The Population Must Grow

While the premise of the game is fun, its optimization (or lack thereof) is abysmal, once the population reaches the level of 10+ millions, it becomes prone to crashes, hogs CPU and RAM, thus reaching the final achievements becomes nigh impossible, even with a fairly strong PC setup.

As the population increases, game starts to lag.

i would have left a review sooner but that would mean leaving the city and the population must grow

A good Game if you need a Tool to Stress Test your Computer. The game is not using the GPU, so everything is on the CPU and Ram, causing the Ram to get fuller and fuller. This goes so far, I not can use the Speed Feature in the Game, because it just allow me 1x because the Game need so much FPS. This is mostly because of the Dogs, who are no animated Sprites, it is a Model made out of 8 pictures who are then animated. All the animations made the game slow. If you could turn of the Dogs the game would run much betterbut like this ... My Computer just has a generation 10 i9-10980HK, 32 gb ddr4-3000 and a RTX3080 with 16 gb of vram in a alienware laptop, but the game use between 20 and 28 gb of my ram abd about 70% of my cpu, even with "-vulcan" in the start options the GPU is just used between 5 and 10%. The Game would be ok if it work like other clickers like cookie clicker but this is just stupid and I'm just on 300 million dogs and the foal for the last achivement are 7 billion.

"The Population Must Grow" is certainly a huge waste of time. Don't think about this as a game, it's more like a CPU stress tester with game-like elements. This is at face value a really badly done ripoff of games like Sapiens or Dwarf Fortress but incredibly shallow. A declarative builder, you give an instruction to your population to build something (housing, whatever) and they rush off and build it for you, leaving you to worry about higher level decisions like overall food and population. The problem with this one is that it's incredibly shallow because the purpose was not to be a game that you play, rather an software experiment to test your CPU limits... but it's not proper benchmark software either. So, useless as a game, useless as a benchmark... why does this even exist at all? The "game" here is of a pretty low technical standard. The implementation is basic minimum effort stuff, more like a weekend project rather than a serious, professionally made product... and it's bad even compared to most amateur made games. An experimental piece... and the experiment is "Can I spend $100 on Steam Direct and then call myself a game dev?" While that $100 spend on Steam Direct probably made the developers feel good about themselves, we have to ask why this kind of thing is good for gamers. It isn't. In terms of visuals, this features really godawful MS-Paint tier "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. The deplorably bad visuals here come across as an insult to gamers. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, the "free" price tag didn't help. This peaked at a handful of players and then immediately cratered. With a peak count of less than 50 gamers (out of over 130 million gamers and over 40 million daily logons), it’s safe to say the PC gaming community has collectively decided to ignore this, probably because of the reasons supplied in this review. Given that this free game won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library? Not on a bet. This might be "free", but I still feel like I got ripped off.

Fun enough, a little too basic I think. Within a couple of hours I was able to scale to the point of 10 million. I encountered an issue where the pathfinding efficiency of the game started to have issues and all of the buildings in my blocks weren't getting placed. The simplicity of visual modding / retexturing is nice.

Got 80 / 100 Achievements because this game eats ur RAM as hell. Got 63GB and it kills my pc.

It's the massive map that is appealing. It scratches an itch. It's simple, but still plenty of room to be more efficient in how you layout your grid and order you proceed. The graphics are super blah, but they're all PNG files so you can replace them if you want. I changed mine to orange and blue dogs, donuts instead of potatoes, hexagons for fields, red cubes with windows for houses, power stars instead of trees, and grey metal paths. I just wish I could change the green background and font.

borderline dog slavery simulator there is no joy to be found in life for these dogs

peak :3 would be nice to have something like hashlife algorithm so we have trillions without lag