As Far As The Eye

So close to being a really special game. The aesthetics, theming, artwork, and game design are solid. But it suffers two great flaws: Campaign mode is a tutorial that gives us a taste of what a fully-developed campaign with story could have been, but then drops you into arcade-game play with no more world building or writing. More importantly, as many have noted, the game balance is off and you can have many hours of thoughtful play ruined by random catastrophe. I visited a region with a requirement of 300 wood to continue, and there was zero wood in the entire map. Every solution required more wood. It's just, "oh well you lose." Maybe buy on discount and give it a try if you're a fan of the genre like me. But ultimately I was disappointed, mostly by how close this came to being a great game.

TL;DR: Fun concept, but there are huge design issues. Your ability to win very much depends on pure luck and much less on skill. You often get unwinnable maps that will make things utterly frustrating. Especially since you have to win a run with a tribe to unlock another one. Good: - Can be a fun resource management game in Custom mode. - The concept of deciding between buildings that you leave or making them follow you with their upgrades. They cost different resources so it is a nice layer of complexity. - Visuals are pretty nice. - When moving on from a map you have to pack the different buildings and resources on a grid. Again, a fun thing to do. Cons: - While in general the visuals are good, sometimes your characters are really hard to see. - Random events often make the map unwinnable. It is very frustrating to lose not due to a bad strategy, but because the game decided so. For instance a resource you need for progression gets removed from the map. Or you start with an event that makes it impossible to gather enough food to survive. - It feels like the number of workers and production chains are unbalanced. You have to be very lucky to get enough workers for both producing enough food and being able to gather the required resources to progress. I had many runs where simply getting enough food took 3 characters and I had none who could work on progression.

i am having fun, but there is a dev oversight problem. I encountered an unwinnable scenario where i couldn't progress to the next "halt" because the current one only had 300 stone and progressing required 360. This programming error in the procedural generation made continuing impossible and forces me to fail, losing all the time and energy put into the campaign. It is a clear oversight and needless to say very annoying. I hope the devs see this comment, but i will still give the game a thumbs up despite this problem.

Fun aesthetics and concept with TERRIBLE (read non-existent) balance. Sometimes no matter how good you plan ahead, there's no way to win a scenario because of RNG factors (way too frequent calamities or terrible map constraints). For example, once I ended up on a map where there're no stone tiles and stone is the primary win condition. Trading is too restricted (10:1 ratio!) so it was impossible to win within time. There is NO manual save option and each scenario has multiple maps so if you end up reaching an unwinnable map, there's no to drop back to a previous map so you're screwed and will have to start over. That's half an hour wasted and pretty annoying. My final verdict: AVOID. You won't miss much.

I don't know if it's just me or not, but this game is too hard for me, I've tried different approaches and seem to work but always at the end it never does and it makes me not want to continue playing it.... maybe I will give it another try some other time.

Super cute turn-based resource management! I love playing the looooong journeys. Doesn't allow saving, but you can back up save files ;) My only complaint, if you can even call it one, is that the last journey besides custom game is really hard, maybe impossibly so (or maybe I'm just bad at the game)

Too much RNG, some situations are straight up unsalvagable. After a 2 hour run of carefully considering options I just lost because one little guy just stood in place instead of returning resources

This game is my personal hell. It is all the worst aspects of a 4X with none of the good. Nothing worth building towards other than just a victory at the end. No cool wonders, or rad weapons & armor, no exploration or questing to do. To top it off, the gameplay loop is just a ton RNG hell and too much micromanagement (food, space, & time being the worst of them). If you want a good 4X, this is not one. If you like time/resource management games with no story you might like this.

Have only played this for 4 hours. The game has a lot of potential but the tutorial fails to make it captivating or clear enough about how complex everything gets and how big the RNG factor is.

Resource management colony roguelike? Meh, slow quiet and not engaging enough to hook me in the first 20 minutes. Too many games on the list to keep going sorry