As Far As The Eye Reviews

nicely done city builder in turn based

6.5/10 - Decent Buy on sale. Worth the campaign and a run or two. I can't remember how much I paid for it but about $10 CAD feels reasonable. Really cute game. Pretty decent challenge and strategy. Satisfying to play once you learn. Tip: 1. Start training a druid early. 2. If you can't find your pupils, look for their balloons. If I had anything interesting to say, it would be that the bottlenecks between halts serve to really narrow my focus. I'm not talking about the requirements to reach a halt, I'm talking about the inventory bottlenecks to reach it. I found myself caring less and less about my pupils, their really cool skill trees, and what capabilities I could unlock, because I would likely need to throw away resources anyway to make room for food and the one mobile building I threw together. It's really hard to get extraction up and running without a good supply of food for the beginning of each halt. But the amount of food that requires takes up most of your caravan's inventory, making it hard to build anything right out of the gate. If I could change one small thing that would make the game significantly better, it would be to double the amount of food per stack in the caravan's inventory. That would open up way more possibilities for interesting choices per run on what buildings to make mobile and what resources to take with you.

Absolutely beautiful art style that does not give away the punishing gameplay. In As Far As The Eye, you play as the wind, guiding a nomadic tribe to safe land. I very much enjoy the different take on the resource-management genre, with the journey broken up into multiple halts and obstacles. The short-term goal is simply to make it to the next halt before the step counter runs out and the flood arrives. The non-combative gameplay focuses on harvesting different resources instead, and actually provides a decent goal-oriented focus within which to use them. Since each halt is procedurally generated, with varying amounts of ressources available, planning the journey ahead is essential for a realistic chance of making it to The Eye. Resources must be carefully managed, since they are simultaneously needed for the journey and the progression of the tribe per halt. At the beginning, I often struggled with rations and faced starvation among my Pupils. Only after many hours spent figuring out the mechanics, the gameplay finally started to feel fair. The challenge lies clearly in the fact that mistakes can’t be undone, with the single save file being overridden every turn. Overall, I enjoy the simplicity of the gameplay, setting up camp over and over again, strategically placing buildings, and managing resources. The task-based progression of the tribe fosters a sense of attachment to the success of the Pupils. And I particularly love seeing them shapeshift into animal spirits based on their assigned trades. Although limited, the lore of As Far As The Eye fits seamlessly with the gameplay mechanics. This even makes me appreciate that excess resources gathered and left behind count against the final score, since the Pupils live in harmony with nature.