City builder sims usually are so addictive that often avoid them, but I couldn't resist this one; it has the one feature I always wanted from this type of game.
Before I break everything again to refactor some bits ready for the next feature, proof that we have in fact come a long way from the gliding T-Posers earlier this week.
I picked up Against the Storm on sale yesterday. I’d had it on my wishlist for a little while cuz it looked interesting.
What a fantastic little game! I lost the entire evening to it! It’s a fun city builder that gives you objectives to work thru and when I get to the point where I usually start getting bored building a city, bam! Time to start over!
If you like city-builders, consider "Times of Progress" for your #wishlist .
It's an isometric #citybuilder set during the Industrial Revolution. You'll get to deliver goods via #steam#trains and boats, take care of the evolving needs of population and trade with nearby cities.
Soooo, in other news Solaria has a Steam page now!
I got approved on NYE, so thank you whichever Steam employee was working that day 🥳
Naturally, it's early days for the game so it's early days for the page too. But it's there, it'll be improved and filled in more as the game progresses, and it's very exciting!
22 wishlists already and only 15 or so are from friends and family, I'm calling that a success haha 😎
This screenshot may look the same as most of my other screenshots. But therein lies the success!
Been refactoring Past Me's terrible first steps into hex grid generation to remove some hardcoded stuff. And as a bonus, I got to delete a ton of other crappy code at the same time.
Everything looking (and mostly functioning) the same now as it did two days ago? Huge success! 😎
Survival game where you learn to be a part of an ecosystem and slowly abandon your unsustainable "tech tree" replacing it with sustainable, local solutions.
A lot of games are trying to replicate very expansionist core loops, be it Minecraft's, Factorio's and so on, which see the player as a force acting on the environment / ecosystem, not working together with it.
Building on an older thread about #solarpunk#gameDesign , I recently played #againstTheStorm and I think it's a brilliant example of what I meant with the mechanic above:
You keep building an outpost. It might succeed or fail, but it's always eventually blown by the storm and you need to start anew. Yet every time you learn something, you improve a little, and the #rougelike element keeps the game fun.
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
Anno 1800 is a 3D real-time strategy city-builder, set in the 19th Century.
I bought it today.
"But Allie, you have too many games. You have new ones coming on Wednesday morning in the November Humble Bundle! Why would you buy a new game?"
Ubisoft had a free weekend, and I made the mistake of installing it. Then playing it. Had I not played it (wouldn't be the first time I installed a game on a free weekend and forgot to play it), I wouldn't have encountered an antagonist so eminently punchable (Edvard Goode) that I wanted to keep playing solely to grind his company into dust.
With a 20% discount on top of the already discounted price through Ubisoft taking it to a historical low of AUD$17.99, it was almost impossible to say "no".
In terms of actual gameplay, it hooked me early, and I was suddenly staring at an in-game popup that said "It's been two hours, how about a cup of coffee."
November 7, 2023 - Day 310 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 330
Game: Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Feb 27, 2019
Installation Date: Oct 21, 2023
Unplayed: 17d
Playtime: 25m
Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt is an isometric real-time strategy city-builder, with a medieval setting.
I got a whole bunch of games on the 21st of October. I was talking with my son about how I'd skipped a couple of months of Humble Choice in the past few years, and he gave me most of the games I was missing (because he didn't want them).
Included in those games was Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt; this review could also be "A tale of two city-builders".
The graphics in Townsmen are quite cute, and it makes Townsmen look like it could be a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, that's the best part of this game, because the actual gameplay is incredibly frustrating.
As an aside, in-game grammar and spelling mistakes immediately break my concentration. One typo is an oversight. Multiple typos and grammar errors sets my teeth on edge. This was not a good start for Townsmen.
The biggest issue I had with Townsmen is that it's less a city-building sim, and more of a city-micromanagement sim. I want to build buildings. I don't want to have to go to each building independently and assign and unassign workers (particularly in early game).
Buildings also degrade over time, and can catch on fire if they degrade too much. How do you know? Apparently they start to change colour. So now I have to remember to look at each building individually to see if it's changed colour and might need repairs. To repair a building, click on it to bring up the building interface. Click on a drop-down menu, and choose "Repair Building". Actually, this building is normally that colour, and doesn't need repairs. Like I said, micromanagement.
The tutorial levels give tasks, and give optional tasks, and would intermittently stop everything to remind me to complete the task I was working on.
"You need more wood, build another sawmill. You need another worker to build the sawmill. Build a new townhouse. You need more wood for the townhouse."
So I'm going around pulling workers from other jobs to put them on different jobs so I can complete the jobs to complete the tasks, which you've just paused the entire game to remind me to complete.
Anno 1800 hooked me so deeply that it was a case of "two hours already?", where this had me checking the clock repeatedly.
It's not just that it suffers in comparison to Anno 1800, compared to all of the other citybuilders I've played this year, Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt is:
Land Above Sea Below (LASB) is a hex-tile isometric strategy game. It answers the question "What if you added pressure to Dorfromantik (2022)?"
I haven't reviewed Dorfromantik (DR) this year because this was mainly games that had sat in my pile of shame, not a game that I bought the day it was released. It's a very chill little hex-tile strategy city-builder.
LASB was released almost 18 months after DR, and the influence is obvious, right down to the identical gameplay controls.
However, where LASB veers away from DR is in going upwards. In DR, you have several different types of items that can appear on a tile; houses, forests, fields, grasslands, rivers, and railways.
Each hex tile in your pile can have any combination of these items on any edge. Match an edge, score points, match more edges, score more points.
In LASB, while it has rivers, the cards instead have themes. And instead of just spreading out into nothingness like DR, in LASB, you're building islands surrounded by water, which is part of the "pressure" that LASB adds.
LASB has game rounds called "seasons". Each season lasts seven "days", with icons at the top of the screen showing you what the tiles you're going to get are.
At the end of the season, the water level rises. Your island is centred around "the fall tree" and if the fall tree gets flooded, it's game over.
However, when you're placing your tiles, if you connect them on three sides to three other tiles with the same theme, all of the tiles connected (of the same theme) are raised higher, with many potentially above the water level rise.
If you connect a tile on four or more sides, you get extra days (and extra tiles) in that season.
River tiles behave differently; they neither get flooded, or raised.
It becomes a balancing act of trying to decide whether you can lift enough tiles, above the water level rise, or if you want to try and extend the season; being that there's no guarantee that the tiles you'll get for the extra day(s) will match the theme - which may result in more land being flooded.
It's an interesting alternative to DR, but it doesn't have quite the same chilled-out feeling.
With that said, LASB feels slightly rougher around the edges. Dorfromantik feels polished, cleanly adapting to my ultrawide monitor, where I had to fiddle with LASB's settings just to get it to run letterboxed at 2560x1440.
LASB also adds a slight blur at the edge of the screen which I find more annoying than "cute tilt-shift".
Although clearly derivative, Land Above Sea Below presents an interesting twist on Dorfromantik's gameplay, which is quite:
December 21, 2023 - Day 354 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 375
Game: Warstone TD
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 24, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 19m
Warstone TD is an isometric tower defense game with some basic RPG, strategy, and city building elements (so says the blurb).
I've started hammering my unredeemed keys list a little bit harder, with the challenge to get it down under 200 before the 1st of January. Just to make the next 10 days a little more gruelling!
Warstone TD was one of them, from Feb 2020; the "TD" is for Tower Defense.
It's a little bit different to most tower defense games I've played, as the game starts with several (I guess they're called) warstones along the path that the mobs follow, and you can choose to build from several optional unit types at each location.
During each round you might unlock an extra warstone to place somewhere else, but I think this is where the element of strategy comes in.
Also, after some rounds, you get a double-strength warstone which increases the range of the units (not sure what else it does).
So far it doesn't seem like you can change or upgrade a unit once activated, so it's an interesting twist on the genre, and I don't have a lot of traditional TD games anyway, so it's kind of fun.
After the initial gameplay introduction, the game sets a story about a wizard who's seen the future, and that he's going to be handed over to a group of invaders by the town, and so he enlists the help of the player (fourth-wall break, nice), to do the city-building thing, and build and arm the city so he doesn't meet that grisly end.
It's a cute framing device and gives some nice RPG elements to push the game outside of the standard tower defense genre.
Warstone TD is kind of fun, and definitely something I'll return to when I'm the mood for that kind of game; it's