Rise to Ruins

This is a mixed review: The game's premise, mechanics, graphics, resource management, etc are all fantastic, and build the premise for a great game. Unfortunately, as you get further into the game, is when the bugs become apparent, and you run into severe difficulty spikes. For example, if you try to clear the corruption, you'll eventually get to the point having a building on a tile right next to corruption may not clear it (or clear it very slowly). You'll also be able to handle almost everything the game throws at you, until suddenly the game decides to 4x the spawn rate and health of every enemy. Maybe I'm playing the game wrong, and you're not supposed to push out? Reading other reviews, I guess I'm supposed to migrate at some point, however it's difficult to know when, given the difficulty suddenly spiking beyond control. Then comes the bugs. Early game, you'll be able to build lots of things each day. As your village grows, you get more builders, miners, etc, you begin to accomplish significantly less each day. For example, even with plenty of resources, including resources nearby, top-tier roads, I'm still only able to build about 3 buildings per day. Or I might have 20 waymakers (road builders), but no roads seem to be built for days on end. Don't get me started on rations, I can't seem to get my cooks to make them ever.

This game isn't hard. It just has no real tutorial, terrible UI and managing your villagers is like herding cats. Everything has more steps than it needs to have and my god everything takes forever. Your god powers are weak and the tower defence element only really comes in later.

На самом деле игра отличная, если бы ее обновляли и не бросили. С определенного момента ощущение, что все еще играешь в самые первые версии - утыкаешься в вершину технологических цепочек и не знаешь, что делать дальше. Скорость игры очень медленная, все происходит долго и нудно. Очень хочется, чтобы игра развивалась и дальше.

I had some fun playing the game but the fun was drained by the problems I had with it. I would describe the feeling more as "draining patience awaiting for the fun to continue". The game is very difficult even on 1 difficulty lower than recommended. Sometimes for some inexplicable reason when I entered a level and built farms, the farmers did nothing on the farms(like nothing was planted). I suspect this game has a mechanic where if you don't have carrots to plant you can't plant them(at least from what I observed). If you pause the game the screen is covered by a dark pause screen so you can't pause and evaluate the situation(you can but you can't look at it). Things take way too long to get done(especially building better roads), I played at max speed almost all the time. Game mechanics and design aside, the thing that infuriated me most was the inability to type in a number for production limits or trade limits. If I wanted 50 planks to be in stock always, I would have to click fifty times on the + icon. Is it really so difficult to have an input box where I can type a number?

Definitely challenging, and definitely takes time to learn. Enjoyable experience if you don't mind the learning curve and grind. Charming enough.

I am generally not interested in colony builders with game mechanics that can't be interacted with when pausing the game. It took me less than a minute to figure out that this game is not for me.

Been trying to find a way to enjoy this game, but it just feels remarkably tedious no matter what I do. The trash mechanic being added is really annoying due to the insane amount of trash that builds up. There's way to much random stuff that happens which completely derails you for multiple days sometimes. This game was awesome back when I originally played this but it just lacked a reason to play beyond a couple years. Now, it's just tedious trying to deal with corruption and all the other issues at the same time. This feels like how Rise of Industry was a solid game but needed some tweaks. Instead of that, they added 2130 which simply made the game more tedious and still lacking the main features people had been asking for (AI that isn't terrible being the main one). I wanna like it and I've kept trying to push through the tedium, but I might be at the end of my desire to keep playing. Also, the way achievements work is just strange. Almost all of the achievements are things you can do right off the bat, yet you have to unlock achievements like they're talent points for whatever reason, in order to be able to even start working towards the next achievement. It also doesn't take long for the performance to get bogged down quick. I've got a pretty old computer, but for such a simplistic game it seems nuts just how quickly it becomes frustratingly slow. EDIT** This is about a year later and I decided to try the game again since I genuinely love the concept, but again I'm left frustrated by the AI being absolutely braindead. I learned a lot of new things, but it doesn't change the fact that the achievement system is just not well designed. Even if it wasn't for actual achievements and was for "progression"; it doesn't function at all like it would in many other games. Usually you have a system like this in order to give the player new achievable goals based on the thing you recently unlocked. But since every single reward is a random buff through chests... which you have to stop playing in order to actually utilize, it feels really odd. You'll get so many achievements that branch to a thing you achieved 5 to 10 hours ago, leaving you wondering "uh okay... I guess I just wait for this to eventually tick up and complete." I love city building, god mechanics and tower defence. I LOVE a lot of things about this game. I know it's made by one guy and I at least got a lot of hours out of this game. If you don't care about 100%ing games then I would recommend it for the simple fact that it's enjoyable for a solid 20 to 40 hours easily. The tedium will drain you more and more as you play though. Being unable to click your own buildings because of corpses and items all cluttered around every defence tower you've built, that alone becomes insanely aggravating pretty quickly. The good is that there are some really cool systems and concepts here. I love the golems, I love some of the cheeky, silly humour. There is a lot that leaves me wondering if it's mistranslated, as some phrases just don't make sense, but clearly so much love went into this. Using the concepts here and modifying a handful of things would have this being one of the ultimate strategy games to play. And I'm very impressed that one dude managed to pull this off. I hate giving thumbs down for projects like this, because I know just how hard it is to make a game, bust your ass to actually finish it, and then put it out there for everyone to judge, meanwhile most people have no clue what goes into a project like this. I really hope the review can be taken as constructive criticism and be used towards another project that's similar, with better progression and a more clear end-goal.