Technotopia Reviews

Loved Technotopia! Alawar always delivers unique and addictive games, and this one is no exception. Definitely worth playing!

Fun, charming puzzler! I was only half-paying attention to what I was doing during the first few hours of learning the game, and my lack of focus was neither a detriment to understanding the flow of gameplay nor the aesthetic of the setting and story. By the time I really delved in to enjoy the game, I was quite impressed with the ease of play, lack of constraint on choices, and role-play immersion. Definitely check it out!!!

Smooth music, fun events with nice writing, quite replayable - good fun game for 4-6 hours.

It can get a bit repetitive, and the story is a little predictable, but it's a fun little deck-builder with nice art deco aesthetics. I also know that its Steam Deck compatibility is "Unknown" right now, but my experience has been a pretty positive one, with few adjustments needed.

A very fun game, if a little short. I loved the concept, but the art is what really got me - it's a beautifully done game. It only took me about 6 hours to 100% the achievements, but for $3 (on sale), that's worth it to me.

A high-quality match-n merge game but with a focus on city building and without annoying mobile-game ads. I kind of wish there was a free-play mode or a way for your resources to slowly generate overtime even though it only increases by each turn. The problem I had noticed was even when you had place down new and at times more efficient items you may end up losing more resources compared to you simply attempting to combine single or double blocks or columns & rows due to it costing more blocks on certain areas in order for the structure to finish building. It also appears as if the amount that the resource cost increases appears to become too aggressive combined with the limited placement per round that seems to make it so that you can only complete a certain amount of missions per run. I'm not sure if this was done on purpose so that you can't complete them all in a single-run, but it kind of proves that the game sort of cheats you from "completing a run" (yes I understand that this is a card game with randomization but the game play mechanics seem to enforce repetition rather than to promote creativity and strategy). The final issue I had was the performance, I have six gigabytes of VRAM and this game seems to have issues, also I cannot disable V-sync nor can I disable Anti-Aliasing. I cannot say that this has a high replayability value considering that this game forces you to continue playing over and over again in order to finish the campaign and it doesn't have any difficulty settings so there's no real reason to replay the tedious game. I recommend this game because it has a neat concept and has an interesting art-style that can keep your attention span for over an hour, however even though I recommend it I cannot give it more than three out of five stars. Scores: Graphics: (3) Interesting but nothing too fancy Performance: (2) Needs optimization at times, since it seems to drop whenever you tilt the camera left or right. This could possible Gameplay style: (3) An interesting take upon the popular mobile sub-genre of match-and-merge (like Merge Dragons) mixed with a city-builder (like SimCity). Cigars needed to pay attention: (2-Almost Severe) 8 cigarette shaped cigars (plenty of nicotine for the day) Repetition worry: (1-Severe) Strategy can only take you so far because you're limited by the game's annoying mechanics which forces you into another run and no this isn't because this is a card game with shuffled cards. Originality: (3.5) While I have not seen any other city-builders, card games, nor match-and-merge games like this, the annoying mechanic of having to worry about running out of resources seems to be just as annoying as having to pay money in order to progress in their mobile games. Implementation & Gameplay Effectiveness: (1.5) As stated before, the fact that it limits your progress artificially and how the upgraded structures require even more structures to place down, makes it feels quite futile in using them, especially when you're in later stages rounds which dramatically raise your resource debts. Average Score: 43% or 2.15 Stars Recommendation: Critical Review but Recommended

I really liked the unique and beautiful Art Deco style of the game. It´s a boardgame-like logic and optimisation game with a bit of story behind it.

I like the game, the aesthetics are nice and gameplay is relaxing. Sadly, the game keeps crashing on loading my save after finishing the story line as well as during the campaign in a second save slot. Gee, work on this, devs! :/ Edit: The crashing seems to start 1-2 hours into a save. I now have 3 non-working saves. Editedit: Crashing occurs even earlier. Verifying files might help for a few minutes but more crashes will come.

Doesn't feel so much "deck building". Gameplay is too shallow. The core mechanics is not fun. If it is not deep strategy game, I would prefer Islander, Dorfromantik or Townscaper that at least you build something beautiful. And for my Alienware laptop the game lags so bad.

The systems for 'balancing' the factions are too basic for any real decision making to occur, the events do not impact the board and the board does not appear to impact the events. The story lines that must be completed to achieve the 'end' state do not reset upon a run ending, meaning any deviation they would impart on your decision making is gone the moment that story mission is complete. The end result is a game that pretends to be a run based puzzle game, but is in reality a click through story game, but the story is not good enough to carry it.