Citizens: Far Lands - Prologue

中规中矩，没有什么特别吸引人玩的地方

☀️

6/10 A turn-based puzzle / village builder TLDR: The idea of the game to place lumber mills, quarries, farms and such to reach and eventually clear resource patches is interesting. Yet the implementation is mediocre because of uninspired looks. And also the strange design decision to have it all work with super-precise manual placements and the physics engine. Standard hex tiles and maybe even 2D instead of 3D graphics would probably work better. Good: - the core idea of clearing an island from trees, stones and deer to then place orchards and farms is interesting - music is relaxing - free (prologue) So-so: - graphics are low-poly 3D and seem to be targeting mobile? Still, even with this low-polygon no-texture look, the game was lagging on my 5 year old Asus Zenbook 6 laptop. Anyways, the overall looks are pretty shabby. And it's not just the low-poly models but also the dull color palette. I guess the game is still in development and uses stub art for the UI(?), so the UI looks pretty bad (for now?) - minor English imperfections here and there. A native speaker of English should proofread it Bad: - the game is 3D and physic-based, not tile-based. So e.g. you can rotate a 3D building's blueprint by an arbitrary angle before placing it. Also, you can set the position of a building with extreme precision, as much your mouse allows (of if you zoom in the camera). This results into a strange kind of challenge of finding precise placements of e.g. lumber mills where they wouldn't destroy any forest patches when placed yet still reach 3-4 patches at once. I guess this all uses bounding boxes for collisions? But guess what: those boxes are invisible to the player, so this results into a dumb trial-error process. This is not what a puzzle game should be about. After completing just the first 1-2 levels, I couldn't shake the feeling that this game should have been tile-based instead (either square or hex tiles). The same type of spatial challenges this puzzle presents would remain, yet the whole idiotic "precise placement" chore would go away. Then, if the game would be tile-based, it could work far better as a 2D game. The current looks are exactly shabby because the game wants to be 3D but can't really have nice looks because it needs to have a very low polygon count (for mobile, right?). And I guess the devs also don't have the budget to make good textures or nice particle animations or whatever. So, like, the obvious, easy solution would be to just go 2D. I'd even say that any random stock tileset would look better than the current bland gray-green-ish blocky mess. Though I'm not sure if such a change would be doable this late in development. At the very least, switching to just 3D tiles (square or hex) would make the game better gameplay-wise. - Q/E rotation of objects is too slow and annoying because of that. I guess they wanted this for even more precise rotation (duh). Well, Shift+Q/E could slow down rotation, while without Shift it could be about 3-4 times faster than it is currently [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]