Evolution of Ages: Settlements

Settlements is a unique mix of strategy and RPG, and unlike anything else on the market. It has some elements of city builders, mixed with some elements of Civilization, mixed with a full-fledged D&D style system of stats and skills for every character. The game is set in the far post-apocalyptic future, and you start out with two small settlements to construct buildings in. Your people are in the stone age, and through harvesting resources, crafting items and researching technologies, you progress further along the tech tree. It goes all the way from stone age to modern age, starting with stone axes and clubs and ending with computers and guns. In your settlements, you can construct houses (which spawn new residents for your settlement), resource collection points (where your settlers can harvest resources), and crafting stations (where your settlers turn harvested resources into usable items). Resources are infinite, but you are limited by the amount of space you have in each settlement and the amount of settlers you have. The most important part of planning out your settlements is to decide where to build which building, and who to assign to work there. Everything your settlers can do has a skill associated with it. There are woodcutting, stonecutting and mining skills for harvesting resources, there are craftsman, armorsmith, weaponsmith skills for crafting items, and there is a skill for research. And there are also combat skills, of course. The skills go up as they are used, but you can also speed it up by having your settlers read instruction books you can find when exploring the world. Each character can only have 15 skills though, and while that might sound like a lot, there is a huge amount of skills in the game and you have to specialize your characters if you want them to be effective at their jobs. Skills go from 1 to 10, and there are also stats (Strength, Intellect, Stamina, Dexterity, Charisma, Status, Health) which go from 1 to 5. While skills improve with use, stats have to be upgraded by spending money, and it's not cheap. Money can also be used to buy perks for your characters, and since you end up with a LOT of characters in your settlements, there's never enough money to give everyone the perks and stats you want. The main focus is on building up your settlements and creating food and equipment for your people, but there's also an abstracted world map where you can send your people exploring. You can find enemy groups to fight, treasure to recover, and new settlements to claim. There are also boss enemies that spawn on the map during each era. These are hard to defeat, but give excellent rewards like unique weapons and armor, or even captured animals which can help you in combat. Combat plays out similarly to oldschool RPGs like Wizardry or Might & Magic. You have a group of enemies on the left side, and a group of your guys on the right side, and they exchange blows in turn-based combat. It's not overly complex, but there is some tactical nuance to it. Every weapon type has a special effect (spears can cause bleeding, axes can sunder enemy shields, etc), there are some skills and consumables you can use on the battlefield, like raising morale with a battlecry or healing a companion with bandages. Your settlements also get attacked occasionally, and you can build fortifications to improve your chances. In later ages you even get catapults and cannons to cause area damage against groups of enemies. The game is really fun, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys unconventional strategy-RPG mashups. It's a complex game and it has its quirks, but once you get past the learning curve it's really enjoyable.

Game has menus for unfinished features, that were promised to be in the next update, but that was 3 years ago. Price is very low and what initialy tempted me to buy this game was amount of hours that some other reviewers put into it, so there is deffinetly something good about it, but having buttons that lead nowhere is not something I can tolerate. I checked developer account and he simply chooses not to deliver what he promised despte puting thousands of hours into playing other (finished) steam games.

Full Disclosure: While I did not exactly receive this game for free, it came as part of a humble bundle so I did not have really anything special invested. That out of the way, this game has been abandoned as far as I can find. I did manage to track down, I believe, the developer and they seem to be alive and in good health, but they do not appear to be developing this game any further. Because the game is incomplete, with nothing further coming, I cannot recommend this game. This of course can be changed if they decide to restart development, but I do not believe that is likely to happen.

Let's use a book metaphor for this game. On the cover, a simple drawing of a man with a club, perhaps a child's book. The first few pages read like elementary school textbooks, with simple words and numbers. But once you start reading, you soon realize there's a complex encyclopedia here. You heft the tome and realize it's much thicker than you thought when you picked it up, and a few minutes later, you're buried in a chapter about spinning wool and fighting giant wolves, forging bronze and exploring a new world. Then you look up, and realize you've only just scratched the surface.

Bad abandonware

[h1]Approach this game with caution![/h1] It is as addictive as it seems ugly at first glance. Well, it's not literally ugly, but for sophisticated player graphics look somewhat unbalanced and partially accidental, but you forget to notice it after an hour or two. You see, I was going just to take a peek as far as this game was in my library for quite some time, I had some vacation free time, but not nearly enough to start something big (oh boy, was I wrong considering this one just a short couple runs indie game!). And look at me - having 21 hours in couple of sits already and looking forward to continue. But let's get back to the game itself. - I already mentioned graphics above. Not flawless, but don't make your eyes run out or even get tired too. - Gameplay is deep! I mean it's not Europe Universalis or Crusader Kings, but it's DEEP. You will depend on your villagers and their random stats, rare trading balance to split between buying items you can't produce yet and saving to teach your settlers something useful. You'll fight to keep everyone alive in battles because they are your rarest resource - it takes time to teach them to be effective and unique set of skills makes every villager irreplacable at some point. As you progress and learn about the game, you will discover more and more features. - It's indie, there's singe developer, I hope game will get more updated or at least workshop release, it has great potential indeed. - Music is awesome. My child robs me of my headphones and sit silently nearby (heartly thanks for that solely!) while I continue to play. - You will hardly notice time flying by, so set your alarm if you want to keep your sleeping schedule.

A fun game for people who like optimizing, playing with numbers and efficiency. The UI is not very friendly and will require patience, but this game gave me enough enjoyable hours to more than make up for the fair price tag.

I could not figure out how to get this thing to work. The tutorial doesn't explain enough and I ended up stuck with no real way out. I couldn't even figure out how to get my settlement working on increasing resources. I built stuff and they sat there. That's it. Not fun at all. Build a better tutorial that shows you how to get everything going, then we'll talk.

Sadly this game seems to have been abandoned.

Abandoned game. Last update summer 2020.