It pains me to give this a thumbs down. I was looking forward to it. I think the premise is interesting and I like to support solo devs.
But...
If I'm feeling charitable, I'd say this is a very early alpha, more like a proof of concept. The only button in the start menu that does anything is "New Game" There is no sound, there are no video options.
Simple, placeholder graphics don't bother me as long as the game play is fun.
But it's not. A new game is not a new game, it's simply start over on the same map with the same resource distribution. And repeat the same mundane tasks over and over to get yourself started.
The killer for me is the UI. There is no visual or audible confirmation that you have clicked a button. After assigning my first task, I thought I had done something wrong (more on that in a sec) but, no, the game was just paused without any indication that it was paused. The game time scale button said "x1" and the pause button looked exactly as it did earlier. I clicked it anyway and my workers appeared, carrying crates.
Success! I thought. Until I assigned my workers to assemble the sawmills that were in the crates. They started putting them together and then the game crashed to desktop.
Okay. Let's give it one more try. Restarted, that's when I noticed that hitting new game just gave me the same old map.
Unloaded the sawmills from the shuttle, got the guys to assemble them without crashing. Okay, now I have to give them a new assignment. What that entails is literally going into a menu, hitting the +task button, selecting harvest, and then having to manually type "Tree" in a text box (I should mention that while you're typing, the map movement keys are still active, so if the object you're interested in contains any of those keys in its name, the map bounces around behind the window you're typing in). I also have to put down another stockpile, because each stockpile can only hold one type of object and then type "Tree" again (make sure you spell it exactly as it is in the game or your workers will ignore you). Then I have to go into the workers menu and manually assign the "harvest tree" task to each of them individually. There's no box select, there's no double-click to select idle workers, no designate a harvest area, nothing resembling a modern UI. The original Warcraft released in 1994 and it had a simpler interface: click orc, right-click tree. Done.
So my guys started hitting the trees with an axe and each cut one down and hoisted a log on their shoulder. Then the game's frame rate dropped into single digits (running this on an Nvidia 3080) and eventually froze. My only guess is that I should have labeled the stockpile "Logs" or "Log" and the guys were trying to pathfind to a non-existent stockpile. There's no way to know because the "How to Play" said if you're unsure what to label a stockpile, click on the resource you want and an info box in the bottom left corner will show you the name. Well, when you click on a tree, the info box says "Tree"
I'm going to continue following this game to see if it improves and may try it again in the future. But for now it's going to the "Return" stockpile.
Quick edit: Thinking back, I didn't have to type "Tree" in the harvest task, there was actually a resource list to choose from. But mousing over or clicking on a resource gave zero feedback that your click had registered. No confirmation sound, no highlighting of the object in the list, nothing.
