Synergy

the art is very nice, it's a bit dry but i'm okay with low key environmental grower, exploring plants and the resources you can get from them. i got it on a sale so im not mad about it, but you shouldnt be able to soft lock two hours into a tutorial. as others have said the ingame information is woefully lacking and confusing. the complexity of it means finding out how to do certain things just are not available. the dev tutorials are im sorry to say very unhelpful. low recommend on a deep discount if it interests you, but i think the frustrations and clear incomplete-ness of the game really sour the experience and explain a lot about it's lack of engagement. check out tera nil instead.

I really enjoy city builders, stuff like Anno, Factorio, Civilization, Stellaris, Timberborn, and more, and thought I'd really like Synergy too, but somehow the game just doesn't scratch the itch. 30 hours in and I've maybe played 4 games and none of them have felt satisfying. Something about the pacing, progression, everything just feels like a slog. Upgrades don't feel all that rewarding. I feel like I devote all my time to ensuring my people have enough water, and then needing to tediously reallocate them during the dry season when they can't work the pumps. The problem is absolutely everything takes water, so one wrong move - like letting some people make medicine or building materials during the dry spell - and you'll end up with too little water and your people will get sick or worse. Before a settlement ever gets satisfyingly large the game punishes you with size problems, wants you to split to a new settlement, and there aren't many good habitable areas anywhere on the map that don't come with their own problems - problems you can't really do much about. A good survival/builder game like this should have a progression arc that goes from "surviving" to "thriving" but with Synergy I can't help but feel like I'm spending the whole time "managing decline" and as my settlements grow they just feel worse off and no amount of careful planning or managed scaling seems to make that go away. I think part of what the game needs is a whole additional set of a meta upgrades available to buildings. Like a way where I can further make my buildings more efficient, like 10/15/20/25% more food, more water, etc. The game already does provide many ways to do this, like upgrade paths to allow you to use dirty water for manufacturing instead of clean water, or more efficient crops, or careful building placement, but it just doesn't have enough of them. Synergy was a good idea on paper but feels like the game loop never really got where they wanted it and disappointingly it doesn't seem like it's gotten much love since release a year ago.

Genuinely one of the most frustrating and unfun games I have ever played in my life. In something like Rimworld, I care about my colonists, and try to make them happy and safe. In this, I actively *hate* my colonists and colony. The more people you have, the worse things get and I don't think you can't stop the colony growth. Some things are covered in the tutorial but there's a lot of non-intuitive stuff you will struggle with until you figure out what the stupid design actually is, because the encyclopedia is just for plants and there isn't a wiki online to search. I think I've made it mostly to the end, I'm at the 'after the storm' segment, but who knows? There's no way to tell in the game and that info doesn't exist online and I'm too emotionally exhausted from playing this garbage. I really thought I could push through it and I feel really bad for giving up like this, but it's actually really affecting my mental health trying to beat this. Don't be fooled by the cool aesthetic, this game is either boring or frustrating and stressful 90% of the time.

I don't know why but anytime I boot it up it's just so uninteresting I end up playing for 10-15 mins at a time or just start to afk. I get too sleepy and just keep putting it off. Just not for me I guess.

i like graphic, i like concept, its hase deep systems but you have a resource game with no resource indicators, no overlays no summaries, book of knowledge without some knowledge, bad user interface but try it

The game itself is okay but the logistics(a critical part of most city builders!) are horribly broken. Villages will prioritize the southermost warehouse instead of closest and will spend all their time carrying random junk to that specific warehouse until it fills up, leaving actual important supply work never done. It's a great shame such a critical issue is left untouched in a supposedly released project.

The game has fairly interesting and unique mechanics but also has a somewhat bugged resource delivery system, causing you to fail even if you do things properly and as expected. And I feel the devs have moved on already. So, I cannot recommend the game to others in its current state.

This game is rather tragic. It has some ideas that are extremely cool to see in a [community] builder. It takes the interaction between your community and the environment seriously in a way that other games don't. Environmentalism is quite so shallow as other games (think Terra Nil)---it says real things about the topic. I played through two runs and came away thinking "That was very cool, but also very clunky." I decided I would wait for a patch or two to address some of the problems the other reviewers have described, logistics being the most glaring of those problems. This ultimately leads to the binary Up/Down review (and why I held off on writing one for so long): The game has been abandonned. I really wish this game got just a small amount of additional love post 1.0. It looked hopeful for a brief period with 1.1 and 1.2, but these failed to address some of the core issues and the game hasn't seen an update since.

Played a few maps, got about 3/4ths of the way through the sphere grid tech tree, enjoyed the Moebius inspired art direction. Giving it a thumbs down because there's not much to keep me playing. Very little replayability or different challenges to adapt to. It's all sort of there and never really hits its stride for a citybuilder.

„Sorry, aber ich finde es grafisch einfach gar nicht ansprechend, da geht mir das Herz nicht bei auf.“