Settlement Survival

Kingdoms Reborn is pretty much the same game, but better, and doesn't have ugly AI generated portraits in it.

Would love to recommend this game, but the developer has never gotten the save feature to work right. It is like playing Russian roulette when you save your game, or if the game auto saves. The game will randomly crash during auto saves or manual saves. Just lost an hour of game play when I clicked save. I won't even bother with any games from this developer or publisher if they can't get even the most basic feature of their game.

Unfortunately it took me 8 hours of gameplay to notice that the villager portraits are AI art. I don't qualify for a refund at this point, which is a shame because I wouldn't have bought this if I had known. I don't believe it's mentioned on the store page anywhere that AI art is used either.

[h1]Chore of a Survival..[/h1] So I bought this game on Jan 1st, 2026 after keeping it on my wishlist for a while and till now, I have only played 7.6 hrs of this game because it feels like a chore. Going to list the biggest issues I have with this game: [olist] [*] [h3]Your people want to die.[/h3] They take forever to harvest resources and when they do harvest them, you pretty much end up using it all in a few days (weeks, months, whatever) to build like.. a pencil. Then they proceed to get injured and get unhappy because you didn't build the best architecture your non-existent resources can buy. [*] [h3]Speaking of unhappiness, your citizens eat more food when they are unhappy.[/h3] Let that sink in. These developers actually added a mechanic to mimic the diet of a 300 kg woman sitting on TikTok spamming #FatIsBeautiful, in a f**ng survival game where people are trying to survive. Your villagers are eating ten times more food because you didn't build a f**ng latrine and church for them. This game is taking place in a medieval period btw, when people used to live in dirt and die of boredom because they only had UBISOFT's games to play on a slab or something. [*] [h3]Immigrants have arrived.[/h3] I get that a lot of these games do the "immigrants have arrived" nonsense now, but can we just stop with it already? It's stupid. A bunch of random people walk a million miles to find civilization and encounter your tiny starter town, only to turn back the moment they realize we didn't build a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TOWN HALL to welcome these ♥♥♥♥♥. [b]"What's that? No town hall? Well I'm turning the car around kids, time to go back into the wild and try our luck with the lions and alligators."[/b] Dafuq? And then they stand around for a week waiting for you to stop everything and build a townhall, starving at a spot. Amazing. I'm sorry but I can suspend disbelief only so much. This is the most asinine thing invented by some game out there, now copied blindly by every random "colony sim". I don't know who started this nonsense, but I suspect UBISOFT has something to do with it. [*] [h3]Worst tech-tree known to man. [/h3] Want to build better underwear for your villagers? Well get ready to jump through a million tech-tree upgrades, struggle with meager resources harvested by the slowest workers in existence to build one underwear that seems to consume half of the resources. Getting to that underwear is a journey in itself. You have to switch between multiple tabs to figure out which thing you should build first, then get bored and build whatever anyway, only to see a requirement text telling you to build another ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing first and maybe mine resources for another hour to build one more building. The point is, this game is needlessly complicated and the complications add nothing to "fun". [*] [h3]PROTIP: Turn off combat and increase amount of mountains in your map.[/h3] [*] [h3]Use of Engrish in the main menu options itself should've been a warning sign of things to come.[/h3] But I didn't listen to the little voice at the back of my head and didn't refund this game back in January, when I had the chance to. *sighs* [/olist] I really can't be arsed to go into more detail, I'll be uninstalling this game and binning it, never to touch it again after this. The primary issue with this game remains the tech-tree and ridiculously low resource gain for the amount of time you waste in it. Even selecting custom settings doesn't do much to make this game fun, it feels like a chore. Go play Patron or Farthest Frontier instead of this game, you'll find a better replacement for Banished there.

As it exists I cant give it a thumbs up. I want to, but I can't because Its terribly imbalanced. I love the concept and the direction its going, especially the vast array of aesthetic additions available for you. But functionally there are problems and I'm still very early into the game which does not bode well for later on. One example is how slowly citizens age. Unlike other similar games, it does not seem that building up your town attracts any new citizens outside of the occasional migration of people. This would be fine normally, however when your citizens have kids, it takes what seems like a realistic number of years in game for them to grow up which creates a problem because overall, the needs of your people stack up WAY faster than your number of citizens so you can VERY quickly go from being a successful settlement one year, to a starving one the next. Another imbalance is the amount of certain resources you gain from things like felling trees. There is a forester hut that is supposed to provide a steady flow of lumber and replant trees (provided you have enough laborers working there) but again, with how quickly the game makes you try to grow, you would either have to have at least 3-4 people working there to keep up with a small town of maybe 10 homes, or have more than 1 forester. Which isn't feasible when you account for all the other things you need people for early on. Then other things like tools and iron gathering are imbalanced in the other direction entirely. For example. I put up a forester and a mine for iron. Both were running at the same time. After a couple years, my forester struggles intensely to keep up with wood demand while the iron is just stacking up like crazy! Now a lot of this is due to the fact that most construction requires wood, on top of needing it for fuel to keep homes warm, while less things require iron in the beginning but still. I chop down what I would estimate are 20-25 trees and I get maybe 70-80 wood which trust me is NOTHING. The average home costs something like 20 or 25 lumber to build. That's 1/4 of what I got from 20-25 trees. That's insane. Finally the clinic.... Healing is insanely slow. When people are sick the clinics are decent and fixing that problem fairly quickly if you have the needed items on hand. But a physical injury? Nah.... that person is basically out of commission for a couple years. Which is again way too punishing for something you didnt do wrong and just happens as a form of challenge. I think this game has a LOT of potential, but again, it just is in terrible need of some balance before I can give it a thumbs up.

3/10 no heart and soul to this game. just here's the assets we bought and slapped in ive played this exact same game before but it had more content. forgot what it was called

Amongst the many minor bugs, this game has a long-standing bug with 'Repairmen' which makes the game unplayable (unless you enjoy continuously rebuilding structures for no good reason). I advise you not to buy it.