Foundation Reviews

Excellent base for a chill management game. Some system could be improved (guards...) but dev updates seem to improve each pain point over time and bring nice QoL Worth the price for the time passed looking at my city grow.

super cool take on city builders. Game is chill and you can get creative with building the monuments to make it all pretty. I hope they will add more stuff to the game

I have bit of a love hate relationship with the game. It has great base but certain things do need some tuning. Like when you promote villages they complain about not having access to entertainment even when walking past empty tavern. There is sweet spot in game where you get and then it seems to start falling apart no matter how evenly you build and promote etc. I would like more options to things like entertainment. Its still fun game to play and obviously it has kept me playing over 100 hours by far. Its easy to learn and gives lot of options how to manage your little kingdom

absolutely amazing game, feels like a medieval version of city skylines but with a bit more customization. you can build custom churches, manors, castles and dozens of more buildings. ive played this for hours and plan on playing alot more. hopefully more is added!

Between a UI that offers incomplete or unactionable information about issues (failed pathing? What was the issue? No can tell; the game only points you at who it was and where they were going. Blow things up until it works again!), buggy and fiddly modular buildings, and an agent based simulation with insufficient agent control (a serf is homeless while there is available housing near where they work, but they won't choose to live there and I can't make them, so I guess they'll just stay homeless and complaining then) this game makes for a frustrating management experience at most stages of gameplay. When you add on the wonky house zoning (large areas of desirable land in the middle of a town get no houses for no apparent reason and most of the build housing plots are so empty that you can build whole other buildings on them, just don't delete anything or it will all implode) and inscrutable agents (what do the work levels do? Nobody knows! Why do they spend all their time walking halfway across the map to sit on a bench in my Manor? A mystery!) it really seems like the game is slightly less than half baked even after 1.0.

I purchased the game during Early Access, and at the time I understood that having some bugs was normal. However, after starting a new game and investing many hours, I’ve run into an issue that has become very frustrating. When a house is upgraded to level 2 because of a certain resident, and that resident later moves out, the house automatically downgrades. This creates a repetitive loop: the house downgrades, I have to spend materials and time to upgrade it again, another eligible resident moves in, it upgrades again, then they leave, and the cycle repeats. I would suggest adding a setting or mechanic that allows a house to remain at level 2 even if the resident leaves. This would reduce unnecessary micromanagement and make the late game more enjoyable. I’ve played for over 250 hours and really enjoy the game, but in the late game, this loop becomes tedious and takes away from the fun.

I attempted 3 different playthrough and every single I ran into so many 'Villager path blocked' errors that my cities fell apart. Often my churches become partially unaccessible (e.g. 10 weekly visitors despite having room for many more) which is the primary cause of the cities' downfall, but many other buildings also have the same error constantly. It really sucks how nothing I tried could fix it either

Fun city builder with a nice art style. always a good time slapping together a city, wish there was a day/night cycle and weather without a mod tho

There are a few bugs that really are silly and haven't been fixed yet, but nothing major that would prevent you from playing. Also there isn't really any sort of storytelling, just very functional quests that aren't suitable to really soak you into the world, which never really develops any sort of character. After all, it's really just a sandbox, and the maps are allways randomly generated. Some handmade ones would definitely be a nice addition. BUT....let's not talk about why Foundation isn't a 100% perfect game. Because it's at least perfect in the core elements that it actually tries to be good at: what you get is a really addictive medieval city builder, that sets itself apart from the competition by giving you a ton of building parts and decorations and whatnot so that you can not just place building XYZ, but instead customize it and make it unique. Even more so when it comes to the construction of bigger structures such as castles, monasteries or city halls. Small ingame quests work as a constant tutorial on what parts of the production line you should work on next, and also encourage you to actually put at least some decoration to at least increase your prestige to the minimum level needed to move along. But I suggest that while you expand your settlement, you take your time to be creative. When you actually work on making things look nice, you get a level of freedom and creativity that I have never seen before in any other game, not even Manor Lords. That's the biggest strong point of this game. There's no active combat, nor do you need much strategic thinking to beat even the challenges on highest difficulty. But you can use this game as a digital canvas to really create some awesome looking architecture, rebuild historical sites, try out different town setups, and so on. If you're interested in that, Foundation will definitely get you hooked. Overall rating: 9/10

The inability to manually assign villagers to specific houses completely kills the late game when your city really starts to sprawl and every meter matters, doubly so if you stick with the vanilla 150m limit for distance from house to jobs and have any decent size rivers between your center and quarries. As I understand from reading online the house needs to actually be about in the middle of both jobs and markets/services which if true and using the same radius makes this even worse. I really love the game overall but this alone pretty much completely kills my enjoyment of it and just turns it into an infuriating experience as my quarry workers continually ignore the 2/10 occupant high density housing right across the river until they get so many compounding unhappiness bonuses they just leave.