FreeHolder Reviews

Too many bugs, Tried to get a refund but I played a couple more hours than the refund limit.. oh well. Maybe he will fix the game some day..

If you liked Agricola, this is a game for you! It's unique as hell and a challenge to boot! Very promising in its current state, but has lots of bugs. It also probably could use a proper tutorial. But definitely something to keep an eye on!!

Got to say I bought this on the winter sale thinking it was quirky, played it for 10 minutes and dumped it. The following day I tried it again and could not get enough... This game is extremely unforgiving, the non-existent tutorial section and save bugs may make you cry. But, this is the best digital suffering since rimworld. The settings is charming, and the board game feel refreshing. There is a lot going on that I have not even tampered with yet offering much reliability and constant testing. Classes are diverse and seem to be each in their own right a new game experience when selected as a starting character but, not so different as to lock you out of the tried and tested strategies. I very much recommend this game and look forward to new content and bug fixes !

As much as I love survival games, I can't get behind this one in its current version. It's frustrating to navigate and gives no objectives or tutorial to the player.

Brutally difficult. Not sure if I am playing it wrong but genuinely fun to play even if I am bad at it. I desperately want more turn based survival games

At it's core, FreeHolder is a cheap-ish variation (maybe even clone) of a game from [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34505966]Clarus Victoria[/url]. It plays very similarily to Predynastic Egypt except latter actually has decent quality and way more content. And it had a full release just few months after this game came to EA. Freeholder is just painful. It gives you VERY limited options. You have, like, 7-9 action points per turn. Most actions are absolutely random and it is not uncommon to have three in a row to fail completely. If those actions are food gathering you most likely are screwed, since you CANNOT STORE FOOD AS IT SPOILS AT LUDICROUS RATE. And then you start anew. And you reload since MOST OF THE TOWN QUESTS ARE SUPPLYING LUDICROUS AMOUNTS OF FOOD WHICH SPOILS AT LUDICROUS RATE AND YOU CAN MOVE ONLY 5 UNITS PER TURN. And you do all of this with horrible, half-completed UI in a game full of bugs. It goes like this - even if you are doing fine at the beginning, starting disadvantages like this start snowballing and wreck you late in game. EVEN if you are doing well, and usually you aren't. I played for, like, 15 hours and during this time I survived more than a year only once... And this costs around 10$... Well, in my region it's not, it costs, like, 1.5$ on sale - which may or may not be developer's ignorance about local pricing. So i have not THAT much problem with this game and may even play it a bit more - just to find the way to finally cheese it. But obviously i'll never recommend stuff like this to anyone. UPD after 12 more hours of cheesiness: expectedly, after you beat the early game, it becomes laughably easy since all these crippling randomness is negated by higher-level skills. And then it becomes just boring since the main threat to you is unending stream of trashy gifts from friendly cities (lol), which overflows your storeroom and allows really important goods to be damaged by weather. Well, this game is complete mess and judging from update speed it will stay this way for quiet a while. *Gone to play [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/]Caves of Qud[/url]*

I have been playing games since 1988 and this one takes me back, reminding of me of old school classics like ROTK with so much more added to it and so much more depth. It definitely allows for you to choose your own play style, between the class system and being able to advance in the game by focusing on the aspects you like, or taking to it in a broad manner doing a little bit of everything. It also carries with it some very realistic aspects like some of the minor details they've incorperated i.e. nitrogen lvls in the soil. (as a organic veggie farmer irl I dig this) I have definitely invested in some flops, and this is not one of them with a good replay value even at the alpha stage this is something I have to recommend.

This is a game that made me think: "Huh, this is new! I like it." I've seen a random youtube letsplayer playing it and just fell in love. It's puts some good old mechanics into new context and setting and also brings something new to the table. I really recommend to put this game on your wishlist and see what it becomes when it's release. It's got a really good potential to give you hours and hours of fun for a humble price. As of ALPHA 2 (aug 2016), gameplay base seems solid, but some branches need work. As I understood, lots of content, mid-game and late-game stuff is going to be implemented in future builds. Art style is cute at places, though I think it needs a lot of cycles of art/graphics polishing to become something really wonderful.

I've waited for six and a half years for this one to leave early access and it hasn't, so I figured that it was time to give it a shot. Unfortunately, it plays out exactly like what you'd expect out of a nearly abandoned and unfocused design effort. Once windows started opening up and obscuring the screen that I couldn't manage to close, I gave up. Obviously don't pay money for this.

Game is unique and really enjoyable, though buggy. Has that 'one more turn' feeling. For a couple of years, the dev (a one-person team) made infrequent updates as life took precedence. But there hasn't been a serious update in a year. I would assume this game has been abandoned until there are new updates. All of that said, I have a lot of respect for the dev. To come up with a good, new idea and even get it this far without a full team is notable. If you want a few hours of something different, I would say to get it, but don't expect a full experience.