Desktopia: A Desktop Village Simulator

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.