izigame.me

I really expected and wanted to love this game and I tried pretty hard to enjoy it, but it never settled into something satisfying. For the majority of the time I was playing the game I don't think I was having fun, and I don't think I was being challenged (except for the challenge of working around the technical issues).
If you want to play Prison Architect you have two options - the current version or the 2018 anniversary edition. Both options have huge problems.
The current version has been updated many times by Paradox as they tried to crowbar their DLC model into a game that obviously didn't work for it. This version of the game is incredibly unstable, filled with bugs and performance issues, and bloated with items that offer minor options for cosmetic customisation but which also make parts of the UI much more annoying to use. The frequent updates for a game with such a small community has also severely hurt the modding scene.
HOWEVER - this version of the game, especially with the two free DLC updates, does include a lot of quality of life and UI features that significantly improve large parts of the game. Many features, like being able to copy and past a building above an arbitrary very small size, or being able to designate zones with mixed access for different security ratings simply don't exist. So even though the anniversary edition runs much better it is filled with frequent frustration that doesn't need to be there. So you can choose between pretty major quality of life features or the risk of your game just not working properly.
Beyond technical or UI issues the game just has weird balance that frustrated me immensely. The logistical aspects of the prison only become interesting to manage when it becomes quite large, and judging by the achievements the game thinks that prisons for 500-1000 prisoners is a reasonable thing for a player to do. Except other parts of the game directly fight against this. The Paradox version of the game tends to simply break if you get more than 400 prisoners at once. One particularly memorable bug completely ruined a save by rendering all workers unresponsive to any instructions. The anniversary edition is better for large prisons, simply because it actually functions, but it still suffers enormous performance issues over 500 prisoners. Building and managing a prison of that size is also made much more tedious than it needs to be because of the previously mentioned lack of quality of life features.
The game also seems to expect you to manually check and manage prisoners who need special treatment (for example snitches, former law enforcement, especially violent prisoners). Doing this is pretty tedious at the best of times, but by the time you have 200-300 prisoners it starts to become extremely impractical. By the time you have a particularly large prison you're ignoring this issue almost entirely, leaving the periodic stabbings as a cost of doing business. Managing the prison and managing the prisoners are operating at totally different scales and they do not mix nicely. Most prisons felt like a period of by-the-numbers build up, a brief period of fun and challenge, and then a slide into boredom as the bugs/performance issues gradually ate away at its functionality.
The other issue is the pacing of the campaign (which also serves as the tutorial). Lots of cool levels, and somehow manages to have one of the most memorable executions I've ever seen despite the goofy cartoon aesthetic. But a lot of the progression relies on random chance, and on more than one occasion I had to just leave the game running for few hours waiting for the necessary task to be met (e.g. have X prisoners achieve something, or have Y% of prisoners meet a certain criteria). This is even worse if you go for the optional objectives. A large portion of my playtime is passively monitoring it while watching something on a second monitor, I wouldn't even count it as playing the game.
Overall just not for me. So many great ideas that have just been left undercooked.