Archeo: Shinar

It has the Achilles' heel of strategy games: A tutorial that tells you to do many things, but no explanation of why you'd want do it. It doesn't realise that it could be much more with less. The mechanics do not mesh and aren't in service to each other and seemingly exist only to add unneeded complexity. I have a massive board game collection and this felt like coming into a complex 4x game with two expansions already integrated and half the rulebook missing. I had to quit out of the basic tutorial and restart it twice thinking I'd missed something before getting frustrated and just quitting altogether. If your solution to negative reviews is to post an explainer video, then that should indicate to you that your tutorial is simply not good enough. Speaking of... After I came back and tried again, I got stuck in the fourth tutorial and had to force quit the game and try again before it finally let me through. After beating all the tutorials I think I actually understood less than when I went in and have zero inclination to actually play the game. It was as if it were trying to teach me 5 disparate games that were tied together by nothing more than a loose theme.

Мужики, спасайте, если наберём 10 лайков и 5 наград, то жена подарит ящик пива!

Менеджер археологической экспедиции. Да, это так же скучно, как и звучит. В интерфейсе без ста грамм не разобраться. Во время туториала если кликнешь ради интереса в соседнюю вкладку, игра тебя будет стыдит за косяки, мол, "ну ты что не видишь кнопочку? мы же тебе стрелочку нарисовали". Визуально вообще просто месиво из вкладок. Сюжет написан крайне чопорным языком, сильно затянут, даже знаменитого британского юмора полное отсутствие. Чувство выполненного квеста после завершения экспедиции отсутствует, ощущение прогресса нету, не могу это объяснить. Жаль не вернула сразу. В общем, не советую.

[h1]Follow our curator for similar games[/h1] https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35180752-3-point-play/ Economic turn-based sim + interesting setting + nice art and UI = Archaeology themed resource management. Make $, hire explorers, go on expeditions, earn rep, collect items, and buy land.

I just finished the tutorial and the game seems interesting, with lots of different strategic elements to have to balance. However, I understood less and less of what the tutorial was trying to teach me as the game went on because the English got worse and worse. They need to hire a copy-editor/translator to fix it. Not a great first impression. However, the game does seem to have great potential. I'll come back and edit this review if my impression changes as my gameplay continues. Edit: It crashed the second time I opened it. Welp.

Interesting little game. The concept is good, although the execution is a bit unpolished. The management aspects of the game are good. Dealing with employee phobias and such is fun. Dabbling the in black market and properties help keep you on your toes financially. The story expedition are pretty fun with multiple choice courses of action. Unfortunately those are rare, and most expedition are very dry. This game is best played with the sound off and skimming over the game text. The background music isn't bad, but the voice actors are 100% loyal to the horribly written scripts. The text in the game is chock-full of grammatical errors and weird phrasings. The company that developed this game is out of Dubia, and it shows. Still if you can look past the translation errors, its a fun game. One last note, unlike most games out there, hard is actually hard in this game. I advise starting off on easy or normal. Even normal is a nice challenge in the campaign mode.

While this game has many gameplay facets, unfortunately fun wasn't one of them. I only played this for an hour but even in this time many flaws became apparent very quickly. 1. All of your employees get fears very quickly for no apparent reason which reduce their skill levels. You can reduce the attitude to cautious (to reduce the chance for new fears) which in return also reduces their skill levels. Strange concept. Also you cannot cure these phobias. In effect, they become useless very quickly. you can try to compensate by training, dumping thousands of pounds into their education, but what's the point when you lose half of it on the next expedition where they get new phobias? 2. Sometimes you only have expeditions available that require more participants than you have employed. Also: strange. I could employ one additional explorer but his skill levels where so bad that i just doesn't wanted to, despite the fact that i could have fired him the next round. 3. Bidding for land. You can give a bid on a parcel of land for the next auction. You enter your bid and they take ALL of it, despite the fact that the other bidder only bid 20% of your price. That is not how auctions work. How can someone get this wrong in a game? Never used ebay or what? 4. The main focus of the game, the expeditions, are very simplistic. You just have to select your explorer for every random encounter and see if you fail or succeed. If you succeed more than fail, the expedition is a success. you get money, reputation and thats it. 5. Artifacts you find can be sold on the black market. Problem is, if there is no demand, you cannot sell them, they can be confiscated and the fence keeps a significant portion of the money. So in most cases these artifacts are no help at all just "fluff" that doesn't lead anywhere. There are more design flaws i could list, but these were enough for me to get a refund. Even for the 6 bucks i payed, this wasn't worth it. EDIT to reply to the devs response: 1. I read the tutorial and it did say that you can improve their stats with gin, tabacco etc. and it also said that you change the attitude to make them more cautious.I didn't recall a part in which it says that not bringing the expensive stuff with you will give them more fears. 2. That is certainly a design desicion people can agree or disagree on. Not liking it and commenting on this isn't "false" it is just an opinion. I found it irritating which is full within my rights as a customer. You programmed it, i bought it, i didn't find it particulary well designed, end of story. 3. I'm sorry, but your explaination has NOTHING to do with my comment. The word bidding and auction is mentioned several times in this regard in the game. You say it is an auction but you don't use the appropriate mechanics. I don't know what more can be said here. 4. That may be, but it wouldn't have hurt to make this part of the game more exciting. I'm not saying make big cut scenes or stuff like that but TELL us some interesting stories. Why burn the interesting premise of the archeology theme if you are not making the expeditions at least a little bit interesting? This is not a major gripe, but it is sad, because it is just wasted potential to tell some interesting stories. 5. That maybe and i wish the black market would have been explained better. I read the wiki-info in the game but the mechanic did not feel very helpful. All in all i don't know why you are saying it is not the best game. Be proud of what you created! The fact that some of these design decisions you made prevented me from having fun, means very little in the grand sheme of things. The review was made for people who may have the same adverse reaction to these points, nothing more. It is not meant as an insult to you or your creation.

The voice acting and script is so bad that I immediately alt-f4'd out of that. I physically recoiled from the computer. That was beyond bad. That was an intentional attack on voice acting and writing. It was ant-art.

A far too abstract push-your-luck game with an awfully bad tutorial and introduction. For this to have been released years after Renowned Explorers is just mad. I can't think of anyone to recommend this game to, who wouldn't be having a better time with a narratively richer game like Renowned Explorers or a snappier push-your-luck styled game like Skull or Dead of Winter.

This game is an economic turn-based strategy. In Archeo: Shinar you can become an organiser of expeditions. Your job is to manage them and find your best team. The game has low entry threshold and you can leanr it in a few hours, but still it's pretty hard and just a few bad decisions may end with you losing couple of hours of progress.