Archamon

This game was recommended to me by someone on my Steam friends list and I’m glad that I gave it a chance. Archamon is a city builder which feels like its stuck in the late 90s/early 2000s, for better or worse. It’s also kind of like a budget version of Banished, but a bit more fun. If either of those two things sound bad to you, you might be easily scared away from this game. If you’re willing to give it a shot, though, you might enjoy Archamon. The first thing to address is the graphics. This game looks old and there’s no getting around that. I find it to be kind of charming in a nostalgic sort of way. Larger towns and cities begin to look like controlled chaos straight out of a forgotten city builder or simulation game like Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion. There are also seasons that change the landscape; fall especially looks oddly pretty. The only part that I find truly garish is the winter setting, which is somewhat blinding. I’m not sure how the winter colors could be fixed, but I do think they need work. Archamon really shines in its town building gameplay. There are several different modes, including a builder mode. This mode is surprisingly relaxing; you can let your townspeople gather resources and construct buildings while you sit back and further plan towns. Since you can modify the difficulty to turn off enemies, there isn’t much in the way of micromanaging on lower difficulties. It’s also a great podcast game in that regard, which is fine since the music isn’t really that memorable. If you do want to micromanage your village, building a network of towns and forts is pretty fun. There are tutorials for all the basics and they’re useful. Sometimes the dialogue boxes get a little too full, but overall, this game isn’t too difficult to understand if you finish the tutorials. Other modes focus more on combat, which isn’t particularly engaging. I’m not sure how to improve the combat but it feels like it could use more polish and focus on control groups like in Age of Empires II. Two modes, the barbarian fortress and with enemies modes, rely on combat, seeking out enemy settlements to conquer. Barbarian raids, on the other hand, function more like a tower defense mode, which is an interesting gameplay choice. Unfortunately, the jankiness of the combat makes these modes less fun to play than the far more relaxed builder mode. There’s also a hardcore challenge mode that I didn’t try. As for the option quality, it also feels a little old. The setup menu could also scare you away if you’re playing it for the first time. Every time you complete a tutorial or want to switch to a different save, you’re sent back to a settings launcher outside of the rest of the game. It does offer a variety of graphical options, though, including support for ultrawide monitors. I did have some crashing trouble related to going full screen in game, but I was able to fix that from the launcher menu. I also experienced a crash while using the landscaping tool but thankfully haven’t been able to recreate it. It seems like a lot of the crashing issues others mentioned have possibly been fixed; I didn’t encounter any rendering issues and never experience alt-tab crossing, but I may have just been lucky. Look, if you can get past the eurojank and enjoy city builders, you should try Archamon. Keep in mind that this was developed by a small Czech team and is still actually receiving updates. The last update was apparently released in February 2021, and it’s great to see a nearly four-year-old game still get updates.