Crest - an indirect god sim

Есть поселение. У каждого поселения есть некие здоровые жлобы. Этим жлобам вы назначаете задания в формате очереди. После чего элобы ходят и имитируют деятельность. Выглядит это все очень непривлекательно. И несмотря на ненавидимую мной ultra low poly графику, игра при этом грузится дольше последнего Дума со старого HDD. В целом очень кислое впечатление от игры. Это прям тот случай, когда запускаешь игру и сразу понимаешь, что НЕТ.

I was super excited about this concept... and pretty disappointed in its execution. It feels less like "talk to your followers and have them interpret your commandments" and more like just trying to play a buggy city builder where sometimes the wrong thing happens. These "interpretations" don't feel meaningful in any way, you're just having to babysit the commandment list to delete the ones that go wrong. Game was buggy and laggy. The "bring a city from zero to full faith" objective never registered after I'd gone 0 to 100, the save function stopped working, and the connections between cities disappeared after the tutorial and never came back. Thankfully this last didn't really matter much except for one objective about making cities hate each other, which I completed by... not paying attention to it and it doing it on its own. The level of challenge here is pretty low, so it's not satisfying when you complete something. It's like doing basic math while someone screams the wrong answers at you: more annoying than anything. Tons of "gameplay" components that didn't really affect the game in any way: the underworld I visited once and never again, the water maps could be ignored because the environment didn't seem to really matter, most of the skills tree can't even be unlocked, resource levels and city relationships just really don't matter to completing the objectives... it was a ton of tutorial for very little that actually came into play. Completed all game objectives (besides the ones it bugged out and didn't register me as completing) in 4.5 hours. Have no real desire to play again.

Fun at first, but you can’t tell cities what to do, and the growth is limited to 6. So once you have more cities, the whole “tell your people what to do” doesn’t really work anymore. When you tell your people to migrate, they might just run from city to city or form a new city on the wrong island, even though your original plan was to get more cities on the new island. The next problem is that it feels like an early access game because there isn’t much to do. Overall, I don’t really feel there’s a big difference between the early game and the late game. You just build more cities wherever they can get food. If you restart the game over and over until you get something where you can unlock the farming tech, I don’t think you can die as long as you build your civ’s core in the jungle area. From that point on, you just watch them and try to unlock the last wisdom points. But it’s still just “don’t fight, get food, build new cities at random places,” because it doesn’t really matter what happens to the cities. The worst thing is when the rivers dry out and you might lose one of your “more important” cities. But if you have farming, you don’t kill the animals and can just eat those during the dry season. Overall, I prefer playing Oxygen Not Included, where I have more control over my people. If I mess up, it’s because of me—not because the AI just does random stuff.

Could have been great with RNG elements that could have added replayability, and which could have made the commandments impactful. As it is, the AI is entirely suicidal and will do everything it can to eradicate all life on the planet, and because of your limited actions you can't really stop them. Played for 4 hours and have a decent little civilization going? Tough luck, the followers now associate "birth" with "death" and will kill everyone in sight; oh and "produce" is now "don't consume", so they'll refuse to eat the berries that are in plentiful supply. And as the population dwindles, you get less and less influence over an already back-asswards situation. Add to this that the "tech tree" is more or less randomized, which can lock you into or out of some unfortunate choices. There are a lot of could-haves with this game, but the developers obviously gave up at some point and moved on. And if you're about to spend your money because there's a Steam sale - think again, there are other games out there for the same price tag that are actually well-designed.

If you get it, get it on sale. Know that your civilizations are doomed from the beginning. No amount of feeding animals will keep them from going extinct when you hunt for them. No amount of planting berries will keep up with needing to pick them, or the land slowly dying. There are some funny parts to the game, and interesting, but this wares out in a couple of hours. You need points to make commands, and even if you have 4+ cities, none of it matters if only one fully trusts in your commands... and that's what gives you the points you need to make commands in the first place. Not having the ability to make commands when you need to make them to gain favor in the first place is a load of crap. You're a god, but it takes them growing for you to understand what a gazelle or what old people are. On the opposite side, you have a few cities following you, you'll be able to make so many commands that you may end up hunting everything out of existence. You have three islands with tiny mountains, and that's it. Buy it if you want to rule over a morbid world fated to fall apart no matter what, where all life will perish while your followers die following misinterpretation. They'll be mauled by hippos, stab each other in the back when they have no metal/gems, and the one you'll get used to the most-- starvation. They even let you name your planet/land... the moment every one of your followers have died a harsh death in a world doomed from the start. No joke. It's freaking dark.

Abandoned in an uninteresting state.

This is a decent idea for a game but it does not work when poorly executed and the devs decide to move on and there is something completley killing the game in terms of frame rate no matter what the graphics are set to.

Isn´t really worth it, lacks options and isn´t being developed anymore

Only played it for a hour and I like it a lot so far. Seems very chill and I like watching my people do stuff. Still learning the game. I will update this as I see fit as I play more. It's cheap, it's nice for something casual without putting in a whole lot of thought, and it seems pretty fun so far..

Late to the review but I guess I'll throw my two cents in here... Don't throw yours in. Everything in the game takes far too long for too little effect. You sort of just stop generating your god powers after a while, they are prohibitively expensive, etc, etc.