Recent reviews by sascha.pascal

I have asked for a refund for this game, because it's a real bad game, even after the "great update", that deleted any achievement by anybody in the game.

Yes, you can hunt or grow chickens or pigs - but in reality it's mostly a waste of time, because they give you so few money, that you cannot even earn good stable etc.

The forced tutorial is in reality not teaching you anything - only where the shops are and how to use the automatic saw, But it is still forced and you are even forced to destroy your old grandmas house, instead of for example repairing it. Rebuild is not possible, only the rebuild of some stupid preparated bad looking houses. Oh and no, you don't "build" them, you just grind wood, buy metal and cement and then the house is magically there - even in the former version is was better, where you at least built the walls before the house magically appears.

This game is obviously not EA but only a alpha status game that the company pushed into EA to gain money.

The game is in an early stage, so there are many details that are still missing - but often you just need a Mod to get your wishes, like when you don't want to only have one trolley bus, the modders can provide you with several busses from all areas. The same with buildings etc.

The Game itself is like a mixture out of the Settlers, Sim City/Cities Skylinies and Transport Tycoon. You really have to do ALL the stuff. It's not like Sim City, where you tell them: "here is your residential area, build your hut", but you have to decide which house goes where. So you can be much more realistic than in typical building games - you can build a village or a mega city (when your PC is able to handle the people) in your design.

Also it's like the Settlers - yes, you can play it easy by just buying contractors from the outside world to build your buildings. But when you want to have it the hard way, you can also start by building a small construction office by money and ONE hut (both are available as mods) and then you build your city up from the ground. My city at the moment is planned for over 20.000 people - but most is yellow, as I'm still in the building up phase - and I even haven't started to plan out the real capital of my small socialistic "paradise".

Also it's like transport tycoon and industry tycoon on heavy mode: You are not only building the factories - you also have to provide them with truck lines that feed them. And feed the people. And the people need public transport to get to the job. And so on.

But as the game is in an early stage, it also has still many problems:

1. Your people are stupid as they can be. Even when you have 100% of them given university training, they are still not intelligent enough to go into the most important parts of your town first, like electricity production, mines, heating plants (russian winter is really dangerous in this game, you can lose a well running city in one month without heating). You need to assign at least one house exclusively to your most important plants like heating plant, electricity plant etc. so that they will work. You can import resources etc - but when you have nobody working in the factory, your stuck of coal will do nothing.

2. Build first your houses - with space where you want to have the road - and then the road, electricity lines etc - It's with most houses and factories quite impossible to build them when you have build your transportation grid first. Also because of the realism - you will not have neatly fitting buildings and roads - curves need space, as well as you can't use any point on a road to attach a new pathway.

3. Be aware of the bare minimum your comrades need: Electricity, Heating (most important in winter), food, clothes (Americano Jeans are a workers dream it seems), a church or a bar (if you prefer to have your people being drunk or christian) and a Kindergarten, schools and some kind of entertainment are most important - you give it to them, they will love you, even when they have to live in small huts. Well, better than the Gulag (but you could also build one :D)

4. If you want to have anything liberal in this game, like democracy, rights for minorities, etc - you will not love this game. This is a realistic socialism simulator game! Not a "how I think socialism should be" game. When you want fancy houses with caribbean vibes and humour - there is another franchise of building game existing, where you can play dictator in tropical paradise. And yes, I put it into "negative" as a warning for those, who might otherwise be annoyed that their woke dreams cannot become reality in mother sowjet russia. Although I'm glad, that I cannot build prisons for political imprisonment. I don't need it too realistic.

So in the end, when you want to play an early access game that really takes time and effort to play, but gifts you with nice looking socialistic prefab cities (I never said pretty), where you want to microorganize everything and try to survive russia winter - this is a game for you.

When you want to have your fancy, easy to play city builder, where all people are happy - play another game. There is a reason that there are walls implemented in this game ;)