There are a few major things I'd like to take the time to address. Before I do so I'd like to say that all of this is said with the best of intentions, and that while a lot of what is here will be about things that could be improved, none of it is said with maliciousness and no one should take anything too personally.


There is the solid core of a game here but many areas lack polish. Most of the issues with the game are the kind that will turn potential new players away, but also the kind that are easy to get used to once you've played for a few hours.

The tutorial is poorly paced and has some elements in the wrong order. The game's "end goal" is a bit unclear which gives weak motivation to get there. The game's visual assets lack important visual clarity, and create ugly "machines". The UX is overall clunky, even though many individual elements of the UI are fine. The game crashed on me several time for no discernable reason.


The tutorial has poor pacing at the moment. When a player first enters a game the thing you want to do to that player is give them both the hook of the game, and also let them find out what they need to know in a way that feels like gameplay rather than a tutorial.

The problem is that the way the tutorial is delivered makes it feel like the tutorial is going to be hours long, and players don't expect to get to play the "actual game" until the tutorial is over; this is a huge problem.

Part of the problem is that the default game speed is too slow. If you go follow the steps of the tutorial (and nothing else), on default game speed, you'll beg for mercy relatively quickly. To me, the 4x speed feels right. This should be an easy fix though, just change the 4x to 1x, and the 1x to 1/4x, the 2x to 1/2x, and the 8x to 2x (I'm referring to the button labels). Then change which speed you start on by default.

Another part of the problem is that elements/steps are in the wrong order. If you follow the tutorial you will go through a ton of waiting time, where nothing seems to be happening. When you finally get to a point where you've got a few things going, now you're spending too much time manually purchasing things. In introduction to market orders needs to come much earlier. Similarly the tutorial needs to tell you that running out of money is game over, and get you to set up a stable loop of buying, making and selling things, all before ever trying to re-build the architects' place. Also the thing needs to tell you to buy workers as well because no one tells you that having a building active essentially eats a worker itself.

If I had to boil this all down to a core philosophy, its that players of your game do not know the basic mechanics, and before you ever try to get them to advance their village you need them to understand those underlying systems. I spent way too much time waiting around, or troubleshooting random nonsense in-between completing tutorial steps, which made progression feel like a slog, rather than fun.


At the start of a run we're given a text prompt which says basically "You're a broke blacksmith, but you want to be rich, so build a town". Alright... but nothing we do is... smithy, and additionally "get money" in itself is not really a goal, or more specifically its not an achievable goal. In other games in the same genre you're given a lofty, but achievable goal which signals the end of the game. In Factorio its "build a rocket to leave the planet", in Banished the first goal is "survive the winter", but the more general goal is "build a thriving city of happy people".

The value of optimization games like this is the journey itself but the end goal lets the player decide what they ought to be doing at any given moment, and allows the journey to happen in the first place. "Get money" is so generic that arguably you either never achieve it until the number refuses to go up any more, or you've achieved it the moment you have more than your starting money. This game badly needs a specific, achievable, but lofty end goal to help drive players forward.

From and end goal you can derive further conflict to make the game more fun and challenging. By having a goal you can have things that threaten your progress towards the goal, or stand in the way to slow you down. Journeys are boring without opposition and conflict. Few can remember the details of their last trip to the grocery store because it was mundane and forgettable. In Factorio that further fun and opposition comes from the biters providing some opposition, in Banished its disease, and starvation.

One of my biggest issues with the game right now is that individual buildings are too hard to distinguish from one another. Their silhouettes aren't different enough for the tiny amount of distinct color they have, and and they have few large stand-out features. Compare the buildings in Warcraft 2 to the buildings in this game and see the difference. I'm not saying you should take things that far, you have a world you're creating, but structures shouldn't blend into the environment quite so much, and should clearly at a glance communicate what they are.
As well, all of the pathing and structures need to look some-form of good when put together as a large structure block. If you look at the way players make factories in Factorio, there is a visual satisfaction to be had in just observing how the belts deliver things from point a to point b, and how large areas of structures fit together, it all is not only satisfying but speaks of its efficiency to the viewer.
There likely isn't a ton that can be done here without a major asset rework, but even just a little bit of selective saturation increase on the textures could go a long way towards visual clarity.


There are a lot of things that are obfuscated by the UI at the moment, but worse is that for many tasks the UI actively gets in the way, lacks some pretty basic QOL features, or has some confusing visual communication. I've given some examples below:

* If I click on a worker, that worker has control over my camera. Since I cant move my camera at will, I cant click on buildings to open their info panels, which means I cant use those two panels at once to evaluate if a change is working or not unless I click them in a specific order.
* The remove road button is at the top of the screen while the add road button is at the bottom, meaning that you discover them at different times, so if you make a mistake the first time you're placing roads you may not discover the solution for over an hour, or worse you think its not fixable.
* The animation for menus opening and closing is a bit slow, and the size change speed is too linear. I noticed this the first several times I saw menus but after a while I got used to it, but its one of those things that signals a lack of polish in general.
* The soundtrack would cut out every now and again, but other sounds would still be active. It seems like either there isn't a smooth transition between tracks, or like the track doesn't have a clean loop. Another jarring moment in play that speaks to a lack of polish.
* When trying to manage routes, it's great that you can get the routes that interact with a building by clicking on it, but its not obvious that you can see all routes at the recreational area.
* When you get to have several routes it would be very helpful to be able to either color code the text of the routes, or put them into folder structures so that you can more easily tell what is going on at a glance. Digging through and opening several routes to see what they're doing is not a great experience. While naming them can be helpful, having to come up with naming structures to prevent it from getting overwhelming is pretty rough, and the fact that editing a route changes its order in the list practically necessitates folders. At the very least being able to sort them by name, and execution time estimate are musts.
* There doesn't seem to be a way to tell when routes are malfunctioning at a glance. Adding in something like "time since last completion", "consecutive errorless cycles" and somewhere on the screen something that tells you how many routes are experiencing errors right now would be a huge help. This is a game about scaling things up, and efficiency, players need tools to actually diagnose issues.
* Worker walking paths feel uncontrolled and random once a single path has too many workers on it. This is fixable on small scales by reworking roads, but I can see this being a major choke point later when you have dozens of things that have to share one or more choke points, and when you build larger networks of things, having to rework the whole network because the workers cant be directed to specific paths, and paths have no priority rules you can change, would be really frustrating.
* When manually buying things, shift clicking for 5's is great, but being able to hold the buy button down would be great too.
* Pseudo Idle workers are a problem that isn't well communicated. If a worker is assigned to a task and then makes no progress on that task for several seconds, that's important to know. Its fine not to free up the worker, you can let the player do that, but at least tell them its happening.
* It would be nice to give some of the text (like the text in the tutorial box) some drop shadow or something else to help important information separate from the background layer more.
* Notifications are helpful if you look at them right now, but if you miss them they're useless. A system that lets you easily see when you have one (and go back to read it) would be a huge improvement.
* The fact that I cant see how many planks are made from a log is a problem. Optimization game are all about getting the ratios and math right. Having to study to find out how many, and then commit that to memory will get really taxing as constructions get larger and larger. Just display the numbers somewhere. Same thing goes for how long coal lasts, how long it takes to turn item A into item B at a given work station, etc.
* The screen scroll speed is very slow.

I wish I had more information than "it crashes" but I played the game for about 2-3 hours and during that time it crashed 4 separate times. One of those times it crashed my whole computer. I am running on an ultrawide but its nothing my hardware cant handle. The crashes typically happen while in the act of playing and never at startup, and the game is regularly at 4x speed.