El Dorado: The Golden City Builder - Prologue

The game is a rather interesting production that reminds me a bit of Age of Empires, but set in the Mayan climate. What I truly appreciate is the ambiance and soundtrack, effectively transporting the player's thoughts to a land straight from South America. While I am intrigued by the project's fate and its full version release, unfortunately, I see elements that still require refinement. Now, let's discuss some pros and cons: PROS: + Excellent soundtrack + Aesthetic interface + Engaging gameplay + Simple yet appealing graphics + Autosave feature CONS: - Quest descriptions are not always intuitive - Some buildings are unlocked before they have any practical use - It can be annoying that roads are not always properly connected to buildings - The tutorial should be more helpful and descriptive; there were times when I had to figure out what to do next by myself - Occasionally, during thunder strikes, some buildings acted strangely, as if they were losing textures. There is still some work left to be done, but overall, I would give this game a positive review.

Whenever I see a game open up with "Made in Unity", I'm immediately worried about the lack of optimization of the game. Unity games tend to be very taxing on a CPU and are especially known for eating up RAM like a California forest fire during the summer. This game is no exception. El Dorado: TGCB hits no higher than 20 fps, averaging around 15 fps most of the time at the lowest graphics setting. It's rough to play in this state since the mouse cursor also deals with input lag every now and then. The game has also crashed on me... twice. A quick look at the Task Manager and it's easy to see why. The CPU usage peaks at 35% and the Memory around 70%. On my system, that's equivalent to over 8 1/2 GB of RAM being dedicated to ONE game. Not even Minecraft Java Version taxes my computer this much. Truly the mark of a Unity game. Can't judge the graphics much because I only tried the lowest to test for optimization. That being said, the lowest settings don't look like it requires 70% of my RAM to load. It reminds me of a slightly better texture Banished mod if you can picture that. The tutorial isn't bad, just unfinished. It teaches some things good enough, but others aren't thought out correctly. The worst part is the UI. It's bad. For example, farms. Couldn't figure out why these wouldn't work until I found I'm supposed to click on the Farm, select the plot in the UI, and bring up a circle grid to select tiles to farm. Choosing what to plant is straightforward, but the lack of indication that I have to manual draw a farm plot AFTER I plop down the Farm building could've been communicated better. The UI also hides all resources behind several icons at the top of the screen. It may look technically nicer, but it hides what you need know behind drop down menus. Having (i think) 6 slots to quickly glance at selected resources is insufficient. The HUD needs a lot of work. TL;DR For a demo, it's a proof of concept, but needs more time in the oven to fully cook the half baked video game. This game, being made in Unity, REQUIRES optimization. It is simply too taxing on the computer to enjoy playing the game.

Game is beautiful but not really that fun. Everything moves super fast so you're scrambling around like crazy and don't get to settle into the beautiful setting. Also the camera can't really go down enough to get beneath the trees so you really don't even get to take advantage of all the beautiful graphics by navigating around with your villagers.

Build water storage and connect to palace. Bug. Slave still standing and runnign with water trying to go through that water storage and unable to go around. No pathfinding.So i was waiting and waiting. Nothing happen. I CAN NOT RECOMMEND THIS GAME NOW

The game is bugged to all hell. First try: Game did not load. Second try: Game loaded in, but the objectives never loaded. Played through with random red arrows. Third try: Game loaded in, and objectives were displayed and the arrows make sense. But now I need corn and there are no instructions on how to unlock it, with no buildings available to grow it and no buildings available to process it. I tried levelling the city, but just ran out of resources. I suspect another thing that's meant to trigger just didn't. It's a shame as the game has potential. As the dev's seem active I'll post some other notes here as well. Can't see buildings through the trees, and it's frustrating. Pathing isn't always great, with workers running on the spot for a variety of reasons. (when a building is moved, a road is upgraded, or just because they felt like it) I don't know if it is meant to, but the gathering hut not restocking seems... unintentional. While it was great for getting into the production mode and receiving rapid feedback as an omnipotent overlord, the essentially instant feedback and lack of granular control felt a bit strange. I really liked the ability to cut certain products form certain buildings, i felt that would be very helpful if the game progressed beyond stage 1. The music and atmosphere are great, but they get extremely repetitive. The animations are nice, but everyone doing everything perfectly in sync is a little... unnatural. If you add a tiny random delay to the start of some of the animations it'll make them less uniform and more natural. I'll be back to check on this again in the future, I think. I like the look and feel and I think with more players giving more feedback it might become something good. At the moment, however, I have to give this broken buggy mess a thumbs down.

3/5 as the prologue makes the game look pretty hollow. My Review: https://youtu.be/1g0APmMg8dk There isn't any lore in the game, no greeting, no target or goal set, no tutorial to explain which building and system does what. The prologue can get stuck if you don't do what you have to exactly. The game needs more tooltips, explanations and guides, in the beginning epecially. Some narration from time to time would be great so you don't feel alone. The music is really nice, but it can fail in some situations and if you reduce the volume, after that, it cannot be made louder or the music is gone completely. I hope the real game will be better and made more complete.

Cool game, addictive gameplay, many types of buildings and mechanics, nice graphics and game atmosphere.

Das Spiel wirkt unfertig und ist unübersichtlich. Es gibt kein Tutorial und im Spiel wird keine Hilfestellung gegeben, wie Ziele zu erreichen sind.