4.3 hours played
Written 2 years ago
Fun at first...
But early survival elements become a chore. Namely queuing things such as water at a purification building in a RTS like fashion with a max of 5 queue-able items, when colony sims nowadays have had the standard of 'Make until X', 'Make X', or 'make indefinitely' options. In the beginning it's fine, but when you get 20 to 30 survivors you could lose focus on this and then you have to hurry up and queue a bunch of water.
Even with that issue though, It's pretty easy survival wise. You would think that one would be concerned about survivalists offing themselves because they would be the most valuable asset to your survival. But you can completely ignore this. Assuming its happiness related, it still seems arbitrary even after creating and upgrading buildings that raise happiness, but since finding another survivor or two is almost a daily occurrence you could still steamroll your way to the games current endgame environment. The infected aren't very threatening in their current state and serve more as an annoyance than a dreadful encounter. Even if they do manage to down one of my guys, it is of little consequence.
The game itself has a pleasing aesthetic, but the GUI needs work graphically, and the pop-up for killing every infected is not needed. In the very least the noise is annoying. I also didn't notice, but was there even an auto-save feature? I'm pretty sure I manually saved since I saw no indication of one present.
Also very confused with how the AI handles its own livelihood. The map would be just large enough that going to, collecting, and returning supplies to where the survivors would begin to take hunger damage because they aren't taking a break from this chore. It's negligible damage, but the animation depicted would make you think they are bleeding out. However, it would be better if they stopped and took a break to eat a ration or something.
I saw the word potential used a couple times, but I'm not really seeing it yet since this is a 1.0 release. Do I hope it gets much much better? Absolutely. The world can always use more survival colony sims. Even with the low price, the way the game is now and what the future plans section indicate is to come, it would need to show much more.
Overall, It's a $6 game that I spent 4 hours on. I spend more on a coffee/hour rate so its nothing to be mad about. I hope to put in a few more hours but that will be about it for me until an update drops since there is a couple things I want to check out still.