Desktopia: A Desktop Village Simulator

A very interesting concept and pretty cool designed by using multiple windows. However, this is all the waiting of an idle game, but none of the "rewards" of an idle game. You need to wait and grind to achieve something, only for it to not actually get you anywhere, because you still have to be hands on at many things, mostly defending. I rarely like to describe a game like this, but it's just.. boring.

木を切ったり敵を倒したりして資金を貯めて施設を建設してボスを倒す、面クリア型？のゲーム。 1面(Dark Priestess)クリアしたので感想を投下します。 ◆おすすめの人 ◎ドットが可愛く音楽も癒し系なので、住民や犬を眺めて楽しみたい人 ◎放置モードにしてたまに眺めつつ、お金が貯まったら施設を建設するようなのんびりプレイが好きな人 ◆進行方法 ①付近の木を切ってゴールドを貯めて左側のBUILDから施設を建設します。 ②住民が増えると勝手に木を切ってくれるのでゆっくりとですがお金が貯まっていきます。 ③自分でするのは集合などの簡易コマンドと建設、催事(?)の決定くらいなのでのんびりお金が貯まるのを待ちましょう。 ④お金が貯まったらまた施設を建設しましょう。 ⑤Lvの高い施設を建設するには各Lvの一番右側の施設を建設する必要があります。 ※施設を購入するたびに施設購入費用が上がるため、計画的に建設しないとクリアまでに時間がかかります。 ※ボスを倒すために戦闘員施設と町に必須施設(消防など)を建設することになるため、カイロソフト的なゲームのように自分の好きな街並みにカスタマイズするのは難しいです。 ◆注意点 コントローラー操作はできますがメイン画面が最前面でないと操作を受け付けません。 またオートセーブがないようで、MENU＞SAVE/LOADからセーブしないと進捗が吹き飛びます(1敗)

Interesting idle-ish game while working/playing other things. Not enough options imo to redo some layouts but it's whatever; it's no that deep. Entertaining with very little hands-on.

Pretty much just a waiting game. Also used a lot more resources than I expected.

Eh, not that great, would've refunded it if I could

I good idea and a good game. Simple but worth the asking price & I hope we see more games like this in the future.

neat idea, but leaves a lot to be desired

Looks like it would be a great idle game but it requires too much attention and input

A poor game and a mediocre idler makes for a devastating 1-2 punch. I'll save you the trouble of reading the full review and say I wish I'd gotten my money back within the refund window. If you insist then wait for a strong sale and if you pay $10 for it you've made a mistake. Get a good cheap game or save up and get a real base manager like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress! Desktopia touts itself as a village building tower/wave defense that you can idle and/or take an active hand in developing and defending, expanding your charmingly rustic village until you and the boys overrun the generic D-tier boss at the end of the road. In theory you have to smartly time your village development vs drawing the ire of larger waves of more dangerous critters further up the road. In practice you'll follow nearly the same build order every time and you will need a truly heroic amount of willpower to not palm smash the Idler difficulty. Gameplay is bare bones, coming up short even against mobile game dregs. You left-click on bushes to generate money or monsters to kill them. You can right-click for an anemic ranged attack that also puts out fires if you can summon the sheer determination to go back to your village from 20+ seconds of travel away. You can't solo bosses and have limited control over your villagers so above all you wait, buy buildings for some goons after your gooning break, press 1 and spam wisps out to stunlock the boss. Desktopia is like a set of disjointed alpha systems that have been shown to barely work and are ripe for development that never comes. Heroes that die as fast as basic soldiers, units clipping out of bounds(in a nearly 1D game?) ranged AI shooting at out of range targets it will never hit, enemies that stand still and stop attacking for 5+ seconds at a time, town NPCs to automate functions that don't do anything and so on. Surely the town building is the meat of the game, right? Nope. There's a fair number of things to track but all of them are dead simple. The only real consideration is if you want to idle longer(manually farming bushes is so dull I consider it an active negative against your time on this planet) to buy later tiers of building first. All the systems are slightly off, such as the wine press. +5 gold per bush should be scaling for income but it caps at 4 wine presses EVER made so you'd have to be genuinely dim to not lock those in on the first level. There aren't many choices in Desktopia and those you get are pretty dull. The randomly expanding villagers show that the choices you don't get feel bad too, especially since this village management game doesn't let you deconstruct buildings. The limited town building makes starting from scratch each level tedious and I'm pretty sure the past level income doesn't work. If I'm wrong this is at least a very grim placebo and matches the difficulty the UI has with telling you what's going on. I found that the growing levels grew ever duller, featuring longer stretches of nothing. I resented walking back to town each time, how about a warp to start function? Why is basic functionality like gather villagers and attack boss gated behind random drops? There's a little charm in the art and the relaxing music but everything is so limited and the unfinished feel of the game detracts from it, like the sound mixing that has gunners firing at 400% volume. I'd suggest adding animations of the trees being felled but that might make the game explode your ram as it has infamous performance issues(on a 2D pixel idler?) Sounds odd but I'm no coder-man. I do know a game shouldn't hang up and chug when you try to save. That it stinks to summon wisps and watch them wander into corners and become stuck for the rest of the level. The game has villager stat tracking and an event log but shows virtually no meaningful info on the primary screen other than fires. The stimulated desktop style of the bulbous, goofy menu windows is very ugly and clunky and I think Desktopia would've fared far better as a full screen game with the ambition to match. At its heart this is a game that can't figure out a tutorial and just opens a .txt file when started. The best thing that can be said about this game is that it does fulfill its suggested use as a pointless time-waster you pair with an actually engaging activity though I'd say you should skip Desktopia and just give your full attention to the videos you're watching.

I was hoping Desktopia would be a fun desktop toy I could just leave running and decorate my desktop that I could check semi-infrequently. It achieves the desktop decoration expectation, but this game features mechanics that prevent it from being enjoyable when leaving it idle. People will build houses when you aren't looking and this goes against the amount of useful buildings you can place. The village get raided periodically and despite having a fire station, your houses will burn down. Idling is just detrimental in most cases, and farming gratitude at the end of a level just seems like a waste of time. Disappointment aside, the gameplay is okay. It's not going to be better than anything you've played, but Desktopia is very unique. The list of games that you play on your desktop like this is very short. I can only think of Metal Marines (1994) and various shovelware games from the 2000's. Hard to recommend at full price unless you want to play a minimal city-building game on your desktop. There are other ways one can decorate their desktop and I cannot recommend Desktopia for that purpose. Despite this review being marked as positive, I'm mostly disappointed overall. I do like the concept however, and I think the game should at least receive a positive response for that.