izigame.me

I first played this game as a demo during Steam's Next Fest sometime last year. I was hooked from that little teaser of content and had every intention of buying this game as soon as it was available. I believed this game would be something special and new, and I was very excited for it. After reading reviews and watching updates, I'm glad I didn't end up buying the game until recently, but I don't regret buying the game now and can absolutely recommend it to others.
Altogether, the game is... good, but not great. I wouldn't have been satisfied to buy this for $60, but I think $30 or less on sale is very reasonable for the enjoyment I got out of the game. It still has bugs, there are some strange interface and progression choices I'm surprised haven't been edited considering how long the game has been out, and there are aspects that I feel needed more polish or were just plain not good and needed some fixing, but it was overall a fun and meaningful experience. The art and music was amazing and the devs absolutely nailed the ambiance and setting, the gameplay is novel, and the story and progression has a way of drawing you in and making you feel for the people you manage.
Floodland felt different than any other survival/city-builder type game I've ever played (yes, including Frostpunk). The game has layers of challenge and often makes you prioritize one problem over another; are you dangerously low on food or water, is there an epidemic, is your main island too crowded, do you need more people, are there not enough jobs, do you need more research to learn to build something to fix a crisis, do you have to placate your people so they stop stealing resources because they hate eachother, or is it finally time to advance the story? There is a story that you are working to finish, but your path through the game is not linear. You are making the decisions on what to do next, not the game.
I found myself wishing there was more pressure to continue the main story, as being allowed to take all these problems at my own pace with infinite time to spare took away some of the fun of the challenge, but at the same time this lack of a time limit or overarching threat of some kind made me focus on the people and actually made me feel the purpose of my role as the leader of the settlement. Balancing your people's needs and wants is the challenge here, not the secondary objective only there to put pressure on you, and Floodland executes this challenge frustratingly well.
The game is as much a political sim as it is a city-builder. Your people are not so kind as to overcome their differences for the sake of the future; these are stubborn people that devoutly stick to their political beliefs and will do everything they can to convince you to follow their ideals. When you have clans in your settlement that are on complete opposite ends of the political axis it gets downright frustrating to try and figure out what laws you should pass, and if you decide you don't want to pass any extreme laws the clan leaders will pester you about it the whole game. Some clans staunchly believe that laws that only benefit you gameplay-wise are horrible and contrary to everything they believe in, and much like real life, there are laws that are meant to improve society or foster understanding between the people that clans will still argue over. This system by itself is immensely frustrating, but it serves to enhance the severity of every other crisis and makes the game feel different than other games in the same genre.
The way Floodland presents its resources and exploration also felt novel to me. All the nonrenewable resources seem so plentiful in the beginning and there's so many ruins with an assortment of useful resources, so in my first few games this lulled me into complacency and I failed to set up a reliable renewable resource system before a crisis brought everything crashing down. Renewable resources are not infinite and seem to replenish so slow that they don't seem all that important in the beginning; why spend resources on slow income when you can just expand to a new island and take those resources now? Expanding your settlement has its own risks and isn't always viable, and many times in my attempts I found myself running out of food and water and unable to expand, thus collapsing everything. It was frustrating at first to restart, but very satisfying to learn how to be better next time.
Floodland required some patience and learning for me, and it wasn't always fun, which might seem strange for a video game, but I always found myself excited to come back for more and felt proud to overcome the many problems it thew at me. Now, as for the negatives...
I experienced pretty minor lag and only a few bugs up until ~23 hours, shortly before I actually finished a run. I thought at first all the crashes I had heard about were just others' computers not being very good, but I did eventually start experiencing problems. I had a bug that killed one of my earlier runs where 120 or more people suddenly decided they no longer wanted to work because I gave them autonomy and I was not going to manually reassign them one by one for the rest of the game. The game started crashing during auto and manual saves (though thankfully it successfully saved manually) and I started to experience lag more commonly with a settlement of ~370 people across four islands and a large portion of the map revealed. Considering the game that gives you infinite time, it would've been nice to try and explore all of the available map and invite every available person into the settlement, but it seems like the game can't handle very large settlements.
Recreation made absolutely no sense. I simply never passed recreation laws, and the game never made this into an actual problem, it just bugged me about it the whole time. You expect me to place very large and rather expensive buildings, some of which use up vital resources on a daily basis, in a place close to as many houses as possible (but you're not necessarily supposed to cluster houses up, the game tells you over and over and over again to put houses near workplaces!), many of which individual clans hate and grow angry over their existence and the passing of the laws required to build them, to improve the relationship of clans? The solution to clans hating each other is segregating them, not recreation anyhow or anyway, which is really strange considering a major part of this game is about making these people get along despite their differences.
There are no hotkeys for rapidly switching between buildings of the same type. When you have many houses you want to upgrade or provide electricity for, you have to click on each individual little house and click the upgrade button or the dropdown menu and then click again for electricity mode. I've never used hotkeys much but there are cases like these where it's borderline necessary to have something to speed the process up/make it easier.
The notifications are terrible. It's hard to tell sometimes if something actually important is happening in the settlement because I'm constantly getting spammed with messages of "your people live too far from the workplace!" or "X buildings have no resources to gather in range!" or "X clans hate each other even more now!" Most of the game these notifications were complete redundant.
You can't tear down some old buildings that take up vital space on your small islands despite having the resources to destroy other far more complex buildings. It's one thing to say the sunken ruins of stone and concrete that don't take up land space aren't necessary to destroy, but you can neither destroy nor re-purpose some collapsed wooden buildings fully on land? You can't tell me these people can blow up old gas stations but can't tear down a little old wood.