Revival: Recolonization

There are so many bad decisions with this game. It's very obtuse and nothing about it is intuitive. The tutorial tells you to attack the robots around as if that's a good idea, but it's actually the opposite of what you should do. You'll lose units, get slim rewards, and if you do beat one group of robots, the other robots around are automatically beefed up and more hostile, which you can't do anything about with your group cap of 6 weak units (which it doesn't tell you about ahead of time). The robots can have 9 strong units in a group, but not you. None of the AI go after the robots because they know it's a bad idea, yet the tutorial tells you to be dumb. Combat is boring and the terrain of it is always weighted against you. You get attacked, and there's always explosive canisters around your unit placements, meanwhile when you attack them, there's explosive canisters around your unit placements, and they have walls. Why are there NEVER explosive canisters on the enemy placements and only on you? If clans have decided that they don't like you and keep attacking you, in any other game, you would want to go take them over or destroy them. Well, you can't destroy them. At best you can loot them and they stay alive. As far as taking them over goes, that's a horrible idea in Revival: Recolonization. So, if you force assimilate them, you must pick to take their clan and build a town somewhere in their region, like you did with your first clan/town. That's fine, but once you do build that new town, you'll see that town still has the clan's attitude towards you. Your first clan/town doesn't have this. If the attitude is too low, you're told the town is at risk of joining an enemy player. So even though it's your town, you are still at the whims of the hostile clan you already beat. And if that wasn't dumb enough, you would think that since that clan is still occupying your town, and you had to build in their region, that the native terrain you would need for this new town would be based on that clan. WRONG! It's based on your starting clan/town! So now you need to run shamans from your starting town to your new town to make the terrain match your starting terrain! DUMB! The game wants you to be peacekeeper against its own advice, against your objectives, against fun, against everything.

On paper this game should be an underrated gem with many interesting and cool ideas and features but in execution the game just mishandles nearly everything. Despite obvious comparisons to Civ, the devs were clearly inspired by Amplitudes' Endless Legends with various systems such as districts, FIDS, map regions, and unit upgrades & progression lifted directly from EL; the strength of this game rests largely in how closely it emulates Endless Legend' systems that it masks the rest of the game's incoherent design. The biggest problem is few of your choices fail to feel meaningful. Putting down districts increases yields but none of it seems weighty. Upgrading units with new tech should feel good but when putting them into action they feel as weak as your starter units. Diplomacy and minor faction interactions don't feel significant and even when you think you're engaging in some diplomacy it's so rare because the currency needed for diplomacy is always in short supply. All of this is exacerbated when you consider the AI plays a completely different game than you do. They are seemingly able to expand, woo minor factions, terraform, engage in trade, acquire resources without issue. I want to play the game [i]they're[/i] playing. A lot of things in this game just feel like half-formed ideas thrown in for no good reason. It's clear the devs wanted to incorporate the best ideas from other 4x games such as the aforementioned Endless Legend and Alpha Centauri, but like an over-eager chef, they threw all the ingredients into the pot without a cohesive idea of how they fit together. What's frustrating about Revival: Recolonization is that the game gets in its own way. Some of the game's mechanics seem to exist simply for the sake of frustrating the human player. The game is rife with systems locked behind other systems. City development peters out once your city grows sufficiently which means unless you're building military units your city just sits there. Clearing out ruins, this game's version of Civ's barbarian camps, become increasingly more difficult to the point that hostile robots will outscale your units very quickly. Then there other incomprehensible choices. Even something as simple as repairing a damaged tile make no sense. Do you use a worker? a shaman? A city menu? No — not as far as I can tell. Then there's combat, units are stacked into armies and if you decide to fight manually, the map pulls back somewhat to reveal a battlefield comprising of your units and the enemy's units. However, I found myself autoresolving most times as fighting manually was neither satisfying nor seemingly fair as enemy units one-shot my units (despite the fact that the autoresolve gave me an easy victory). Assuming the devs haven't moved on, I hope the devs take a long, hard look at Revival and make the decision to trim away a lot of the cruft and fat that bogs this game down into a slog instead of a satisfying 4x game. Revival: Recolonization is a game that needs a fundamental rework from the bottom up. It needs better progression, better combat, better pacing, better diplomacy, just ... better everything and the only way to achieve that is to go back to the drawing board. Get rid of the un-fun mechanics and polish the ones that work well enough now. There's a semblance of a good game in here somewhere but it's completely unrealized in its current state. Revival's issues are too fundamental, too foundational, to be fixed with a minor update or piecemeal patch. I hope the devs acquire the willingness to re-think their game and give it the love and attention it needs to shine because right now there are too many other 4x games out there that are far more worthy of one's time than Revival: Recolonization.

This game feels like it isn't finished yet. The tutorial and encyclopedia are missing key information, as are many of the in-game error messages. Buttons that would normally do something will be grayed out with no explanation; despite having eight city tiles along the coast, I can't build a port tile because "no eligible tiles are available"? Why not? What do I need to do to build a port? There is zero information about that. The AI is also inscrutable. Other factions don't communicate with you except through trade proposals. I'll trade you peace for peace. Oh, wait, I'm declaring war on you for no reason whatsoever! Fun! Oh, now you want peace after a single turn of war? Okay. There is just too much in this Alpha Centauri clone that doesn't make any sense and isn't explained anywhere in the documentation. It also suffers from the same afflictions that too many 4X games have fallen prey to while trying to be the next Civilization/Orion clone. You have edicts, ethics, policies, approaches, philosophies, herpes, Xerxes... enough already! It's a shame that all the effort went into the graphics and not the gameplay.

I got this game for one sentimental reason: my son was born on its release date, 11-Apr 2024. It’s a mix of Civ V and Endless Legend, with a nice story. The game is full of great ideas: a post-apocalyptic world, clans with unique traits, customizable armies, and a dynamic climate system. When it works, it’s fantastic, but unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Diplomacy and combat can be unpredictable or frustrating, and the UI is clunky. That said, the game has improved a lot since release, and it’s clear the developers poured their heart into it. It’s not perfect, but for patient 4X fans, it’s a unique, thoughtful experience ... and for me, it will always carry a little extra meaning. Tip: The Steam achievements are very easy to get and can all be earned in a single campaign. I found them useful as a tutorial! By the time you’ve unlocked them all, you’ll have a solid understanding of every core mechanic in the game. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3621288551 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3616516788 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3617589619 Unlocked all achievements!

I regret buying this game. So many poor game design decisions. Some that are fresh in my mind are as follows. 1. Movement point allowance and remaining not easily visible when selecting a unit. 2. Double right clicking to move. 3. Auto resolve against a weak neutral stack just killed my emissary. I regret spending money on this.

Spent a lot of time trying to like this game, but it constantly left me wanting to push through turns to get to the "exciting" part...which never came.

[b]Civilization from Temu | KAMGUSTA's MINI REVIEW[/b] When we talk about 4X games, you have to compete with the big boys: "Civilizations", "Endless Legend" / "Humankind" and "Age of Wonders". Then we have some more specialized ones like the historical "Old World" and the quick and fun "Hexarchy", which I love. Revival brings to the table a post-apocalyptic world with unique clans and adds a climate manipulation / terraforming mechanic. Not enough. UI is clunky and confusing, AI cheats, RNG is pervasive, and so on. Game feels unpolished and it's simply unfun. [b]Best played with keyboard & mouse Recommended buy price: 3$ Score: 5/10[/b]

Had promise, but in the end failed to deliver. Great concept in general, different take on 4X. Still needs polish, but no update in a long time, most likely abandoned, negative review.

This was part of a Humble Bundle so its weaknesses are not a major loss - I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. Unlike a lot of people who left a positive review after <2 hours of play *cough*, I gave this a good go. The graphics, music and the base premise (AI destroys the Earth and you try to rebuild it centuries later, the AI acting as an NPC) are all strong. There are a lot of good ideas here too - the climate system and clan traits to name but two. The problem is, all those ideas and game mechanics simply do not work when you put them together. I can overlook a few poor English localisations and less than perfect UI (including selecting and moving units, which are pretty core for this genre), but the game cannot possibly have been extensively playtested in its current form (this is the full release and not an EA build). For example, the clan system means other factions can entice regions to change sides (and your actions and broken promises can play a role too). Sounds good. Then you have a region that is completely surrounded by other regions you control flip. You take control of it again, and it flips to a second rival faction the next turn because you invaded it. It just makes no sense, as well as not being remotely fun or interesting, particularly when the movement system can make moving armies highly problematic. The victory system is also an issue - you are vying for a point with a different goal every 50 turns. Unfortunately, through no fault of your own, winning a point may be impossible - perhaps due to the location of a particular resource, or the way you played the game (militarily or tactically). Again, it's an idea that sounds potentially interesting but it plays horribly. Based on this, I could not recommend this game - instead just buy Endless Legend or one of the host of other 4X games that won't make you shout WTF at your monitor every few minutes.

no way to get a fair game here. No matter how well you do the Ai players take your cities out from under you with their loyalty points that never drop while your in a constant struggle to keep what little you have. Not worth it. save yourself the headache and skip this one.