I tried giving it a go after many years, and it's as bad/meh as I remember.
I think it might be fine for somebody looking for a chill city builder, not so much for somebody wanting to optimize stuff/challenge themselves.
I know it has some interesting mechanics further (diplomacy/economics) in the game, but if the basics are so annoying, I don't see how I'd get there.
It's a mix of Settlers and Anno, and at this point, I think if you want to scratch that itch, it's either a better idea to play some old school Settlers I-IV, or Anno 1800 (or some less advanced entries in the Anno series).
1. There's no grid or building snapping. In a game where planning your production chain layout is the core gameplay, it only leads to frustration due to wasted space and inability to fit what you'd like, to a predefined space availability of the map chunks.
2. Game is awfully slow and the 150% speed does not help. If you know what you're doing, it turns into a waiting game.
3. Buildings require the road to be connected, but it's sometimes bugged or very UX-unclear, as of what you should do (how close/what angle the road should be) for it to count. Again, with no grid, very annoying -> look point 1.
4. Pathing to the resource site is unclear, and things like rocks can block access. You technically can destroy those rocks by placing a road there, but it's unintuitive because visually it's not a blocker for the workers.
5. Resource management / logistics is not snappy enough. Sometimes you have the resources for army recruitment, but game does not show you clear enough what exactly needs to happen for the soldiers to recruit. It's just slow and annoying.
6. It requires Ubisoft launcher log in. I did not have any technical issues with that so far, but it's a matter of time when that gets broken, and some users are reporting issues already.
7. It's a stylized graphics game from 2010, but you need to set your GPU to limit the FPS yourself. My 5070Ti got quite hot/loud because the game does not have a FPS cap in in-game settings. Overall the in-game settings are rather poor.
What's more, the campaign dialogues and portraits run in like, 5FPS. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a deliberate choice, but it's weird given everything else is running rather smooth.
8. Campaign is very childish. Could be fine if you wanted to introduce your child into RTS games, but other than that it's just intellectually insulting in that aspect. I don't mind the mood/humour in some earlier games, but this is a weird trend even in some of the new Blue Byte games, that the character design is like, designed for 7yo target audience. I don't need it to be mature or dire like Frostpunk, but cmon...
Art-direction on its own is fine (plus i don't think it dated that much), and music is also quite good.
