Laysara: Summit Kingdom

There's a lot to like about this game, and for a long stretch I genuinely enjoyed it. But by the end I'd stopped having fun and started grinding through it out of stubbornness, which is never a great sign. The biggest issue is how punishing it gets in the later stages. You're given less and less land to work with right when the game starts demanding more complex production chains, and it stops feeling like a puzzle to solve and becomes a management nightmare of constantly tearing down and reshuffling everything you've already built. For me, it crossed the line from challenging to exhausting, and in the end I just gave up.

DNF. Got softlocked on the final level of the campaign. Because, for some insane reason, the game does not have a "restart mission" option, and does not set aside the save for when you start a new level so it cannot be accidentally overwritten by you when you save manually; why would I want my manual save to be under "Mission 13 Completed" instead of my own name, game? This is all a problem for the campaign because building a town and completing a level is all about reaching certain resource benchmarks, and since you are building on the side of a mountain your space is extremely limited. But the levels introduce new game mechanics and resources and objectives in the middle of levels. So you'll be progressing, building a nice town, and the game will order you to build a giant building. So you destroy a bunch of houses since, as stated before, space is extremely limited, and the game complains about a lack of workers and penalizes you by completely draining your funds, resulting in a game over. In a game all about limited space it could do more to at least make it easier to move buildings arounds at least. This problem is compounded by a lack of information and overlays. Which expensive roads are draining my coffers? What building is demanding so many of from the middle-class caste? Which transport buildings have a surplus of supplies? These problems all combine into one big problem in the campaign when it starts levels on mountains where you already built towns. Now it wants you to farm for new resources, but doing so would require rearranging the entire town, which you get penalized for. And since the game doesn't put aside a save at the start of the level and is you can dig yourself into an inescapable financial hole where disturbing anything will penalize you without any way to undo your mistakes. Which is what happened to me. The three autosaves were too far into the level that I couldn't fix my mistakes, I had accidentally overwritten my manual save, the level itself was doomed from the start because the town I built before couldn't handle any changes. The only way to fix it would be to go back several levels to when I first built the town and rebuild it while remembering all the objectives that would occur in a later level. I was so frustrated after putting in 65 hours for nothing that I couldn't even bring myself to try the other game modes, so I just quit. It's a shame, because I really was digging the basic concept of building a town on a mountainside with limited space.

Charming but very tedious puzzle game (because it's no city builder at all) Economy and trading are messed up in so many ways...it becomes a matter of moving entire districts a few steps away to allow anything to happen. I was so excited for this game! A wasted potential imo. Just go for Anno or Town to City if looking for a chill city builder with campaign

Manually clicking on 16 buildings to upgrade individually is what drove me over the edge. It has great potential but needs more efficient user interface and more creative challenges. Satisfying basic production chains like any city builder doesn't give the game a unique selling point.

Laysara: Summit Kingdom is a city builder where the player must build settlements on the slopes of a mountain, with the ultimate goal of constructing a huge temple at the mountain’s peak, which the people believe will please the gods enough to dispel a strange mist which has covered the lower lands. Each town contains three castes of civilians – lowlanders, artisans, and monks, who work in different types of buildings, with some other jobs being performed by yaks. You’ll need to build houses to increase the number of available workers, and then support their needs by supplying multiple types of food, commodities, and enlightenment. Houses which have multiple needs fulfilled can be upgraded several times, to further increase their capacity. Each type of food or commodity has its own production chain with separate buildings responsible for gathering raw materials and converting into finished goods. In addition to this you’ll need buildings relating to storage and distribution, research, gathering taxes from civilians, and buying or selling goods to a trader. And you’ll need to protect buildings by creating barriers to block snow avalanches which can fall from higher up the mountain. Most buildings have a limited effective range when providing a service to houses, or sending goods to the next building in the production chain. This can be extended slightly by improving road quality, but trying to place everything efficiently often feels very puzzle-like, especially as the available building space is limited by mountains and cliff edges. This is made more difficult by the fact that you can’t rotate buildings. So for example, you can’t fit a building that is 4 tiles tall and 2 tiles wide into a gap that is 2 tiles tall and 4 tiles wide. I remember reading that the main reason players don’t have this option is because the developers didn’t want to redo the artwork for each building. Fortunately you can freely move any building at any time with zero cost and instant build times, which at least makes it a bit easier when you have to rearrange everything. However, I also think the game lacks detailed menus to quickly show how many of a specific resource are being produced, if there’s spare capacity, and quickly locate specific buildings on the map. As my towns grew larger, I sometimes found it difficult to remember exactly where I built things. Some of the production chains feel overly complicated, where the final product combines two or three raw materials, and one of those might be produced by combining two other resources, with every individual thing being gathered or combined by a different building. And sometimes the quantities don’t match up exactly, which is where distribution adds a further layer of complication. For example, a yak shack produces 9 milk and a butter beater requires 6 milk, so to be most efficient you’ll want 2 yak shacks and 3 butter beaters to produce and use 18 milk. But you can’t tell a yak shack to supply 2 butter beaters (with 6 and 3 quantity). You have to use a carrier post building as an intermediary, receiving from both yak shacks, then supplying all 3 butter beaters. But then, each butter beater produces 6 butter, and a butter tea brewer requires 9 butter. So again, you’ll have 3 buildings producing enough quantity to support 2 others, which means you’ll need another carrier post as an intermediary (because each carrier post can only handle 1 type of product). Meanwhile, each butter tea brewer also needs 3 herbs, and a herbalist produces 6 herbs, so that needs to be split by another carrier post. Many production chains are like this. Some are even more complex. And just to add another complication, some buildings produce more or less quantity depending on their elevation level, with each mountain having three different elevation levels. There are four difficulty levels. After completing the tutorial I tried the third difficulty (“professional”), however I couldn’t complete the first real mission so I started again on the second difficulty (“adept”). Even this was very challenging on a couple of missions. Some mission objectives, which technically only require adding one building or supplying one new product, eventually lead to you almost doubling the size of the town. For example, the monastery, which is a research building, needs something like 60 monks to function. But it also requires a resource which is generated from a complicated production chain, whose buildings also need monks. So really you need an extra 80-100 monks. Which means either building or upgrading more houses, which means getting lots more food/commodities, which means needing more lowland workers, who might also need more houses/food/etc, and maybe because of limited space you’ve got to produce the food on the other side of the mountain and transport it over to the monks, so you need more artisans, so they need more houses or higher tier houses, and they need more food, and so on, so adding this one building turned into a two hour project. If you don’t have enough workers, buildings will still function, but you suffer a massive financial penalty because you’re paying for external labour. Same with house needs, if you suffer a shortage of goods, the houses don’t downgrade, you have to pay them compensation instead. So ultimately any problem will result in a financial crisis. Some missions are easier, for example when you’re sent to a different mountain to build a smaller colony with the goal of exporting a specific resource back to the main town. When returning to the main town for the next mission, I found that I could tick off some mission objectives immediately because I’d already built what was required. However, the final mission has such a limited amount of build space that it feels like every building has to be in the exact optimal position. I’m on the last objective and I only need to supply one more type of resource to finish building the temple, but I need to build about 5 more production buildings and there’s simply no space left. Just a few tiles scattered around the map. Even if I found a way to fit those in, I’ve got 100 less workers than I need so I only just barely have a positive cashflow. I can’t be bothered spending any more time trying to optimise further. In addition to the campaign, there are several scenario and challenge maps. I’ve played a couple of them, which are much easier than the campaign because there’s much more space to build stuff. But I’m also at the point where the constant cycle of building up a town and starting again on an empty map to do it all again is starting to feel a bit repetitive. I’ll admit that I haven’t played many city builder games, so its possible that some of my complaints might not be huge problems for more experienced players, and this is why I’ve still given Laysara a positive review. However, Laysara feels much more complicated than Wandering Village, which I played recently, and I didn’t enjoy Laysara as much as I thought I would.

There is no building. There is no city. There is no simulation. Only a puzzle game dressed as a city builder. It's like barebones ANNO.

Laysara is a beautiful city-builder with puzzle elements... though it can drive you mad on higher difficulty settings—I enjoyed it more on "Normal," and the campaign isn't bad either. While it doesn't revolutionize the genre, it’s a solid game with some nice, fresh gameplay ideas. You constantly have to rebuild things and rethink your structures. BUT in the final part of the campaign, it turns into a ridiculous scavenger hunt across mountains that are already fully settled. You are given objectives that—theoretically—require you to destroy half of what you’ve built just to rebuild it. It’s a real shame they went so overboard here; ultimately, the mission design just becomes absurd. It’s a real pity. I’m really torn on whether to recommend it—but I’d lean towards not doing so. I think many people might end up viewing it as a waste of time. - - - Laysara ist ein schönes Städtebauspiel mit Puzzle-Elementen ... auf höheren Schwierigkeitsgraden kann es einen allerdings in den Wahnsinn treiben – auf „Normal“ hat es mir mehr Spaß gemacht, und auch die Kampagne ist nicht übel. Es ist zwar keine Revolution, aber ein solides Spiel mit netten, neuen Gameplay-Ideen. Man muss ständig Dinge umbauen und seine Strukturen überdenken. ABER es wandelt sich im letzten Teil der Kampagne zu einer lächerlichen Suche in bereits komplett besiedelten Bergen. Es werden Aufgaben gestellt durch die man in Theorie noch mal die Hälfte vernichten muss um einen Neuaufbau zu erledigen. Wirklich schade das hier so übertrieben wurde. Letztendlich ist das Missions-Design dann einfach nur noch lächerlich. Wirklich schade. Ich schwanke hier inzwischen sehr mit einer Empfehlung - würde es aber eher nicht tun. Ich denke viele könnten es nachträglich als Zeitverschwendung ansehen.

Aggravating is the word for this game. Tried to play it, multiple times, but just can’t wrap my head around how everything works. A couple of pain points are the UI, lack of rotation of the buildings, and the unilateral connections of the buildings. The way the game works is that you need a building for a building for a building to resource mine and distribute. The issue is that all the buildings are spread out into different areas, areas that if you don’t know where it’s located you will get annoyed with a building not working and not knowing were, exactly, you need to go. A grouping would help a lot, but it seems like it wasn’t implemented. A lack of building rotation is another issue. The devs seem to have a lazy and accept it approach, but this ends up becoming an issue when you add this to the unidirectional, always need to be attached to a road, to have access to buildings. If you can’t have pin-point accuracy with the buildings you will have constant annoyances with placing a building, thinking it’s good, and then finding out that it’s not at all connected to anything. The fact that the devs are taking this approach is BS and lazy, especially for a form of Anno/city builder type of puzzle game. Every other game like this gets this right, but the fact that the devs are refusing to fix this and claim it to be a “part of the puzzle” is just point-blank stupid. After trying and struggling to wrap my head around it I had to finally give up the ghost on this game and remove it. Great idea, would be fun, too bad the devs are unwilling to make the game fun and less frustrating. Hopefully they’ll open the game up to mods, so that way sadly someone will come in and fix their mess.

There might be a good game in here b ut considering it crashes on every loading screen and I have not been able to play, I can't actuall say. Refunded.

Минусы: Слишком казуальная, нет интереса развивать город и в целом какого-то понятного намека на метапрогрессию, фиксированная экономика: сделай производственный домик для 4 не производственных домиков Плюсы: Красивый трейлер, графика, интересный сеттинг, но фактическое ощущение от игры не соответствует тому что показано в трейлере