Of Life and Land Steam Charts & Stats

I just couldn't get hooked, the game seemed to run great no issues on the performance. What it did lack was some understanding of what's going on. At some points seemed my villagers weren't doing anything and the notifications that they were building, farming, gathering and other tasks seem to leave me in the dark. I had to constantly check not only on the town but also exactly what the villagers were doing in the town. You can set employees and also fire people and such, which kinda lead to a over complicated set of working rules. Maybe its just me and my casual gaming experience with games but it just wasn't for me. I kinda like when a few things happen without management in Sim games. Still give it a try I would say, I've submitted a return as its just not for me.

A massive recommendation! This is NOT banished, but 100% a spiritual sequel. It feels in many ways the same, with a sensible amount of buildings, sensible amount of resources, not too micro-managey, while not too "far away" like sim-city. A nice pace. Some games you leave on max speed for 1h real time, barely checking in. This you put on max speed for a small minute, check in, do a few things, and even keep the mid-speed for a while. BEST part: Devs are very active on steam discussions and discord and WILL listen to you. Only critique I have is that some elements of the game is poorly explained (which is I why I made I guide for some things, because I want more people to enjoy this) EDIT: I 100%'d the game now at 67hours. Probably the best city builder since Banished!

I love city building games. Seeing a tiny village grow into a bustling city is fun. I spent a lot of time on this game in a span of like 3 days and had so much fun trying to figure out all the small details of the game mechanics and how to make my city boom. I even slightly regret buying the game on sale , cause this game deserves WAY more attention and way more purchases. Ill be waiting for the supporter pack to go off sale before my purchase :)

I would not recommend this game to anybody. Save your money and buy something else or put it in a savings account. The game has a lot of issues from resource collecting to no freeplay mode. You have to pick from 6 scenarios, can't adjust the maps etc. no seeds to get randomized maps. It really should not have been released.

This is a good game, with some flaws as with any game, but the developer is very active and quick to make changes to try and improve the game. I like the different approach this game takes as well, with limits on wildlife and such that can be over hunted and run out. The art style is nice and overall I've had no crashes in 11 hours. If this game continues to develop, it has the potential to be one of the best games in this sub genre of city survival games, and I have seen no reason to believe it won't with how active and responsive the dev is to feedback.

To lead off with a TLDR, after over 180 hours as of writing this, I would give it an 8.5 out of 10. It’s an amazing game that nails all the core things it was aiming for and gives you a few extra good surprises on top with mostly only small quality of life things holding it back from scoring higher in my opinion. TLDR out of the way for those still interested read on... THE GREAT BITS -- The gameplay depth is very deep with a lot of things going on under the hood. There is so many things to juggle it can be very overwhelming at first if approaching it the same way as a more routine city builder that doesn’t have a robust nature simulation also built into it. Understanding ground water, how to block the blazing heat in a desert, turning pollution into positive resources, prevent starving wild animals from eating your farms, making your villagers not run off into the wilds in winter, how to keep the wild life in check and so very much more. Once it all clicks, it is super rewarding to see your little pixel people conquer nature and build a rock solid village after you grasp managing everything. The developer is responsive and on top of things, frequently talking to the community and improving the games quality of life. THE GOOD BITS -- This title did a few things that were refreshing. Having multiple maps with different biomes was neat, so you’re not just turtled on one map, but can establish more settlements to build a trade network with your own cities across maps. And how you go into each biome is very varied. How you manage your pixel people in a drought heavy desert with high temps differs wildly from a perpetually cold mountain, and the fact you can enjoy both on the same game session gives it some nice variety. Do you build up the other maps to sprawling cities or do you just make them into mining towns to feed your main city resources, fun choices to be had. The music is solid, which is a good thing since you’ll probably be listening to it for oh so many hours. Just be sure to change the streamer option to hear the extended music library, which is a nice touch to save anyone from YouTube or others wrath. There’s plenty of data available to the player to understand what’s going on and why. The cause of death for your pixel people, resource displays, census graphs, various terrain map views and visual cues are just some of the many means to help you out. Having an editor is also a good thing for the longevity of the game. THE IFFY BITS -- Like most games of this genre, when things scale up little annoyances start to become big annoyances. While your pixel people are pretty smart and handle most actions well automatically, you do occasionally need to step in to manage them. Which correcting which house they live in or which job is more critical isn’t so bad with a small settlement on a single map, once you have a thousand people and five maps spinning at once it becomes very tedious to flip back and forth correcting them. While the core menus are great, a good chunk of menus don’t feel as polished and robust as you’d want. There’s also issues telling when something is a button verse just static data for you to read. Some buttons can be microscopic, some data points like the census don’t directly just you specific numbers, other bits you need to tab out of the game to the wiki for information. Just a lot of tiny quality of life things, all of which adds to the learning curve and detracts from the experience some. If the terrain is crowded with trees and buildings or certain map effects it can be very hard to see what you’re doing. Adds some annoyance when trying to line up your tetris piece building in and out paths. Diplomacy system to me doesn’t fully mesh well with the heart of the game’s simulation and city building. The quests also can be a bit weird in later scenarios with pacing pain points. THE BAD BIT – There’s nothing in the game I myself would consider bad or that make it unplayable. However dear reader, if you are not the type of gamer like me who wants to spend some hours experimenting and learning the finer mechanics and interactions of the simulation part to problem solve, then that learning curve could be a big turn off. As always, to those who made it through the wall of text. I salute you! Cheers.

been playing this game constantly for the last two weeks or so. the updates keep making it even better. highly recommend! update: after reading a lot of other reviews, i see people complaining about not understanding mechanics, no explanations, etc. part of why i like this game so much is that it felt like understanding the mechanics was a little bit of a puzzle in itself. at first, i didn't understand why certain things weren't happening - but the somewhat cryptic statement "everyone is always trying to fulfill their needs" is completely accurate. it sometimes takes a bit of analysis on why things are happening but it ALWAYS makes sense.

The tutorial for this game is overwhelming and confusing. I lost my desire to play because things were explained so poorly :(

This is mildly positive, I wish I could leave a neutral review. Had lots of fun for a good while, until the cracks started to show. There's a number of UI functions that are missing that would make the game much more enjoyable to play .. if I plan out paths I want to eventually build, and then prioritize some bit of it, I need to click on every individual square of the path and increase its priority, there is no tool to set priority for an area. There is no job to generally construct other buildings, I can assign individual construction spots, but that becomes unmaintainable very quickly, especially when every bit of road is an unique construction spot. As you can't directly manage the people you'd expect them to at least have some basic self-preservation capabilities, but no, they'd happily freeze to death etc. rather than seek heat, or take one of the 500 available firewood to their homes. They will also not eat even when you have plenty of food available. The automation prioritizes every available job the same as any others, and years go past fast. Combined this means your critical workers die of old age, then the game just assigns kids to wash the streets instead of working on the farm feeding everyone. The game often does not follow the principle of least astonishment. The UI feels clunky, where if you want to enter a number to a field with a placeholder value, you're first editing the placeholder value of 10000, and if you clear it it gets reset to 1, meaning it's hard to just enter the value you want reliably. When you want to transfer 8 people + supplies to a new zone to have them start a new settlement, and you accidentally enter 1000 copper bars, none of the supplies get transferred but the 8 people go there on their own and freeze to death with no supplies. With no supplies they can't construct a single thing, no homes, no woodcutting spots, nothing, so nothing happens until you realize that the transfer isn't completing. The tracking is hidden in a secondary tab of the map, not shown anywhere on the screen. You will notice this when your settlers die from the cold etc. Then you manage to get things working well by manually going through every single settler's life, assigning their home, which places they work on for a sensible workflow - work in the bakery, if you can't then in the mill, if you can't then on the wheat farm. Which is great, until again, someone dies of old age or something and now you have no idea which job is missing and if you can figure it out you'd have to again manually find someone to do these jobs. Lots of promise, but I don't think I'll be playing any more of it unless there are major improvements.

First of all, couple of advices: do not build to much in one go, disable streamer mode in sound settings to expand music collection (if you are not streaming of course) and enjoy the ride. And don't trust migratring chickens. Of Life and Land is an interesting variety of colony building game with focus on balancing out needs and production. At the moment of review I've played this game for over 30 hours and restarted starting map several times upon realisation that I did something wrong and my next settlement would be better with newly acquired understanding. While I realise, that this is not everyoune's cup of tea, it granted me experience I lacked in the genre before. Even though I still has not reached the endgame, I have a pretty decent settlement trading with all other settlments on map, This game could be a little slow-paced, altough you can increase game spead very much (the fastest option is not even marked in hotkeys from the get-go). For me Of Life and Land is a good lesson in planning priorities, accepting challenges of the surrounding landscape and nature impact with great moments of realisation where pieces of production chain click together. Would recommended to those who enjoy colony sims and ANNO series but want something a little bit different to scratch the itch and play from a bit different angle. I will continue playing until I finish my self-set goals and most likely return to this game in the future - especially if devs will make a new content.