izigame.me

Apparently played over 150 hours of this game, so here are some thoughts:
Positives
- Gorgeous world, I'm often blown away by how pretty the landscape is
- The basic gameplay loop is really enjoyable with being tasked to gather resources to craft buildings and provide homes for your villagers
- Early game can definitely feel rough and offers a bit of an interesting challenge to new players
- Any setting can be changed in-game any time you want to make the game easier or more difficult
Negatives
- The game is oddly paced with a lot to do in the beginning to the point you can feel stressed out and overwhelmed but as you overcome that hurdle you suddenly find yourself with nothing to do
- City management could become more complex where upgrading houses and providing more complex or better foods and other amenities to your citizens are relevant, so you feel you actually build a real village
- A lack of a proper end game; eventually you just wait for the days to pass so you can see your heir turn 18 years old but game doesn't start over or take a new turn at that point, but it just continues where your main character at that point died (there is an update trying to address this to some extent, so this may not be relevant after the Q3 update)
- I wish I could feel more involved in the lives of my citizens; fetch quests do little to develop them as characters that you look after (it would help if your village would face real challenges here, such as your citizens becoming sick, be attacked by wild animals or bandits and the like in addition to your villages having unique personalities and desires)
In summary, I feel mixed about the game. It has some really nice positive aspects but the game is thoroughly lacking follow through and content in several areas to make you want to come back for more. The most fun part of the game is the early stages where you are still lacking a home and struggling for survival and money, and still staking out where you want to settle and how to do it.
They also need to seriously balance the hunting mechanic because the amount of food you can make by manually choosing to hunt wild animals is ridiculous. Even hunting rabbits with your bare fists is easy and fixes all your food problems early on. I would envision that animal meat should be valued more, and that hunger needs to be better balanced in this area without being oppressive. Killing a deer should net lots of food that lasts longer compared to a rabbit.
Winters also need to be much harsher with clothing and heating actually being truly relevant not just to yourself, but also to your citizens. Would also love to see more focus spent on farming with crops failing to mature due to harsh weather conditions, struck by blight and the like, so it feels like a genuine struggle for survival even after your settlement is up and running. Right now farming is ridiculously powerful as all good foods rely on farming-related products so alternatives would be nice and that citizens want better quality food or you could theoretically supply them with grilled meat all day.
Compared to others I am fine with the travel system as is but it could be nice if you could hitch a hike with local travelers to stay on their wagon to fast travel between city points at least, or potentially rent a horse or a donkey for a fee. I would also love to see wandering merchants beyond the merchants that show up at the taverns (including yours once you built one). While I am at taverns, alcohol currently serves no purpose in the game either, and also looks like one of these elements that come across as mostly unrealized ideas - i.e. citizens are intended to gain bonuses by providing them alcohol, but currently that bonus isn't there at all. Or potentially being able to host festivals once you built a market square or a tavern or some such.
And as I mentioned before - since you actually spend many years with your citizens, the ability to build meaningful relationships with them would be extremely nice as in they have their personalities and they expect you to come socialize with them and ask them how they're doing once in a while, they got their own unique needs based on their personalities and it gives them certain boons and downsides e.g. maybe one is a morning person so they're up earlier to work than the others but instead likes to drink more alcohol and gets drunk more easily and causes problems with the other villagers and so on. It would go a long way in making the village you build feel alive and that there's something more to address than building homes and solving fetch quests. It would also pose you with problems such as maybe you need to kick that villager out because they're actually a liability to you, but they got a family with children and do you really want to make them homeless as it will drastically reduce your citizens' trust in you?
And I think this summarizes how I feel about the game a lot - there's a lot of potential with a lot of great ideas, but a lot of the time it feels like the game is just not developing these ideas to the fullest. As a result, it feels like the game is just lacking a lot of depth - it's pretty and the basics are there, but there isn't a lot to do beyond it. I hope the devs will continue to develop the game in ways that deepen the gameplay.
Otherwise I can only really recommend it based on that it's not a very expensive game and it offers some casual fun early, but unfortunately the game also lacks that something that makes you want to stick around for longer.