I have played over ten hours in this game now, half in sandbox mode and half completing the first six story missions, so I think I can finally give it a fair review.
tl;dr This is a very interesting and fun city builder/tower defense game with a unique concept and tons of potential that is worthy of your time. The developer is still active and updating the game, and I have every hope that he will eventually turn it into something great.
Why is the concept so unique? For one thing, the city that you build looks and functions like a network diagram! The buildings all have inputs and outputs that are connected to each other like nodes in a flowchart. People, energy, and resources travel down the connections like packets in a network. I have never seen any other game quite like it, except maybe for the Creeper World series (but those games are pure tower defense and do not have a population to manage the way this game does).
What makes this work so elegantly is the way the buildings change their function depending on what inputs they are given. There are only nine buildings -- house, storage, field, mill, workshop, furnace, altar, tower, distributor -- but each one can be configured to perform different tasks. For example, the house is normally where your dwarves live, and you can connect a full house to an empty house to encourage them to reproduce. However if you instead connect a chicken to the input of an empty house, it turns the house into a chicken coop full of egg laying chickens! This is a wonderful innovation as compared with the typical city builder where you need a different type of building for every resource.
The other buildings work the same way. Connect logs to the input of a generic "workshop" to turn it into a sawmill producing wood planks. Disconnect the logs and plug in iron ingots instead, and the sawmill turns into a smithy that produces axes. You can also feed two different raw materials into a workshop and it will combine them to make all sorts of interesting products. I have discovered dozens of crafting recipes just by experimenting with the inputs, and I don't think I have found even half of them yet. Add a mill and a furnace into the mix, and you have a production chain that could potentially create hundreds of different products.
Anything you discover or unlock in sandbox mode stays unlocked in story and endless modes, which is great for people who just want to experiment with different production setups without the pressure of enemy attacks. The tower defense aspect of the game is fun when you are ready for it, especially when you realize that the towers can change their function depending on their inputs, just like all the other buildings. Plug spears into one tower to make it attack enemies at long range and apply a bleed effect. Plug axes into another tower to have it sling axes at close range that deal massive damage. You can even craft bombs that will turn your towers into devastating cannons!
While I do think the game is well worth playing in its current state, it is the work of a solo developer and as such is still a little rough around the edges. I have a few suggestions for improvement:
1) It can be difficult to tell where the bottlenecks in production are occurring, especially in a complex production chain that involves multiple buildings. Right now the entire building flashes red if its inputs are not connected, however I would find it more useful if a specific input was flashing when the building was waiting on it for more than two seconds. For example, if I see a building where the energy input is constantly flashing, I know I need to provide it with more energy; conversely if the material input is flashing I know it needs more raw materials.
2) Certain basic materials such as wood, stone, and iron are designated as "global storage" which allows those specific materials to be sourced from global inventory anywhere on the map, without the need to be connected to a nearby extraction point. This is a very useful feature, however I would like to see the list of global storage materials expanded a bit. For example, I really think that coal should be available via global storage since it is an important resource in several crafting recipes and can also be used as fuel. It would also be nice if a few of the most important ammo types, like axes and bombs, could be drawn from global storage instead of needing to be produced near the towers. That would help to alleviate the problem I will describe in point #3.
3) The maps are large and mostly open with very few natural barriers or chokepoints, and enemy waves can appear from almost any direction. This makes it difficult to prepare an adequate defense, since most towers have a short firing range and there is no way to predict the path that the enemies will follow. It would be very helpful if some marker, maybe a simple dotted line, would appear on the map thirty seconds before the next wave appears, showing the approximate route they will take. That would give time to quickly build a few towers along the attack route, and it also explains why it would be helpful to keep ammo in global storage, since these quickly constructed towers need to be supplied with ammo and there may not be time to construct ammo production facilities near the towers.
4) A minor point, but the mill and the furnace are quite a bit larger than the other buildings which sometimes makes it difficult to place them on the map, especially if they need to be placed in the middle of a production chain with several other buildings. It would be nice if they could be made a little smaller.
Whether or not the developer implements these suggestions, the game still has an amazing core concept and quite a lot of depth already. I very much enjoyed the 10+ hours I have spent so far and I plan on spending more time in endless mode. I really hope more people will discover the game and give it a chance so the developer will have motivation to continue working on it.
UPDATE:
Over the past two weeks, the developer has fixed nearly all of the issues that I outlined in my suggestions for improvement. I have since completed story mode and progressed deep into the endless mode as well. While there is still a lot that could be added, should the developer feel inclined, the game is completely playable in its current state and worthy of a recommendation. I have gotten over 20 hours out of the game so far and I am very satisfied with my experience overall.
