izigame.me

Early Access Review - July 9th, 2024

First off, I am going to rate this game positively, but I am mainly going to be putting criticism in this review. I am also only going to state what is in the game when posted, and not what it could potentially have. It's a beautiful and fairly well optimized game. Great for relatively casual play. However the game does not last as long or as challenging as I would like, making the price a bit steep for what it is currently.

For me, the game has me a bit perplexed. On one hand, I like how the management is not overwhelming for the individual towns. On the other hand, it means there is often a lot of times where this is very little for the player to do. A lot of people are going to over-optimize their towns, but there is really very little reason to do so as the game naturally solves the problem quite easily. It's basically best to try and build your towns to resemble medieval towns, level 3 houses around the market, level 2 on the outskirts, and level 1 in little hamlets around the region.

The main difficulty is that you are basically forced to make every town completely self-sufficient. It is realistic, but for unless you are in one of the two fertile regions on the map, it is very difficult to make grain crops to have a supply of bread for a whole year, leaving you weirdly more dependent off of vegetables, eggs, berries and hunting than what should be expected. While in theory you are supposed to optimize each village to an industry, the exporting and trade system doesn't really balance out between the regions, making the small exporting towns quite rich, while population centers to be fairly poor, due to the exporting towns not needing goods from larger towns. Due to this, the game somewhat encourages the development of only one region, then has the player just take over all of the rest, which I don't think is intentional at all.

Combat is also far simpler than I would have liked. While arches have been buffed from early access release, they are still underwhelming. The current combat scale is a bit too small to make positional warfare an important strategy, making the simplest strategy to just have spear militia to pin the enemy and retinue charge and break them. Unless you can get silver VERY fast, mercenaries are largely out of the question for the player.

The other thing is that the physical map stays the same, though each time you start the game the resources and fertility are randomized. I would recommend restarting the game until you have a starting region that you are happy with. However, even with this, the game doesn't really encourages me to do a second playthough after fully restoring the peace. I might build another settlement on that playthrough just to try and make a better ale production, though in reality, most likely I will just have to crash the global demand for ale with this new town just to the price is cheaper for all my other towns to import it.

Once again, I did enjoy this game. Most of the enjoyment is from watching your town grow, and walking around. Don't try to meta this game too hard, just try to relax and take your time with it. Other than the occasional bandit raid or claim being pushed on you, it is actually a fairly relaxing game to wind down to once you have the necessities built and families assigned. Further expansion of required goods and services to the towns will likely make it more interesting in the long run, as well as more diplomacy and other AI towns on a larger map. I am willing to see where this game will head in the future, though it will likely be several more years until a more complete vision will be realized.

Also, feel free to ask me any questions on this game in the comments below, and I'll gladly answer them!