recommend it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Mana Potion Studios and published by Mana Potion Studios and Pingle Studios. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows 11 PC equipped with a single GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card (driver 581.80), a Ryzen 7 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed (as described above). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10 and contains Fantasy Violence. The violence is totally bloodless, just little guys falling over. If it can hold their interest, this is an all-ages joint.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: During main play there is no dialogue. In tutorials, dialogue is accompanied by text boxes (not true subtitles, example of text below) that cannot be resized. There is narration in the opening movie but no subtitles. During play there are no essential audio cues. This game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: On PC, this game offers partially remappable controls. Keyboard and mouse bindings can be changed, but it is not clear whether controller mapping can be changed (indeed I couldn’t find a page that even had the mapping on it). In KBM mode panning and rotating the map is primarily on the keyboard while the mouse is primarily for zooming. While hotkeys to perform a few functions on selected buildings are available, most selection and other functions uses clicking and dragging of the mouse. I found the game awkward to play with a controller. The left stick controls cursor movement (sluggishly) and the right stick adjusts the view. Buttons are used to select but once a building is selected the D-pad must be used to enter its menu and assign workers (using the face buttons).

The post Becastled Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Tight city-building controls and lots of customization.

LOW Each experience ends abruptly.

WTF Why am I able to infinitely stack bushes into the sky?

Tranquil Isle is all about building a tiny island village far away from everything, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

The objective of Tranquil Isle, if you can even call it an objective, is to place buildings around an archipelago’s town center and slowly expand the population by building houses, artisan buildings, and other fixtures, while also expanding to other islands. Each building the player can place also has a point total assigned to it, with certain buildings buffing and debuffing others.

As the points add up, Tranquil Isle presents the player with two options for buildings to populate their village with after certain point thresholds, like a choice between one group of an altar and five houses, or another group comprising a farm and some stables. It’s an effort to give players more control over their end score, which tallies up all the points for every building placed across their village, after which the player can move on to a new project.

A player can experience Tranquil Isle in two different styles — the first being a purely numbers-based experience where they attempt to stack as many buildings as close to each other as possible, while combining certain groups of buildings and their buffs to get the highest score possible. The other is to create an aesthetically pleasing paradise to look at.

Mechanically, the first style is a complex puzzle to solve, but placing certain buildings next to each other makes intuitive sense. Forager buildings work better when they’re not in contact with any other nearby buildings. The mills with big windmills get buffed by nearby farms, but are debuffed by other mills within a certain distance. Houses buff the town center, as well as altars and town halls where people who live in these houses certainly congregate.

The best part of this buff and debuff system is that it naturally lends itself to creating towns that look aesthetically pleasing, so it rarely compromises any part of itself. I don’t play builder-adjacent games like The Sims or Frostpunk because I feel like my poor design choices would ruin whatever architectural layouts make a well-run city look the part, but Tranquil Isle takes that out of the equation, and makes me feel like a somewhat capable city planner.

Aesthetically, designing my islands to make them look more lived-in came secondary to placing down buildings — but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t try to dress them up.

While each building has spacial requirements that prevent them from being too close to one another, there’s no limit to the amount of decorations the player can put on every building and empty inch of grass in town. I found the limits of customization in Tranquil Isle when I found out I could infinitely stack decoration objects like rocks and shrubs on top of each other. Naturally, I made infinitely tall stacks of these objects and just laughed to myself that I was permitted me to do that.

Getting to create a beautiful island utopia is most evident in Tranquil Isle’s Sandbox Mode, which lifts the limits of building space requirements and allows players to run free. I could put ten town halls on one island, or make an island that’s full of taverns and theatres, surrounded by houses so the townspeople could access them. There’s a world full of combinations of buildings, decorations, and terrain forms that can make Sandbox mode a joy to explore.

My only issue with Tranquil Isle come from the eventual end to these building experiences. While I can begin lots of new islands to create lots of different potential towns, it always feels like the building process ends too abruptly.

For example, a “medium” sized town will have three different islands to populate and build upon, but once the player runs out of buildings to build, the game forces them to end. Every time I’d place my last building, I was given the option to build a bridge to a new island… that didn’t exist.

I wish Tranquil Isle would give players a greater sense of closure when they were clearly finished with the space at hand, or build out some objectives for the player to complete when they were actually done. However, with tons of combinations of buildings, decorations, and island constructions, players can get nearly infinite replayability out of this title’s solid foundation, chill vibes, and potential.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Buy Tranquil Isle – PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Tom Daly and published by Future Friends Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 2.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but it contains no violence, graphic imagery or language.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no dialogue, and the only bits of text are in pop-ups on the screen. The text can be resized by a “UI Slider” in the game’s settings. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post Tranquil Isle Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Cool concept, solid fundamentals.

LOW Demonic, dismal UI. Boring cards. Confusing structure.

WTF Seriously, why is there a story at all?

The hardest reviews to write are the ones for the nearly-theres — the ambitious failures, the unsuccessful experiments, the polished messes, and the well-meaning shambles. They’re usually built on sound principles and timbered with good intention, but somehow, somewhere, something causes the whole experience to sink. Such a case is Knights in Tight Spaces.

This is a standalone sequel to Fights in Tight Spaces, a game that fused small-scale, position-based tactical battles with deckbuilding to evidently well-received effect — I haven’t played it.

KITS swaps out the modern-minimalist martial art aesthetic for a woodcut-inspired medieval world. There are knights, rogues, wizards, swords and boards, wands and wagons, flagons and flechettes, dungeons but, curiously, no dragons. Along with these trappings comes a new structure — a fusion of the Slay the Spire node board with some RPG-esque questing, party-building, and equipment.

It seems like a logical next step, and due props to Ground Shatter for taking something that worked and making an honest attempt at enriching it. But KITS, sadly, completely trips over its sabatons and exposes its whole ass like a character out of Rabelais.

First and most grievously — for a game that is ostensibly finished, the KITS UI and general readability is shockingly bad.

KITS takes obvious inspiration from Into the Breach, in the sense that its battles unfold in cramped arenas (they definitely delivered on the tight spaces) and positioning is key. Enemies move and telegraph their attacks, and then the player takes their turn. This is where the deckbuilding enters the formula.

Every character action is represented by a card, every card has an energy cost, and the deck is cycled through as the fight progresses — I really, really dislike saying “It’s basically like game X,” but, in a post-Breach, post-Spire landscape, all of this will seem Quite Familiar… KITS is one of those titles that finds its own identity by dovetailing signature mechanics from other games, and there’s nothing wrong with that — in principle.

Whereas both Breach and Spire transmuted the underlying density of their mechanics into beautifully luculent, readable interfaces, no single scrap of key information in KITS is where it should be, arranged how it should be, or at hand when it needs to be. Tiles where an enemy attack will land are marked with a subdued reticule that blends in with the rustic hues of the maps. Barring projectile attacks, there’s no way to tell at a glance which attack is coming from which well-cuisse’d cuss comprising the opposition.

In fact, nearly nothing can be seen at a glance. HP is not constantly displayed, there are no static damage prediction values, and the color-coding for cards and enemy archetypes is riotously borked. Characters have equipment that modifies the parameters of cards and those values are thus altered on the cards, but there’s no easy way to tell what piece of equipment or what skill is increasing/decreasing these values, and by how much. Enemies also have equipment, by the way, which modifies their attack/defense values, and god help the gormless player who wants to see that equipment, because they’re about to take a trip to sub-tab-within-a-tab Land, which I don’t need to point out is one of the worst theme parks in recorded history.

These may sound like nits, but there are a lot of nits, and eventually they swarm together and coalesce into whatever the nit equivalent of a rat king is — it’s a pulsing, pullulating, crawling mound of KITS nits.

Unfortunately, this confusion isn’t a symptom of any additional depth. In fact, there’s a leaden shallowness to KITS’s battles. They just… aren’t that exciting. Too many cards are tepid variants of other cards with numbers slightly tweaked. Positioning never has the razor-edged, nightmare chess energy of an Into the Breach. There’s an aching dearth of Power Turns where, through rigorous analysis and eloquent play, the golden thread of victory is seized and followed through a seemingly unwinnable tangle of dire enemy threats.

Also, far be it from me to kick a knight when he’s down, but I gotta say, the graphics just aren’t doing it for me.

The idea — tavern-smokey woodcut – is great, but the execution seems like RobinGoodfellowWoodcut.tex laid over Unity store rudiments. The characters don’t emote or react, and their faces have less emotional range than a blacksmith’s anvil. I don’t even think the ‘cinematic’ attack sequences are cool — there’s no pugilistic flair, no thudding frisson when sword meets gorget. Also, I think it’s just kind of dumb that fully armored knights are hopping around doing martial arts kicks — I wonder if some of these animations were brought straight over from FITS, because they seem incongruous to the setting.

“Setting,” by the way, would be a strong word for the world in KITS, much like “story” is a strong word for the narrative elements, or how “cutscenes” oversells what the text exchanges between the static medieval archetypes here achieve. I quite literally do not have the space, and mentally do not have the patience, to elaborate any further on the story trappings here. Come for the gameplay or don’t come at all.

That said, there is something worth coming for in KITS, somewhere. I sense there’s the makings of a good game in here, just below the surface. It shimmers at the periphery sometimes, when a particular turn almost lifts itself out of the morass of near-tedium, or when I nearly forget the messy menus and nigh-omnispresent obfuscation and can make my cool sword-guys fight other cool sword-guys in cool sword battles in cramped sword-spaces.

That’s all I wanted.

Maybe Ground Shatter will get KITS there after a few patches and updates, but right now, anybody picking this one up is in for a rough knight.

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

— Ben Schwartz

Disclosures: This game is developed by Ground Shatter and published by Raw Fury. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 8 hours were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game has not been rated by the ESRB. There is (obviously) a lot of fighting going on, and some comic book-adjacent blood and gore effects to go along with it. Some of the attacks have an element of pronounced brutality to them, but the game doesn’t linger on the suffering in any way and when a character dies, they fade away quickly. All in all, the mature elements are fairly low-key in the grand scheme of action/adventure media.

Colorblind Modes: Nothing officially called a ‘colorblind mode’ is available here, but there is an option to remove backdrop color.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the narrative elements in the game are text-based and not spoken, but the dialogue text cannot be resized. Enemies and player characters make sounds when attacking/being attacked, but KITS is a turn-based game so these sounds do not play any role whatsoever in comprehending the action. Text size for the card descriptions can be scaled up to 160% of their original value. I’d call it fully accessible.

Remappable Controls No, the game’s controls are not remappable. KITS can be controlled with either keyboard and mouse (or just the mouse), or a controller. In the former setup, clicking with the mouse accomplished pretty much every necessary function. The most important non-mouse action is using the Q key to rotate the map in quarter increments.

When using a controller, the left analog stick is used to flick between cards, select targets, etc. It ‘snaps’ to actions rather than merely control a cursor. The A button (or its equivalent) is confirm/left-click, while the other face and shoulder buttons fill hotkey functions for other common actions: the shoulder buttons rotate the camera, while right trigger and left trigger pull up the draw and discard piles, respectively. The Y button ends the turn and, while the controls cannot be altered, the game offers an option for making a long press on the Y button necessary to end the turn, rather than a single tap.

The post Knights In Tight Spaces Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Cute aesthetic. Intuitive, brain-soothing gameplay.

LOW Too chill for its own good.

WTF Some of the marketing is cringe-inducing.

The indie game scene is — and I don’t think this is a controversial thing to say — the healthiest, most interesting and fecund sector of the industry. With the major game studios intent on treading mechanical water and out-glossing one another, anybody craving texture, creativity, innovation, spark, or juice should turn to the individual artists and small collectives for the good stuff. Nearly everything I’ve truly loved from the last five years – at least – has been an indie release.

Indie devs are the freak specialists, the alchemists, the daring vivisectionists fusing together disparate elements with an experimental flamboyance that the big boys lost back in the PlayStation 2 era. The only problem, if we want to call it that, is that there is actually too much good stuff out there, an absolutely tidal glut of noteworthy indie releases. Unshackled from the need for console clearance, indie devs can put their titles online for a (relatively) low cost, potentially finding audience sectors that the megacorps, faceless and vaguely moronic in their glittering arcologies, just aren’t interested in servicing. Thus, the indie scene is an embarrassment of riches and it takes a bit for a title to stand out.

Certainly Darenn Keller, developer of Dawnfolk, managed to bring his game up to a humble yet meaningful level of visibility — mainly through some sorta cute, sorta heavy-handed marketing stuff including an ad on Tumblr (!?!) that playfully references a meme from Supernatural (!?!) and if I write any more about this I will instantly age 1000 years, turn into dust, and my remains will blow away on cosmic winds…

In Dawnfolk, players build and expand a city on a planet imperiled by some sort of supernatural darkness. They’re aided by Lueur, a cute little blossom of flame who looks like something Hayao Miyazaki would doodle on a napkin during a smoke break. Each map is a grid of square tiles, some lit, some dark. Leuer’s job is to light the dark tiles on the frontier, so that players can build structures on them. Every structure affects production in one of four areas – Light, Workforce, Food, and Materials. All four are necessary for a successful city, but players will prioritize some over others depending on their situation.

The central gimmick in Dawnfolk is that many interactions on these tiles entail completing a real-time activity. In order to clear a tile of trees, for example, players play a reflex-based, three-second long woodchopping minigame. I say “central gimmick” but that’s almost overselling it since these minigames are just an embellishment, a little riff that Dawnfolk plays before leaving to explore other elements with its chilled out, near-weightless touch.

Lightness is the operative word with Dawnfolk. It does not ask for epic play sessions. It is not Crusader Kings or Civilization, and any of its maps across its various modes (excluding Endless) can be completed in an hour or less. It took me 60 hours to finish my first playthrough of CKII. I don’t know if I’ve ever finished a game of Civ — has anyone? But I completed Dawnfolk’s entire Story Mode and sampled some of its Puzzle and Curious Expedition maps, in well under ten hours.

This is not a criticism, inherently, as the strategy/civ builder format needs more short stories. I like that a Dawnfolk city’s entire arc resolves in less time than it takes to watch a briskly-paced movie. I also like that each Story scenario adds a twist to the formula, whether it’s the presence of an orc culture on the map, a dragon who demands tribute, or zombie-infested swamps. My particular favorite was a scenario about hunting for treasure in an archipelago (mostly water) which forced creative layouts to maximize production across several little landmasses.

So short is good, being accommodating is good, simplifying is good, but at some point a game that smooths off every rough edge and element that could generate friction, loses mechanical texture. Dawnfolk is too relaxed.

I am not a brilliant strategist, but I didn’t lose a single map in the Dawnfolk campaign – I didn’t even come close. Not a single bead of sweat crossed my brow, not a scintilla of anxiety passed through my system at any point. Even the aforementioned twists on specific maps don’t crinkle the strategy in big ways. Ultimately, every city felt like every other city, with the same buildings more or less doing the same things. It seemed almost impossible to make a real mistake.

…And all of that is fine, in a vacuum. Dawnfolk is pleasant, but nothing here sets off fireworks. Nothing grabs a player by the ganglia and makes them think about Dawnfolk when they aren’t actively playing it. It’s all breadth and no depth, and there isn’t even enough breadth here to make a single strategy sandwich. Play just one map, and the majority of the overall experience has been revealed.

So, while there was not a single moment of Dawnfolk that was unpleasant, buggy, or painful, there are many indie strategy titles I would recommend before it. I despise that we have to look at the experience of art as a transaction (and it grosses me out to say this) but I want people to know that their money may be better spent elsewhere.

…But then again, it may not.

If Dawnfolk looks cool, give it a try. It is a pared down, chill experience sitting at the crossroads between idle game, puzzle game, and city builder. Going in expecting a full-fat example of any one of these is asking to be disappointed. Expecting it to fully explore the territory it stakes out for itself is also a mistake. But for those who can relax and reign in their expectations, there’s an honest joy to be had.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

— Ben Schwartz

Buy Dawnfolk: PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Darenn Keller and published by Astra Logical. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 7 hours of play were devoted to the game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. The game could fairly be described as “wholesome” with all characters and units (even typically unpleasant creatures like zombies) drawn in cute pixel art. There is combat and death is implied, but little violence is depicted on screen. During hunting minigames, players shoot arrows at animals who do fall over and die, but there is no blood. There is no foul language, no mature themes, and nothing that could typically be called “scary.”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no spoken dialogue in this game, everything is presented with text. The text cannot be resized, although there is an option for an “HD font” which looks a bit bigger. The most important cues are when a turn ticks over and production occurs for all buildings/tiles — there is a “clock sound” to indicate a new turn, but all tiles also have a visual production animation. That being said, they’re pretty low-key and easy to miss. There is also has a turn-based option so the real-time elements can be completely removed, and this is the mode I recommend in general.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. Both keyboard+mouse and controller are supported. Controller is recommended.

The post Dawnfolk Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Narrowly dodging a budgetary issue that could sink a run.

LOW Why do I need to build more buildings just to talk to people?

WTF Nuanced critiques of morality in civic management… in a videogame?!

When I agreed to look at Technotopia, I’ll admit it had the odds stacked against it. I’m just not huge on card-based games, and it feels like we’re drowning in a sea of roguelites lately. Yet despite those trepidations it just looked so gorgeous and unique, I couldn’t pass up the chance. And you know what? I’m glad I said yes! It’s a legitimately outstanding title, even as it dances with the cliches-of-the-day in today’s indie dev scene.

The central conceit is rather simple — it’s a city management sim handled through random card draws.

Players inhabit the role of Iris, the city’s AI in a near-future society. She works alongside her father, The Architect, to please four corrupt faction leaders currently running the city. Together, Iris and her father strive to make the world a better place while uncovering the corruption that surrounds them. It’s not a story that will shock anyone with its twists, but the fact the writing in a card-based management sim is good enough to be enthralled by is one hell of a trick. 

Honestly, it would’ve been easy to simply not have a story at all, or it could have been something super bland, but instead I was foiling terrorists, trying to un-rig elections, deleting internet reviews for a terrible cabaret singer (yes, really) and meeting up with a hacktivist to screw over her corporate overlords. Every character boasts a distinct voice, and I appreciated how biting the script’s social commentary is. I genuinely wanted to see what happened next, even if, again, it’s nothing too surprising.

Now, the gameplay. Rather than only being able to build based on the current card hand available, Technotopia takes some notes from Tetris — or more accurately, it borrows a few shapes.

In order to get the most out of the city, a player has to arrange buildings into various shapes, which add massive bonuses — the fastest way to build up resources needed for each faction to stay functional, and racing against the clock is key here. While Technotopia can be played at a leisurely pace, every building placed moves an overall countdown one notch forward.

In addition to this clever formula, Technotopia will also throw moral quandaries at the player that can tip the scales between factions. Are the workers demanding riots? Call in the digital Pinkertons, hear them out, or automate the jobs with machines. There’s an athlete struggling in the ring? Maybe give him some dope, or stay out of it. What’s brilliant is that there’s no indication of what the outcome for each choice will be — players have to learn the hard way what the best course of action is, and sometimes there may be more than one worth contemplating.

All of this is bolstered with a wealth of new buildings to place as the campaign progresses and progress with the factions carries over between runs. I’m also grateful that story objectives don’t reset, so it’s feasible for everyone, not just min-maxing civic leaders, to actually see the story’s conclusion. Plus, as I progressed, I’d get access to key structures that made the overhead costs of resources much easier to manage for each faction. The persistent progress in Technotopia is well-done.

Truly, I’m stunned at how little I have to criticize. Probably my biggest issue would be that once I finished the campaign, there weren’t many achievements or bonus objectives to tackle. Some sort of random challenge modifiers or even a sandbox mode where players can tinker with things or design their ideal cities would be a welcome bit of variety, but this is such a minor point that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

As someone who predominantly plays games antithetical to this experience, the fact it blew me away should speak volumes on how confidently it presents itself. It’s by far one of the best things I’ve played this year, and it just works in a way that is almost magical when considering how many bigger titles have fumbled the fundamentals Technotopia handles with ease. Whether one loves or hates card-based games, this is one worth playing, hands down.

Final Score: 10 out of 10 

Disclosures: This game is developed by Yustas and published by Alawar. It is currently available on PC. This copy of Technotopia was provided via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 3 hours were dedicated to the single-player campaign, as well an additional 2 hours in the post-campaign and it was completed.

Parents:  This game is not rated by the ESRB, but contains Mild Violence and Suggestive References. This one is pretty safe when it comes to what’s depicted on-screen. There are references to terrorists, the mob, and at least two instances of murder, but it’s all purely through text, static images that obscure the actual violence, and vague references. It’s an otherwise relaxed, minimalist experience.

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available. This is accounted for with distinct silhouettes for each building type, varying substantially in height and design.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All in-game dialogue is delivered purely through text. It’s a reasonable experience to play without sound, and I would say that it’s fully accessible.  

Remappable controls: No, the controls are not remappable controls. There are, however, both keyboard and mouse options, allowing it to be played one-handed with minimal movement.

The post Technotopia Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The lovely fairy tale-esque aesthetic. 

LOW It doesn’t feel as expansive as it should.

WTF: A mean witch keeps turning my citizens into hungry skeletons! 

Let’s go ahead and state the obvious up front — yes, Fabledom’s cutesy aesthetic is generally representative of its overall accessibility compared to other titles in the city-building genre. There’s not an overwhelming amount of parameters and building types to keep track of, and they’re easily available. It’s difficult to make citizens upset, and Fabledom allows the player to grow a settlement at their own leisurely pace, letting them relax and take in the vibes. 

However, the ‘softness’ and accessibility of Fabledom doesn’t necessarily take away from the strength of its simulation, or its status as a unique entry within the genre. Forging confidently ahead, Fabledom asserts an identity of its own by importing a few mechanical elements from other genres, to fairly strong results. 

Fabledom’s initial setup is simple, effective, and delivered in the form of a cute little storybook. The tale takes place in a land of wonder and prosperity, in which kings and queens send their grown-up children out into the world to build their own kingdom from the ground up. And… that’s pretty much it! At this point, the player is released into the world along with some peasants (the most basic type of citizen) and a few supplies. 

Like the majority of city-builders, Fabledom is essentially a sandbox — players can place structures, roads, and other materials wherever they wish, slowly growing their population as new citizens join their kingdom at regular intervals, but newcomers to the genre can enable a handy tutorial system that provides a series of objectives. These start out small and ask the player to engage with Fabledom’s entire range of mechanics — it’s an absolutely perfect intro for anyone intimidated by the genre. 

When building their kingdom, the player will need to employ citizens to staff all of their buildings while also producing supplies and keeping everyone happy enough to continue increasing the population.

It’s easy to staff buildings and move citizens between them (citizens don’t get unhappy about being moved, so the player can juggle them at will to maximize output) but it’s through careful management that some of Fabledom‘s depth begins to emerge. 

At regular intervals, ‘visitors’ come to the player’s kingdom. The number of visitors who are then interested in joining the kingdom depends on the overall happiness rating, and this in turn depends on a number of factors such as the amenities near citizen homes, the current level of hunger, how heavily the populace is taxed, and more. Fabledom doesn’t have the endless nested menus of a Paradox title, but it still creates some nice dilemmas for the player by juxtaposing a few of its key systems in order to try and achieve an optimal state. 

Even if a player masters the city-building stuff immediately, Fabledom still contains a few unique wrinkles that they can poke away at.

Early on, the player can spawn a ‘Hero’ who can then move around the map. Between city-management tasks, the player can order the Hero to interact with randomly-spawning events, often leading to combat encounters or management decisions. They can also send them on missions to other kingdoms in order to collect rewards and affect their affinity with that kingdom’s ruler. 

Oh, I haven’t even mentioned the other kingdoms yet! The player can interact with the leaders of neighboring kingdoms by doing quests for them, sending gifts and eventually marrying them, if they so desire. Yes, Fabledom has dating sim elements! In aggregate, these gameplay adds make Fabledom feel more engaging on a personal level than some other city-builders do — it feels more active.

That said, these unique elements could use some expansion and elaboration. There aren’t as many randomly generated events in Fabledom as I’d like. Seeing repeated events isn’t game-breaking, but it did begin to make the world feel a less expansive and reactive.

Also, considering the narrative weight given to the dating and marriage elements, I can’t say that my own choice felt particularly notable or weighty — the final cutscene doesn’t even seem to reflect the player’s choice of partner, and — beyond a passive bonus — marriage itself doesn’t seem to have much of an effect after that point. 

While some of the reaches Fabledom takes end up a little empty, there’s no denying that it remains a friendly, streamlined, indie take on city-building that not only offers quite a bit of charm, but would also be a great place for a genre newcomer to get their feet wet.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Grenaa Games. It is currently available on PS5, Switch, XBO, PC and XBX/S.  Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed (I seemed to reach a cutscene marking the end of the game’s story, but play continues as normal after that point). There are no multiplayer modes. 

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E and contains Mild Fantasy Violence. There’s no additional consumer information available, but I can’t think of any objectionable content beyond the (very mild) combat sections. 

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available. 

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized.  Every gameplay element has a corresponding visual cue, and all the dialogue is accompanied by subtitles, so the game is fully accessible. 

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Fabledom Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Parallel parking like a boss.

LOW Police AI is asleep at the wheel.

WTF Hitting pedestrians only costs 100 Euros!

In the hectic streets of Barcelona, My taxi driver’s journey unfolds in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator – a simulation that promises both realism and adventure.

Taxi Life puts the player in the shoes of a business owner starting a taxi company in Barcelona. The objective is to grow the company by completing fares, purchasing new vehicles, upgrading said vehicles, hiring drivers and sending them out to complete even more fares to eventually become the taxi king or queen of the city.

Besides driving customers to and fro in standard rides, there are other activities in Taxi Life that provide XP which can be used to invest in perks that make building a taxi Empire a little easier. “Places to discover” usually lead to graffiti paintings. “Interesting architecture” tasked me with visiting famous sites like the Triumphal Arch of Barcelona amongst others. “Challenges” are more demanding fares, mostly requiring speed, coupled with minimal collisions.

Barcelona feels alive in Taxi Life, rendered with good attention to detail, albeit artificially light traffic. From iconic landmarks to narrow alleys, the city is a joy to navigate – except for that one time when I made a wrong turn down one of the many one-way streets because I didn’t notice the sign. That wasn’t so joyful.

Also, I did get speeding tickets for driving too fast, as there are speed cams peppered throughout the city. However, the fine of 20 Euros wasn’t enough to dissuade me from from putting pedal to the metal when calculating time saved plus the earnings from a fare – speeding was often an obvious choice. 

The driving mechanics (speeding or not) offer a decent experience, with some quirks like over-steer and delayed reactions to sharp turns. There are varied camera options including cockpit, dash and hood. It would have been nice to have more options for a third-person camera because the one offered is a little too close to the car.

The vehicles in this game are generic – no name-brand sedans here! – and all I saw were designs similar to vehicles I’ve seen in real life. No doubt the cost of licensing was at the forefront of this choice to skip real models, but thankfully the lack of licenses doesn’t take away from the immersion factor.

Also, the perk tree is worth taking the time to study before investing perk points. Level-up options include boosting the speed at which XP is gained, greater availability of VIP Jobs that pay more money, lower costs for maintenance services like towing, mechanics and cleaning, and so forth. My personal favorite perk provides the ability for drivers I hire to cost my company less in terms of salary while raising their efficiency. These all add a layer of strategy to what might otherwise be a straightforward taxi experience.

In terms of immersion, despite some shortcomings, the nuanced interactions with passengers are a welcome addition. These can sometimes lead to more or less satisfaction from customers, so be careful when responding to them. For example, when an occupant asked me what fun activities were available in Barcelona and I suggested the beach, and then I kept referencing the beach even after they said they weren’t interested, they became irritable and lost some of their ‘patience’ (represented by a bar) which directly influences their final rating of the ride.  

While the voice acting is passable, it lacks the polish expected from a modern title. However, the well-written dialogue compensates, providing believable and sometimes humorous interactions with passengers. I once did a bad fare and the customer said “I hope your driving improves, not that I’ll ever give you another chance to show me.” Multiple language options including English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin, Arabic, Catalan Spanish, German, and French cater to a diverse player base.

While what I’ve listed so far all contributes to a solid sim experience, there are some rough patches. For instance, there are only four radio stations offering techno, light pop with a dash of Jazz, some rock (although for the life of me I cannot see how rock music could possibly facilitate calm taxi driving) and finally some classical – the closest one will get to chill music for what can be a tense experience. I would recommend turning off the music entirely in Taxi Life and firing up one of Yo-Yo Ma’s renditions of Bach’s Cello Suite No.5 instead.

Another issue for me was that while Taxi Life strives for realism, it falls short in some aspects. Believable vehicle damage adds to the immersion, but a lack of consequences for traffic violations feels unrealistic. Hitting pedestrians netted me a 100 Euro fine, which is a pittance considering the thousands I easily stacked up in the first few taxi fares I completed. One would expect a heavier hand with such serious infractions. Running a red light right in front of the police was particularly jarring as it does not net a fine of any kind.

Vehicular accidents are the same way. Besides the damage to the vehicle, nothing else happens. No fine, no police report, and no ding to the customer patience meter. Real-life fender benders usually ruin a person’s day, yet in Taxi Life, it has the same weight as bumping into someone in line at a coffee shop and accidentally making them drop their bag. Annoying, sure, but no big deal. For a simulator (as opposed to an arcade experience) I feel the devs did not spend enough time on this.

Finally, the mispronunciation of Barcelona’s name is a detail that may irk locals and some travelled folk like myself. It’s pronounced Bar-the-LOH-nah, and not Bar-sur-Loh-nah.

Taxi Life ultimately offers a mixed bag by blending realism with a fantasy upgrade system. While the attention to detail and perk system impress, issues like the lack of expected consequences detract from the experience.

As this is my first foray into videogame taxi driving apart from Crazy Taxi, I can only guess how it might stack up against others in the same vein. However, what I can say is that I suspect it will scratch the itch of most simulation gaming enthusiasts, and I found it worth the time and effort needed to build my taxi empire – just be prepared for something clearly on the simulation side of things, with no arcade-style action here.

Rating: 6 out of 10

— Patricio do Rosario

Disclosures: This game is published by Nacon and developed by Simteract. It is available on XBO/X/S, PS5 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E. There are depictions of Mild Language. The official description reads: “This is a simulation game in which players drive a taxi in the city of Barcelona. Players can pick up passengers and drive to destinations in a timely manner while following traffic laws. The words “damn” and “hell” appear in the game.”

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are not available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Taxi Life offers no options for audio accessibility other than subtitles. The game is playable without sound, as there are no necessary audio cues needed for play. Taxi Life is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: All controls can be remapped, making Taxi Life fully remappable.

The post TAXI LIFE: A City Driving Simulator Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The story and characters are charmingly endearing.

LOW Visual and technical issues harmed immersion.

WTF One more day, bro. Just one more day…

Once in a while, I like something a little more scaled back and relaxed. Simulation-style games tend to give me what I need for that, but there’s something unique about the setting of My Time At Sandrock.

I arrived by train in the middle of a dusty town, with little vegetation and even less water in the environment. From the get-go, I was told explicitly not to cut down any vegetation within town limits, or I’d become unliked by the community. Animal Crossing, this wasn’t.

330 years ago, an apocalypse left humanity surviving in caves, but after a time, they were able to return to the surface and rebuild. After this reappearance, a woman named Martle set up a town in the midst of an oasis. However, the town grew out of control and people ravaged the flora and fauna so much that it became nearly as barren as the desert it was surrounded by. As a result, water consumption is highly regulated and cutting down trees in town is forbidden. This scarcity and struggle is what makes Sandrock so interesting.

Players take on the role of a Builder in Sandrock‘s community — a person who helps build structures, equipment and items for the townsfolk. Almost everything is built in real time, which meant that I had a lot of free periods to gather materials, get commissions, go into combat arenas, play games, or mingle with the people of Sandrock.

Combat is also in realtime and can be a bit clunky as enemies can move quickly, making it hard to track them with the camera and targeting system. The battle mechanics are also not meaty enough to be engaging, as most weapons don’t have any special abilities and encounters can sharply outpace players’ levels, especially if they stick to the main commissions.

In other sims, I’m usually able to take from the environment with wild abandon, but not here. Upon forgetting about the order and cutting down my first tree, I was given a warning and told that cutting down trees would harm the town, and to my shame, that tree remained a stump at the end of the game — a badge of dishonor since everything in play is centered around helping the town bounce back.

To do that, I worked for the Commerce Guild by taking on projects to help the town and its people, from big tasks like installing lifts to a mine tunnel, or things as small as helping to provide them materials. While the core gameplay loop was centered around building, the building aspect itself is a fairly passive activity as most parts of construction center around waiting for materials to process before construction could be completed.

On the plus side, this waiting for construction to finish gave me ample time to meet and engage with the town’s many citizens, and they are what invested me into taking better care of the town, because everything I was doing was making their lives better. I loved talking with and helping them, and they were definitely the stars of the show. The standout, however, was Zeke, the town’s moisture farmer and botanist, who was trying to keep plants alive despite the nearly futile nature of the effort.

Enriching this side of things, characters would have their own schedules and interplay with one another, which helped Sandrock‘s world feel more alive. Cooper and Hugo performed a song for the townsfolk every Wednesday night, Owen would tell fables in his saloon every Saturday, and Rocky read bedtime stories to his son. This oasis felt like it was filled with actual people with their own lives.

There’s also a friendship and romance system that’s simple to grasp. Each gift, commission completion, or even just talking with people made them a little more friendly to me. I could also play games with them or go on dates, platonic or otherwise. Eventually, I was given an opportunity to enter into a romantic relationship with one of them. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be many activities we could do together as a couple, even at a late-game spot that I thought would be an ideal dating location. As such, it felt like a flat mechanic.

Another, more technical problem with My Time At Sandrock is texture and asset pop-in. This can cause objects, and even buildings, to take up to ten seconds to appear.

For example, a lift I needed to leave a mining area would not appear when I loaded into the area, and I was stranded until the lift finally spawned. This would also happen for some buildings I would exit, such as the museum. This soured my experience a bit, as I had to wait for objects to appear correctly before I could continue playing. This was most common in the final act, when a large number of assets are added in.

There were also constant framerate dips when moving around, but most harshly after entering a new area. This problem became compounded as new objects were added to the map, creating additional lag. Other quirks included some objects wobbling erratically, such as tree leaves warping and stretching in the wind, and some NPCs becoming stuck on environmental features or ending up in places they shouldn’t have been. In one comical instance, I tried to turn in a commission to Owen, only to find him stuck in a tree and unable to interact with him. Things like this were constant issues, and it killed my immersion.

Despite those rough edges, My Time At Sandrock is ultimately a wonderful and heartfelt game. There is an incredible story here about human nature, the environment, and the desire to right the wrongs of the past. Sandrock’s residents were charming, and I cared deeply about their lives, joys, and struggles. In that sense, I think my time in the desert was time well spent. With just a little polish, I think this one could become a masterpiece.

Rating: 7 out of 10

— Justin Grandfield

Disclosures: This game is developed by Pathea Games and published by Pathea Games, Focus Entertainment, PM Studios, Inc., and DMM Games. It is currently available on PS4/5, Switch, XBO/X/S, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on PS5. Approximately 109 hours were devoted to the game, and it was completed. There is no multiplayer mode at the moment, but the developers have stated that it may be implemented in the future — the early access version of the game did have a multiplayer component, but was shut down.

Parents: This game has an ESRB rating of E10+ for Alcohol Reference, Comic Mischief, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, and Mild Suggestive Themes. The rating summary from the ESRB reads: This is a simulation/role-playing game in which players assume the role of a builder in the desert town of Sandrock. Players explore open-world environments while interacting with townsfolk, performing tasks/quests, and fighting enemy creatures. Players use cartoony weapons (e.g., daggers, rifles) to engage in combat with certain townsfolk (for training purposes) and creatures (e.g., livestock, giant ants, robots). The occasional combat is highlighted by impact sounds and small explosions. The game includes a dating mechanic, in which players can spend time with any adult character; while on dates, players ask for options such as Hug, Kiss, and Observe. A saloon in town contains posters advertising “Lost Mountain Beer.” During the course of the game, monster manure is depicted as “poo coils,” which can be picked up and gifted to characters; the dialogue contains references to flatulence (e.g., “Never trust a fart…”; “Is that…a methane leak?”). The word “damn” appears in dialogue.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game does offers subtitles. The text size cannot be changed. (See examples above.) The game’s dialogue is mostly provided via text boxes. There are some spoken flavor lines that cannot be heard well, but are mostly irrelevant to the current dialogue.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post My Time At Sandrock Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A few really nice quality-of-life features.

LOW Poor performance at launch, even on high-end machines. 

WTF Sometimes a massive tornado will just sorta roll through your city and wreak havoc. 

To me, there’s a certain kind of artistry involved in developing a sequel that’s nearly identical in aesthetics and mechanics to its predecessor. This isn’t to say that every hacky triple-A series with a yearly release schedule is dabbling in high art, of course. Rather, sequels that hew close to the original vision but wish to stand on their own merits require a sort of careful attention on the part of the developer. They must treat the original like a lump of clay, paring down superfluous mechanics and streamlining good ones until untapped potential of the original is fully revealed. 

Cities: Skylines II definitely opts for this sort of careful, iterative approach… though I’m still not sure whether or not that was the right decision. While it does streamline the previous core gameplay loop in a way that makes much of the experience smoother and more satisfying, it also places more emphasis on the ‘human’ aspects of the city, to mixed results — at least for now, prior to any DLC releases. 

The start of a Cities: Skylines II run unfolds much the same as the first one — the player is presented with a mostly-empty map featuring a small handful of connections to the outside world via highways and the like. Immediately, the player can begin building the city of their dreams by setting down roads, zoning for commercial, residential, or industrial buildings, bolstering their citizens’ happiness and productivity with a variety of city services, and so on.

The early game rollout of roads and basic services (such as water and electricity) feels less painful now thanks to a few smart tweaks like the ‘grid’ tool. In a few clicks, they can set the length and width of an entire series of roads, making the creation of suburban housing units or industrial centers feel totally effortless. Essential services now feel far easier to implement, as well. For example, instead of manually placing water pipes, the majority of road types now feature a built in ‘network’ of underground water pipes, sewage pipes, and electrical wires, meaning that buildings are automatically connected to these networks when they are built next to a road. 

These handy tools, combined with a more robust set of tutorial popups, make the early game absolutely fly by. Clearly Cities II wants to empower the player to create as soon as possible, allowing novice players (and experienced pros alike) to focus on the more detailed and human-focused simulation elements of the sequel. 

On the right side of the screen, the player is delivered a constant stream of social media posts from citizens and businesses in their city. Clicking on the names of the uploaders warps the camera to their location, allowing the player to see them going about their day. From an isometric view, the player can see these mini-Sims walk down the sidewalk, park their cars, wait outside their burnt-down house as the firefighters deal with the wreckage, and more. Every single member of the city can be ‘followed’ by the player as well, keeping their profile within a handy tab and adding their significant life events to the constant stream of social media posts.

However, all of these systems still feel a little barebones — characters seem largely defined by employment and familial status. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, especially when it comes to a series like Cities: Skylines which seems to be reliant on its post-release DLC if the pattern of the previous installment is anything to go by. Nevertheless, I think it’d be nice if the constant social media feed and notifications on the map (indicating problems or areas of interest) were more varied and personable.

As it stands now, the player is mainly treated to a constant flow of repetitive and often unhelpful complaints from citizens, as shrill as an alarm clock. If an extremely small section of city has less-than-favorable hospital access, for example, the player will receive constant social media notifications complaining about the city’s bad healthcare. The same scenario applies to every other city service — police, electricity, sewage, and internet.

Oftentimes, these issues won’t be a pressing concern, or they won’t be fixable given the player’s current plans/financial situation. As such, the ways in which the game ‘talks back’ to the player often seem more obnoxious than helpful, and more confusing than inspiring. CSII contains a nifty skill tree allowing the player to unlock and focus on services they’re particularly interested in, a nice component the adds to Cities: Skylines II’s sense of personalization and expression. However, for the majority of my playthrough I felt that I spent a great deal of time putting out fires (real or imaginary) brought up by the busy UI, rather than expressing my own desires. 

As I alluded to at the beginning of this review, I’m sure CSII‘s idiosyncratic and compelling elements, such as the ability to follow individual characters, will be expanded on in future DLCs. But if that’s the case then — well, I hate to be That Guy, but is there any reason to upgrade from the original Cities: Skylines at the moment?  

If you’re a die-hard city fan of city builders, and the idea of a new Cities: Skylines that’s 10 percent prettier and 5 percent more interesting has you salivating, you might wanna hop on this one right away. But for the rest of us, we can probably just keep chipping away at some other 2000-hour video gaming time sink. It’s not like this franchise is going away any time soon, after all.

Final Score: 6/10 

Disclosures: This game is developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 12 hours were dedicated to the single-player campaign and the game was not completed (it does not seem to have a definite end-state). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E, with no additional descriptors. This is a city-management simulation game in which players can build and manage their ideal city. From a top-down perspective, players monitor various statistics while using planning skills to attract businesses, residents, and tourists.

Colorblind modes: there are no colorblind modes available. 

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game does not offer subtitles, but all information is relayed via a text and image user interface. The user interface can be altered and resized. Every relevant piece of information is transmitted visually as well as aurally. It is very easy to play the game without sound, and I would say that it’s fully accessible.  

Remappable controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls. 

The post Cities: Skylines II Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The visual style

LOW The crashes, bugs and glitches

WTF The infinitude of rare resources

The Settlers is a series at its best when the player is empowered to bring a miniature
civilization to fruition from beginnings of poverty and scarcity. However, The Settlers: New
Allies does the complete opposite by facilitating as many resources as possible, and the socio-cultural dynamics of civilization are cast aside for a focus on military-industrial production and warfare. Adding insult to injury, at the time of review it was buggy and prone to crashing.

New Allies, like its predecessors, is a real-time strategy city-builder with a top-down
view focusing on a combination of resource management, warfare and city planning. The
campaign mode has players controlling a refugee group fleeing civil war in their native
kingdom. With each new scenario, the people progress toward their objective of finding a
peaceful new home away from strife.

This basic premise is embellished with pretty visuals and a functioning resource
management system. Civilians (up to a maximum of 500 in every campaign scenario) either
function as soldiers, engineers, laborers (such as foresters, fishers, bakers and miners) or —
if no task is assigned — as carriers. Carriers bring resources (wood, wheat, stone etc.) to a
settlement’s most nearby warehouse. The limited amount of civilians available make
balancing their jobs a significant component of successful management.

This core gameplay loop is New Allies’ strength, as it was with its predecessors.
Unfortunately, this basic joy is soon tarnished.

First, being a Ubisoft game, New Allies requires an additional step to get launched via
Ubisoft’s own storefront, Ubisoft Connect, thus extending the procedure to boot the game.
Once launched, I frequently encountered crashes, failure to load maps, and bugs where the
UI wouldn’t load, forcing me to restart. These issues were as prevalent as they were severe,
and I had to restart the game at least 50% of the time I tried to play.

I also experienced various in-game glitches, including a particularly annoying bug involving a
malfunctioning autosave system, corrupting both the autosave and manual save. The result
was a forced restart without recently saved progress, making me replay large portions –
sometimes hours‘ worth. This technical inadequacy is simply unacceptable, especially from a
huge publisher like Ubisoft.

I’ve already mentioned that the basic elements are solidly crafted, and managing laborers,
engineers, soldiers and carriers in a balanced manner presents the player with a decent
challenge. Still, this is the only successful system in place, as all external challenges such as
resource scarcity and invaders are easily negotiated, and there’s little internal pressure to
keep the player on their toes.

Resources are plentiful — farms don’t require fertile soil, self-regrowing trees make lumber an
infinite resource, and mines (gold, gem, stone, iron or coal) also provide inexhaustible
supplies. If some resources cannot be claimed in a particular scenario, it’s easy as pie to set
up a harbor, sell whatever surplus exists and acquire material that cannot be harvested.

While stone and lumber are essential for residential and defensive buildings, all other mined
materials have a final purpose of army construction. This, then, is what nearly every scenario
steers the player toward. Despite their peaceful intentions, the settlers must inevitably claim
a structure, destroy a ‘barbarian’ outpost, or defeat an encampment. Bafflingly, New
Allies doesn’t offer any peaceful alternatives, nor any more creative solutions to conflict.

A potential saving grace lies in the story’s emphasis on making friends with several
indigenous groups throughout the campaign. However, these story elements are left under-
explored, with the people taking the shape of stereotypical tropes such as a Viking and
spiritual clan. The player’s people easily take center stage, thus colonizing both the lands
and the narrative. The ‘enemies’ of the campaign are referred to as ‘barbarians,’ a likewise
stereotypical name that is not given proper nuance, regardless of an awkward and forced
twist at the end.

The Settlers: New Allies is the latest entry in a beloved and longstanding franchise, and
carries an inherent advantage of starting with a greatly successful formula. However, there
simply aren’t any exciting updates or formula explorations here. The buggy quality of the
code at time of review and utterly flat narrative are salt in the wound, resulting in a game that
does not boast a single positive reason to warrant a purchase.

Rating: 1 out of 10.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Ubisoft Düsseldorf and published by Ubisoft. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 34 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game’s campaign was completed. 0 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB this game is rated E10+ and contains Fantasy Violence. The ESRB’s description states: “This is a real-time strategy game in which players help a group of refugees establish a new settlement. From a top-down perspective, players construct buildings, gather resources, engage in trade, and battle rivals and enemy raiders. Players can deploy military units (e.g., soldiers, mages) to protect their settlement, with combat depicted as large-scale skirmishes (e.g., sword battle, shooting arrows, spell casting). Battles are highlighted by sword slashing, bright visual effects, and cries of pain; defeated units collapse to the ground and disappear.”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles can be altered and resized. Some in-game clues (such as “[army] recruitment complete”) are only available via audio, but the most essential information is covered by written dialogue and instruction.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

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