Jon Shafer's At the Gates

I waiting a very long time to write a review, because I hoped that there would be some news. And now 3 years have passed and there is no news. The concept of the game is amazing, I was in awe of something so fresh in a classic 4X. I really liked the idea of ​​clans and the germ of asymmetric conflict that is made in the game. But I must admit - the game is dead, abandoned and too raw to be enjoyed. Half of the mechanics are simply not implemented, the game has a huge amounts of bugs and unfinished elements.

Sadly, it's an unfinshed game and seems to be dead now. If you're interested in civlikes, you might want to get it anyway - there are some interesting ideas here and it's playable as a kind of survival strategy game. The elevator pitch was that this was like Civ, but you played a wandering tribe in the waning days of the Roman Empire, and while you were building your strength, the map would slowly get less hospitable over time in a kind of climate thunderdome situation. To win, you'd either romanize or sack Rome. What works well: I love the art style, I like it better than all of the Civs or Old World. Dynamically changing map with weather. Scouting, exploration is cool. This is the game that pioneered infinitely nested tooltips. What kinda works: The varying worker clans you get have randomised specialities and weaknesses. It's interesting, needed a bit of balance; I think it would have been good if the first few didn't have negatives. The economy has tons of different resourdes and products, it's interesting and works decently. Combat is somewhat basic and is deeply tied in with the economy, but it does the job okay. Supply is a thing. What doesn't work so well: Clans interact with each other, these interactions tend to be negative and not a lot of fun. There's not really a good concept what a clan is exactly - their population keeps increasing to balance their skill upgrades in a hacky way. Diplomacy was a bit of a construction site when development ground to a halt - it sort of works, and I like the basic concept, but it lacks polish. The nomadism thing you can get around with later techs . I think the idea is very interesting, the execution a bit so-so. Not sure if it's a fundamental problem or if the game is trying to do too many things at once. What doesn't work: The AIs are braindead. There's not really a mid- or late game. All in all it's a very interesting experiment that probably was attempted by too small a team with too small a budget. If the game should ever be on sale for something like a cup of coffee price wise, feel free to grab it if you've read the review and it sounds like something you'd like.

The developer should reduce the price, game is unfinished. I am a kickstarter backer and honestly the game had great promise but the developer gave up. He should look into allowing modders to fix his game.

Abandoned. Unfinished. Jon promised refunds but didn't follow through.

This game had a lot of potential, and was quite fun while learning how to play it. The idea that you could move your settlement around was a really cool feature, and I did enjoy trying to figure out ways to maximize resource gathering without destroying the nodes. It was also nice to be able to emulate the Goths sack of Rome. Those are the positive points. I also really do like the artwork, as it was a unique take on 4x games. The negatives are, no real AI with the NPCs, no diplomacy to speak of, really, and honestly there really isn't any benefit to being diplomatic in the first place. You can conquer another tribes main settlement, only for it to somehow spring up out of the ground and continuously resurrect itself like a tent-phoenix. The game is hard if you cannot get established quickly, and it's quite likely after starting out a few times your people will simply starve to death. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes ridiculously easy. I also didn't really care for the diverse representation of the barbarian tribes of Europe, it's just not historically accurate at all in a game that was supposed to somewhat emulate the Goths wandering Europe avoiding Roman Legions as much as possible. The game also randomly crashes quite frequently, and once it does there really isn't a way to recover your game. Sometimes rebooting helps, usually it doesn't. I'm quite distraught to see no updates at all in nearly 4 years, because this was clearly an unfinished game upon release.

it's almost a scam

Abandoned the game after making so many promises, and stating in a podcast that they 'may' return to this, while also still trying to charge full price for it. Absolute garbage behaviour, do NOT buy this or any other future games by the developer, do not allow this to become any sort of standard.

do you like unfinished/unpolished games then Jon Shafer has the game for you

Unfinished and abandoned. Last update was 2 years ago.... prematurely pushed out as a "complete" game. Really disappointed because the game mechanics had a lot of potential, but many of them are broken or incomplete.

Some cool ideas, but incomplete, buggy, broken, and abandoned.