Recent reviews by Foreskin Gamer

I would give a mixed review if I could, but it does do some things really well. The game works great if you want to experience the unrivaled satisfaction of building up from absolutely nothing into something great, preferably by fighting for it.

Good:
- The combat system is quite detailed, there's a lot to think about and analyze in optimizing your unit of soldiers.
- Advancement feels more satisfying than it has felt anywhere else I've played. It is hard to understate this.
- The game does its best in making failure your friend, at least combat wise. Getting beaten up increases your toughness. Losing limbs gives an opportunity to replace the limbs with robotic limbs instead.
- Lets you figure out how to solve your problems. No hand holding. Makes you feel smart when you figure out tactics that make your life easier.

Bad:
- The AI is quite clunky.
- Peaceful/positive interactions with the world are limited.
- The world isn't necessarily living and breathing to the extent you'd think based on the way the game is advertised.
- The world is not internally consistent.

The economy of this world consists mostly of people who take from others and people who prevent others from taking from others. Nature consists mostly of predators. Most people you meet are bandits and warriors. Any settlement you build gets attacked by suicidal idiots several times a day, regardless of the defenses. Settlements that spend their time producing anything are far and few between.

Breaks my immersion in the world completely, because this is completely unsustainable. There's like at least a hundred dust bandits in the border zone. Every hundred meters there's a camp. They don't produce anything. Who feeds them? Who builds their gear? There's barely anything to rob in the border zone.

This game is infuriating to play. Not the relaxing experience it is advertised as.

If you like board games like terraforming mars and castles of mad king ludwig, you'll love to play this in multiplayer. It has a very similar feel, but it rarely stops to a grinding halt. Alternatively, if you like playing islanders, this game in singleplayer has a similar feel to it.

In singleplayer it is a chill experience with just enough challenge and stuff to think about to keep you going, building a cool region. Unlike in Islanders, I never get the feeling that I'm getting punished for not thinking several buildings ahead, due to both demolitions and overall game design. I can go brains off a little bit without ruining the benefits I get from a particular building in an area irreversably.

In multiplayer there's constant paranoia about giving your opponent easy points, while also eyeing at the opportunities others are handing out by making buildings. You sometimes purposefully place buildings in places just to ruin the chances of someone else merging buildings for the bonuses.

I think a lot of the negative reviews are very lazy. This game should have a similar review ratio as islanders. This game is similar in quality, and it's in early access.

EDIT: The game doesn't give out demolitions essentially for free anymore. This has shifted the gameplay to be significantly more planning heavy. The game does accommodate this with pins, that allow you to mark tiles and areas so you remember what things you've planned to do. I definitely still enjoy the game, but the playstyle is quite different than it was initially. You're better off planning how you build your whole settlement before building your first building.

The game is also significantly more complex and deep than it was when I initially made the review.

This game feels like it is ten years older than it is, due to just plain out being unfinished.
- Crashing at an exact moment in a cutscene that I needed to fix by going into the game files, following a guide from the internet.
- Lack of basic quality of life stuff, such as not knowing where overwatch is active and where it isn't. Or even knowing what technologies do. Just a complete lack of transparency.
- The whole launcher change others have mentioned. To even reach mods that would fix these quite basic problems I need to download a launcher from the internet now, because the 2k launcher doesn't let me play with basic quality of life mods.

I should have taken the warnings more seriously. I thought I could get the game to a playable condition in half an hour, but I have wasted several hours trying to fix the game (A lot of my time in the game is from leaving it on accidentally over night). I regret not pirating the game; The company shouldn't get any money for messing up a game like this.

All of this aside it does seem like a cool game. Shame on the corporation for shafting the effort the devs put on the game.

EDIT: I had a friend download me about 50 basic quality of life mods to make the functional and transparent. The amount of fixing the community has had to do is insane.

This game isn't finished or polished at all. Simcity 4 is more finished than this, and that game has certain mods that you need to install in order for the game to function properly. Primarily a mod that makes rich citizens actually work hi-tech jobs.

I'm not saying this is a bad game, but it is unfinished. A bit lazy of a port of the mobile version of the game.

Here's some pretty glaring marks of bad design.
- Public transit is not actually simulated, and any parts that are, don't really work. It primarily just provides a modifier that reduces car traffic.
- Elevated railway can't handle height differences. It plain out can't move up or down follow terrain. (This one thing made me review the game negatively. This should be the transport method that works particularly well in uneven terrain.)
- Controls are a bit wonky.
- The text looks weird. Sometimes it just isn't readable.
- There's a region system that allows cities to interact with each other. It does not work online.

The game is enjoyable outside of the glaring problems, but the problems really piss me off. I would have given a neutral review if it was possible.

Crashed three times in 2 hours.

The UI, the camera and the visual design combine into a monstrosity that looks and feels like a free software from 2006. Even just placing tiles is extremely tedious, because the area you need to hover your mouse over feels completely divorced from where the tile is going to be placed. I wouldn't have cared about the ugliness if it wasn't for the difficulty of use. This just isn't a finished product, despite the creators claiming it is.

If you like to build in minecraft creative mode, this game is for you. Otherwise, it isn't. Essentially the same thing, but more tailored to make it easier to build urban environments with some tools to help reduce some of the tedious parts of building stuff, while providing players the ability to make their own items into the game.

The game also gives you the ability to share items and buildings you've made in steam workshop. Compared to the size of the playerbase, there's a lot of stuff there, partially because adding stuff to the workshop is easy in this game. The game doesn't really have water outside of the coasts, but that hasn't stopped the community from building working fountains.

Coop is also fun and easy, if you have friends.

My primary complaint is that the roads and terrain are sometimes a bit wonky.

I played it once and forgot about it for a while. Then I tried to play it again, but with more effort. Didn't like it, here's why.

It's about as far from a relaxing game as could be. It feels like work. At the same time the game emphasizes a heavily competetive environment with global high scores and high complexity, but it also tries to sell itself off as something casual. Casually, I played it exactly once, and it's not ever going to interest me again to play as a casual game. Less casually, you have to learn by looking at a huge amount of different possible die faces and prepare a strategy around a bunch predictions.

The lack of transparency pisses me off. Many of your strategies are dependent on where your next die is put (the game has a dice which get adjacency bonuses), and the game doesn't give you agency to choose where your die is put, nor does it inform you about the order in which the dice are placed. So I quit two games because the die didn't go where I wanted it to go, because I tried to predict which place it would go and was wrong. Why would you add an adjacency re-roller without giving players agency on where to put the dice?

If you want to spend your time looking at all the possible die faces and calculating a good strategy, have fun. Go buy the game. If you're someone who wanted what was advertised, then maybe don't. It's an okay experience once to play through once, but that only lasts approximately 2 hours, so maybe you can get a refund out of it if you play through it quickly enough, but that's not fun either.

Unstable.
Crashes about 1/3 of the times I play the game.

Hard to approach.
The tutorial is all the resources you get to learn the game. While the tutorial is good, there's no way you're going to remember even half of the stuff it teaches you and learning by playing is not the way the way to go with the game. Online resources about the game are bad. The game lacks an in game guide of any sorts to provide guidance to your first playthrough. Or your second when you play the higher difficulties with plain out more mechanics to tackle, such as electricity.

Mediocre UI, bad public transit support.
Let's say you want to replace a bus stop with a tram stop.
You have unpause the game to let it deconstruct the building. Then pause it again. Then you have to try to jam in the new stop and rebuild a bunch paths and maybe roads related to the roads of the old bus stop. You have to manually assign the all the road parts and path parts separately to the construction office, which makes the roads, because the auto-search doesn't work. You may have to even pause and unpause to let it build some of the roads so you can assign new roads to the same construction office, because construction offices refuse to take responsibility of anything that isn't directly through a road connection (Every time you add a curve to a road or a new direction, it's considered a separate road). Then you have to go to every single bus line which went through the now tram stop, and add the stop the to the line. You have to manually look at every single bus line that you have to find the ones that once moved through the stop (Imagine this in late game, you may have like a hundred bus lines, this was a pain in the backside with ten).

Now think of this. The UI for making public transit lines, is not good compared to any public transit game that I've ever played, except maybe open ttd. Changing the order of stops is difficult and the easiest way is to remove the line and start again. The UI for sorting through your lines gets cluttered before finishing one city. This is just bad.

Bad loyalty system.
- Happiness doesn't matter. They'll still go low in loyalty. High happiness is earned by giving the people all the services they want. The services include: Culture, sports, food, meat, alcohol, electronics, church, clothes, electricity, water and maybe more. Apparently getting pretty much everything doesn't matter. I doubt people hopped to the other side in real life, because of simply disagreeing with marxist-leninism.
- Long term, the only solution are these weird high tech solutions: Television and radio. Monuments are such a weird unrealistic propaganda method (they're your way to buy time in terms of loyalty). Apparently there's no such as propaganda films, propaganda posters or propaganda speeches.

Let's be honest, Not a lot of soviets owned electronics anyway.

Fun, if you're willing to ignore the four points mentioned before. You're way more attached to cities, because it takes so much time and effort to build a real city. Another big point for the game is that the game design is made with pedestrians as first priority. Most city builders start from cars and everything else is an afterthought.

However, imagine this game has been in early access for four years. They said they'd be done in two. The game is still this unpolished.

EDIT: Not in Early Access anymore. All points still stand, except it's more approachable.