izigame.me

I would love to be able to give this game a positive review. Genuinely, I would. There's a lot of interesting potential and the water mechanics are actually pretty interesting.

The problem arises with the city builder aspects of this game. I came in expecting a survival city builder. Similar games in the genre being Against the Storm, Frostpunk, and Ixion. But that's not quite what this game is. You'll sit and wait in the early chapters as you are heavily limited by the number of citizens you have. Then you start to get citizens and you're just starting to get started on having a semi working station, and then you have to go off and head to a new area because some problem has arisen with your current area. So you move to the new area, and you're back to square 1 with more people this time. So this time instead of waiting for more workers, you're waiting for your workers to get you more supplies and waiting for your expedition forces to go out to give you something to do. But at least you need to plan out your city, except you don't. The maps are either too spread out to the point you'll not run out of space to build or so narrow there's only one or two possible locations for your important buildings. Then you have to worry about having room to connect your pipes, except you don't really get to determine that, you're just stuck with the automatic generation of the pipes. There's different types of pipes with different levels of leakage, too bad I can't see it without entering the storage UI and I'll just leave it with whichever pipe gives me at least 90% throughput. In summary, it just felt like I wasn't doing much, just sitting and waiting for most of the game. It wasn't engaging my mind to make a civilization, it was putting down the parts to solve the puzzle, and once the puzzle was solved all my work was gone and I had to start on a new puzzle entirely.

I made it through act 2 chapter 1 by having single play sessions met with weeks of space in between before I deemed this game good enough to play. Following an unfortunate wipe on my computer of no fault of this game, I decided to give it one more try even though I didn't have the save file. This is after that play session. While I think there were a lot of parts, the restarting at each chapter kills my motivation to keep playing and I'm officially done with it. There's not an update to fix the issues I have, they'd need to make a new game and I won't be waiting on it.