Mini Settlers

Abandoned by the devs, and the gameplay itself is largely a waiting simulator. Even at max speed, progress drags.

Минималистичный градостроитель, который скорее больше паззл. Во-первых, это игра о производственных цепочках. Тут не так важна радость жителей, за их здоровьем и криминалом не надо следить, нет бюджета - просто набор ресурсов, из которых можно получать всё более сложные предметы или товары, которые нужны либо жителям для увеличения довольства, либо последующим цепочкам. Выглядит игра просто, музыкальная тема успеет надоесть за 5 минут, звуковое оформление зданий базовое и не различается по типу - но это одна из тех игр, в которые просто залипаешь, чтобы улучшить результат, оптимизировать производство, закрыть очередную цель итд. У игры есть демо, пробуйте сами, мне лично понравилось и засосало.

Got the game in Humble bundle, so not free but very discounted. 13€ is way too much for what it is. Thought it's a minimalistic colony/logistic sim. That it is, somewhat. It needs a lot of QoL updates and polish. - Starts with something simple like rotating a building is "R", closing the build menu completely is "E"... - Lumberjacks remove trees from the map, foresters plant new ones. Their build space and area of effect are so badly overlapping that you waste half of both no matter how you place them, forester plants faster than they can get cut but not fast enough to support 2 lumberjacks. Meaning they just drain your water for a while to plant trees that will not be cut. There is no warning that you reduce production rates if you build roads on production tiles. It’s logical that you do but you get no info by how much unless you check the building after placing the road. Production rates are only given in production time e.g. 2x Tools in 15s makes optimising not that intuitive. There is a Production/Demand statistic, which allowed me to solve every level by just checking if i overproduce and then spam storage lots near the buildings demanding the resource. You get a bit of a traffic jam early and loose resources but there are infinite anyways. There is no copy/paste or something like blueprints. Meaning you have to setup the same system every time again. More frustrating here: the first more complex production line is furniture, which you do not need after reaching the next population tier. The production values are also so misaligned that one furniture factory can supply two tier 1 villages. The fun part is there is no reason for that. There isn't a fail condition, at least not one that I saw; if you fail to supply you just waste time. So you could just supply one village with the resource until you can level it up and then supply the other village. After that the production line is useless. You can repurpose the raw resources for the next tier goods but depending on your layout you have to rip up a lot of infrastructure and the rates are wrong anyway. The pacing is also terrible. You need to unlock the buildings by reaching a certain population amount. Meaning you just spend the first 30 seconds of every level setting up the same water/food/village setup and then wait 5 minutes for the population to reach 100 so you get storage and highways. Every next pop tier then just takes longer to wait like some idle web game that wants you to buy premium to speed up. But there is no speed up. Max game speed is 3x. The last game before I uninstalled I just sat there 10 minutes waiting for the population to grow after i set up the production in 5 minutes. It wasn’t even half way there. There is no way to speed it up, as the houses have a set consumption rate and the map did not supply enough water to just build another village. The "Campaign" goals also always seem to be pop goals, that means you have to idle for the level to finish. One of the early missions has a Monument you need to build. That just takes the same resources as your village so they just slow each other down until it is build. You would think the solution is here to just increase production to speed things up. but you can't. One of the base resources is water and there is not enough to scale things even if you have the space. The only bug I encountered was a visual glitch of a road that did not disappear after bulldozing it.

I have tried to play the game a couple times and each time I run into a different problem. 1. I find the roads kind of unintuitive, it doesnt really make sense to have a truck that only moves on a tiny section of road, and although it works just feels off functionally. 2. Highways are even worse because they have a weird length requirement, which often makes you have to plan/rebuild your stuff or make spaggetti style highways. 3. What am I doing this for? The lack of any type of story or reason for playing the game makes the game feel hollow. Even a generic Build the rocket, like in factorio gives you an obscure goal to work towards, all I get here is to move on to the next level, which is just more of the same. 4. I dont like that your gated into starting with water and food, and then having to wait for population, it further slows the progression and makes you have to stop and wait, or stop and check. "Do I have enough population for this building yet? TL;DR - For a logistics game the logistics are awkward and not smooth in any way shape or form.

The most common achievement for this game, is finishing the tutorial. Which I did do. That said.... only around 60% of players did this. That means 40% of people bought this game and didn't even finish the tutorial. That should go somewhere far enough to tell you how I feel about this game... it's soulless. It's like a city builder, without the city or the builder. It's just waiting on menus and dots. You can sorta build.... But there's no real freedom in it. Just weird interfaces. Finally... the tutorial is bad. It tells you to build buildings.... but to work out how to do that, there are videos. That sounds fine, right? The videos are a tiny button that I completely overlooked while doing the whole tutorial through guess work. I didn't even realise it was a video for the tutorial. The game never told me. So I guess the tutorial is difficult or something? Might be why 40% of players didn't finish it. I didn't give this game much time, because I don't want to. The developers have abandoned it. There's a lot of people talking about that on it's steam discussions and in other reviews. If the developers won't give this game the time of day.. why should the players? Thanks for reading or skipping to the end. Have a lovely day.

Mini Settlers is a minimalist colony sim with logistics management as its main focus. If you are a fan of those genres, it's pretty fun. However, the game could use some quality-of-life improvements, extra recipes, and some bug fixes to better improve the experience.

It started off tough for me as a newbie to the genre, but got easier as I slowly learned to basically grid everything in multiples. Fun little game, but it's a lot of waiting and small tweaks to get builds just right. If you're fine with that, go for it. It really grew on me.

Is this a bad game? Not really. But not a good game either. It's fun to figure out the game. But once you do that there is nothing to the game. Most of the time it's just waiting for pop to get new upgrades. Then wait A LOT MORE to get higher pops so I can get the 3 star on campaign. I can't even imagine the amount of time I would have to wait for 25k pop. Good part about it is that: It's too easy. It's so easy in fact. There is no punishment. It's really chill and I think it's the best part about it. If you're new to automation games I think this game will ease you up to the genre. That's what I thought game is trying to achieve. 6/10 decent enough for what it's doing.