I'm afraid that at this point in time, I cannot recommend the game in its current state. The premise is a sound one - you play as a colony of mice, ruled by an upper class depicted as cats. While the cat-mice dichotomy isn't an original idea what with it appearing in several great literary works, it is a stellar metaphor in more ways than one: Not only are the cats fattening themselves off the hard work of your fellow micelings - they are clearly predating on the weaker lower class mice, making a political statement that has held true for not only this time period, but others, as well. This also brings forth the idea that, surely, someday you shall break free from the chains, through the ingenuity of your mice people, parroting cartoons and movies alike. This is also shown in many ways through the game's mechanics as well - your mice have a rebellion stat to them, and the cats will not accept refined goods from your colony as payment, forcing you to not go overboard with industrialisation, lest you find yourself unable to pay your taxes, bringing misery and suffering upon your fellow micelings. All this, is brilliant game design, and I commend the developers for having created a game like this.
Unfortunately, this game has a major letdown right now, and is the main reason why this review is a negative one: There is seemingly no way of breaking the chains from your feline overlords. While I am certain this is planned to be something they want to implement down the line, the fact that this is missing means that any colony that attempts to grow to a certain size, or survives more than a year, will inevitably reach a point where there is simply no way of dealing with your overlords. The fact that everything about the game, its design, the entire concept of it, all points towards this, is why I simply cannot recommend the game at this point in time. It also shows that this is something they can't just go about doing like what the later Tropico games did, where they handwaved the independence from the crown by paying a large sum of cash. The game is doing its darndest to make sure that you know that one day, you'll be free from those cats. But it just isn't in the game yet.
In some ways, maybe this is a bigger stumble than the lack of such a mechanic - the rest of the game has built this up so much that, if and when they do implement it, people may find themselves sorely disappointed if it does not match the way the game has built up to this. As such, my current recommendation is this: Do keep an eye out for this game if you enjoy a game that, to me, seems to want to mix Tropico with that of Timberborn and similar games. Keep it in your wishlist and see it grow. But right now, I cannot recommend buying it and playing it, because you will become attached to these mice and the colony you have worked so hard to build up together, and you will know that, no matter what you do, you cannot help them at this point in time.
