I fell in love with this game, because it literally contains 3 different genres in one: tower defence, city building and open-world adventure. This cocktail makes me addicted because of the constant desire to discover what surrounds my base. Though the more you play the harder it becomes to hold a defence. That's exactly what motivates me to progress faster to find new resources to build stronger walls, new units etc.
Here you get no explanation more than how to build walls, towers and how to upgrade the base and after this short tutorial you must find out about everything that new mounts do or what hermits can build.

However after completing the main campaign there are plenty of DLCs available. My favourite are with vikings and with Greece because you can personally stand up for yourself with different artifacts. The Dead Lands are my least favourite but have a depressive vibe with a murderous music and appearance of local people which suffer like never before, but in the end clearing all levels has made me a bit happier and left me with a feeling of a bright future for this deceased world. Instead of it the first two expansions that were mentioned are more positive and made me dive into the local atmosphere of vikings or greek mythology by adding unique aggressive units to make player play activer than before or by adding bosses which are pouring in local prophecy perfectly. Overall the core gameplay is the same but each one has an exclusive highlight or a thing that will stay in your memory.

The graphics and the soundtrack are incredible. As I said every story has their own banger moments and music is a part of it. Nevertheless the whole design is remarkable and unique. Music part helps to feel these worlds better and it's just good to listen to them in a free time.

It's worth playing, otherwise I wouldn't have played it for 100 hours if it wasn't that great.

The third iteration of essentially the same game. Still obtuse and mostly the same fairly-bland-but-enjoyable core loop.

...But this version has an utterly unacceptable winter mechanic that stops all income, where the "gameplay" consists of just waiting around for a literal 45 minutes before you can make another decision. There's no reason this should've ever made it into the game, especially when it's their 3rd revision of the idea!

cozy :)