Homeseek Review (Kevin the Inkling)
I tried to like this game. I really wanted to like it. But I'll be blunt. Homeseek just sucks. I'll start by going through it's faults in no particular order.
First off. The lack of well activity in general. Not sure why so many city builders do this even my favorites but it's become a pet peeve. The citizens can be inspected to see their stats and what they're doing. But this seems to be just a check box that's become cliche for the Genre. Can you interact in any kind of meaningful way from this? Like say manually assign a job? Or learn some lore? Maybe uncover hidden mini quests? Nope.
Second the Citizens may as well not even be there. What do I mean? The people rendered so damn rarely you see static unmoving structures and that's it 90% of the time. Other games try and atleast make the citizens atleast visible. Hell Frost Punk well making the prior mentioned mistake atleast went as far as to ensure you actually saw people in your "City" this game doesn't even do the bare min there.
Excessively linear. Look it's difficult to have a story and challenge without some degree of a linear design. But this is to an excessive extreme. You HAVE TO PLAY EXACTLY as the game devs demand you to play. Such an extreme illusion of choice I have never seen in a game before. You have exactly enough space for 1 farm. In one particular facing. Limited resources is a major problem but not in the usual way you'd think. There are 3 resources. Food water and scrap. Scrap is used to build buildings. That is it. Your problem isn't a scrap shortage. It's everything else combined with with a bug that makes the game outright unplayable.
Bugs will screw you over. And heavily. Most games in the Genre reward you for stockpiling what you need. So surely that is the case here.. NOPE! First bug I noticed I will call the Consumption bug named after what I initially mistook it for. You see you'd think you'd wanna gather and store water and food in large quantities right? NO! Do not do that. Every night. Food and water resets to zero. "But Merku isn't that just the people eating and drinking?" You'd think that. Except for one problem. There is a secondary status of citizen drop down that tells you if your citizens all drank water ate, or have housing. So what I've observed even when it says "Everyone ate" And "Everyone Drank" With say 2,000 water in storage, and 1000 something food. All of that is gone. The following morning. And no it's not a display glitch. The amount is removed from the deposits. And yes if you don't gather even more food and water people will start dropping.
The only work around to this. You have to manually switch food and water gathering on and off. Do not stockpile. Any excess gathering is deleted. This problem compounds the big flaw that is the connection system. On paper it makes sense and seems straight forward. "Okay you gotta link a gathering building to a storage etc. Okay. These connections are perma. You got limited connection amounts. Oh and these connections are very prone to game breaking bugs.
Most crippling bug with the connections. Set up Wetlands, a Farm etc and end up with no way to get food or water. How?
Water and food come in different grades. Wetlands makes water cleaner. So I have a water storage fully loaded with suppliers. It's output is the Wetlands to clean that water. The Wetlands then sends the water to a second water storage. That water storage outputs to the farm since the farm can make food from water. When you do this. You end up with zero water and food production as it will work fine and then randomly not. And no it's not well depletion either.
To sum it up. The game's premise is fine. But the game itself is boring. Unfun, your not really in control as your mainly spending the whole game micromanaging around the bugs. The city has no people rendered in at all or moving. So even when things are going well it's boring as all hell.