izigame.me

Initial review at 30 hours:
Not going to lie, this game had me at “Hello”, since it presented itself as an RPG/Strategy hybrid AND had a lineage mechanic. Unfortunately, after spending over 30 hours trying to will myself to like it, I regret to admit that this is basically a lot of good ideas with mediocre execution, thrown in with little to no general cohesion.
While the game has several issues, the most glaring of all is the lack of motivation to push the player forward. The survival mechanics are as basic as they go (Thirst, hunger and temperature), and they’re basically disconnected from the city building aspect, to the extent that you’ve already maximized your survival capabilities by the time you’ve got your first hut, as you can easily survive on hunting across every season.
This really hamstrings the whole game, as it makes most of it redundant. Each and every complex item (Elaborate meals, metal tools, alcohol, etc) requires a lot of infrastructure and preparation, while offering no advantages over their simpler counterparts. Sure, if you build a city, you can make iron axes, which have a metric ton of durability compared to a stone one, but you’d only need an iron axe if you’re going to get into a city scale project to begin with. You can apply the same logic to the food: I can either get a single pie, which requires a kitchen, a vegetable garden, a wheat field and a mill…or I can outrun four rabbits, clock them on the head with a stick, roast the meat and get the same result. One takes 2 minutes, the other one takes 10 hours.
If I were overly charitable, I could say that this is set up this way so people can play at their own pace, but if you have a city builder game in which the city building part is entirely optional, someone has to go back to the drawing board. However, I was holding on writing this review until I was able to get a challenge from the Herald, as those are some pretty tall orders which definitely need a city to be able to fulfill them…turns out these are optional as well.
The time advancing mechanic, while it is a very interesting idea, is completely wasted here. Sure, the villagers technically grow old, and so do you, but that’s the only thing that changes. The other towns are completely static in their size, no outside (Or inside) events significantly impact the region as time goes by, so this mechanic may as well not exist. Even if you get a child right away, the titular dynasty mechanic of being able to continue playing as your offspring comes so late in the game it might as well be a 100% completion bonus thing, considering that 0.3% of the players were able to experience it, according to the achievements.
Going back to the environment itself, it’s kind of a disappointment after the initial great impression. While the game starts somewhat strong, with a somewhat interesting main story mission, it can get resolved within a year if you’re at least putting some effort into it. The game also pulls a sneaky on you, giving you several multi-stage, unique missions at the very beginning (Like Alwin’s Story), thus giving the impression that these are going to be the standard for the rest of the game. Wrong. After those ones, you’re left with randomly generated, fetch quest-tier missions that get refreshed every season and are absolutely unengaging, with little in the way of reward.
All the villagers have exactly the same dialogue options, and you never see them go outside the area of the village, either hunting, exploring or trading with other villages. They wake up, go to work, go to sleep, rinse and repeat forever.
The remaining mechanics are pretty lacking as well. The only consequence for stealing items is a penalty on your Dynasty Points (Which only determine the maximum population of your village) and you can easily recover with a fetch quest or two, even if you steal a very valuable item. Dirtiness is a mechanic, which I guess exists, but it only impacts on whether NPCs want to talk to you or not, and you can get rid of it by walking into any of the many lakes or rivers. You can get drunk, but it does nothing save for screwing your interface, plus you’d have to be drunk IRL to do it, as a bottle of wine costs almost as much as an iron tool; and so forth.
Now, I don’t want to be that guy and trash everything without providing some constructive criticism. Some of these issues could be solved relatively easy: For example, a “Comfort” mechanic. If you consume higher quality food and drink, have nice clothing and so forth, the character could get a % bonus in any XP he gets (Which would be welcome, considering how grindy the game tends to be). Eventually, the player can unlock higher comfort levels, with a higher bonus and a higher requirement (You could even add an XP penalty if it dips below a certain level), so you have to keep the gravy train going. Same thing with the general environment: A story mode could be implemented, with missions that shape the region depending on their outcome; the game has all the tools to make this happen, all it’d need is implementation.
The game has good bones, but as it stands today, I can’t recommend purchasing it.

Addendum at 130 hours:
After wasting another 100 hours to complete every single achievement (Clearly I have masochistic tendencies), I have to say that not only I stand by every appreciation made previously, but that the enjoyment factor drops off a cliff as you play, mainly due to the lack of content. You have a strong first portion where you unlock things at a pretty steady pace, build your village and play the main quest (1-2 years), a mediocre mid portion where things get grindier and more boring, since the buildings take much longer to unlock and only give a very marginal advantage (2-5 years); and an a mind-numbingly boring late game, with nothing new to do, and the last buildings certainly are not worth the grind (6+ years onwards)
The city building management controls are incredibly clunky and frustrating, requiring you to fiddle with them season by season if you want to optimize them (Such as the herbalist hut), and you can’t set production limits, so they require constant babysitting.
The much vaunted heir/dynasty mechanics are incredibly threadbare (Your family may as well not exist except for giving you quests or items every once in a while), and you can only have one child.
And to top it off, after seeing that the priorities seem to be with implementing coop player (As a way to compensate for the lack of single player content) per the developer’s roadmap, makes me thing these issues will not get addressed.
Get Dawn of Man if you want a great city builder with tech progression, or Kingdom Come: Deliverance if you want a great RPG set in the Middle Ages. This game tries to be both and ends up being neither.