Laysara: Summit Kingdom

Laysara is a good-looking city builder with some factory-management elements (at least it reminded me a bit of Factorio). I've completed the campaign on Normal difficulty and enjoyed it quite a lot. I would recommend it because I had a great time with it and, despite its flaws, I think it's a good game that delivers what I expected from it. That said, I can understand why some players might give up on it after a few hours. PROS: * It's beautiful and has a lot of charm. * The localization is very good. I played in Spanish and never encountered any translation issues * There are some interesting progression mechanics, such as unlocking better transportation methods, productivity upgrades, and so on. The housing-level system and citizen needs are also well balanced. * Controls and keyboard shortcuts are excellent. For example, the fact that dragging with the mouse automatically links two buildings is fantastic, and being able to click the magnifying glass icon on a building and jump directly to its production area is incredibly convenient. That said, these features should be explained more clearly, as I only discovered some of them after 10 hours of gameplay. * The terrain adds a puzzle-like challenge that makes the game more interesting, even when it increases the difficulty. However, I do miss some way to expand the available building space, such as constructing wooden supports or terraces to create additional platforms and allow for more flexibility. * The game runs very well. I didn't encounter any bugs, and performance remained solid even with larger settlements, lots of entities, and animations. CONS: * The campaign. 1. While it does a decent job of teaching the mechanics, many objectives are poorly designed. Quite often the game asks you to have a certain number of houses of a specific tier even when you've already progressed far beyond that point and have more than enough population. I found myself demolishing Tier 4 houses just to build a large number of Tier 2 houses because the game required it. Then, once the objective was completed, I would tear them down again and rebuild my Tier 4 neighborhood. These kinds of missions completely disrupt the flow of the game. It feels like you're forced to follow objectives step by step and ignore the housing progression system until the game explicitly tells you to use it, even when doing so hurts your economy and forces you to sacrifice income that you would otherwise be generating through higher-tier housing. 2. At some point, the campaign starts sending you back to previously completed cities. The concept itself could be interesting, but the execution is boring. If revisiting a city meant unlocking a new area or a new district where the additional construction could take place, I'd be fine with it. Instead, most of the time you're simply tearing down a city that was already working perfectly in order to adapt it to arbitrary new requirements that don't add anything meaningful. This becomes even more frustrating when combined with the previous issue. You return to a city where every house is already Tier 4 and suddenly the game says, "Now we want 180 Tier 2 houses," despite the fact that you already have excess population. * Logistics can be extremely tedious. Some transportation buildings can only move goods from Point A to Point B, meaning you need another building just to distribute those goods. I don't understand why every transportation building can't also function as a distributor. I also don't get why you can only transport one item at a time. Tunnels, while they seem useful, require you to build a dedicated entrance and exit for every single resource. It's a very similar story with the handcart station, where you sometimes have to place five of them just to haul five different resources to an area with more space to work. It only results in additional resource costs and takes up valuable space. On top of that, all of these buildings have a very limited operating range, especially when assigning resources to production buildings. * The size of some buildings. While building placement is clearly a core part of the game's puzzle/Tetris-like design, some structures are simply frustrating to work with. For example, you might design your entire town around the market, which occupies a relatively small footprint, and later discover that you need to place a Mandala or an Academy that is enormous by comparison. I'm exaggerating a little, but trying to fit the Mandala into an existing city was one of the most frustrating parts of the game. It has limited coverage and takes up an absurd amount of space. These issues wouldn't be nearly as noticeable if space weren't so limited. But when every tile matters and you've already built a large settlement, relocating major buildings becomes incredibly tedious. Conclusion: I think Laysara has a lot of potential, and I will probably continue playing it for a while. However, I completely understand why some players may find the combination of limited space, factory-style production chains, and complex logistics frustrating. In my opinion, the game would improve significantly if it offered ways to expand building platforms, reduced the footprint of some oversized buildings, increased the operational range and capacity of distribution structures.