Foundation Reviews

Tax! them peasants! I require more wine! This is like alpha manor lords with more content, Game finally fully released more complete more done game, content wise is fun can give you between 10-100 hours depend on what is fun to you. Building village, small town, or mighty castle with army etc. i played 16hour of early access played couple more after full release not that much added since last time i played but they really added depth into millitary missions, UI, Looked clean before now looks even cleaner. Everything about the game is on point and progression feels fun you can see your village becoming more into kingdom of yourself! Ofcourse there are some things that are quite annoying, like city wall creation is down bad, Crashes a lot after full release hope they fix it, Since i did not find new content for me to replay fully. I will suggest this game if you love creation of your own Medieval Village-Town-City-Castle whatever you call. You can trade, do some missions and expand on production, army and religious endeavours and reach beyond power in the foundation of your creation! Note: wait for discounts i would suggest :)

Very cute and cozy little village builder. The devs had some good ideas and i can see what they were intending to achieve, however unfortunately the game is still completely riddled with bugs or features that don't work nearly as well as they should. A lot of very needed features just aren't there. Like citizens automatically moving to places closer to their workplace. By the time you progress out of the very early game, you are constantly bombarded by "not enough housing" notifications due to citizens not being able to find a home close to their workplace, despite there being houses literally next to their workplace with enough space left inside. Its also very annoying that citizens will find their own paths and generate them that way. Its a cool idea but at the same time they also absolutely refuse to build houses ontop of old pathways, so you have to wait 1-2h+ for them to slowly disappear before they will build there. Speaking of paths, the citizens require you to build watchposts which will send out patrols to make them happy, however you can not select how exactly they will patrol. They always do a doomstack of all patrollers available that will then move in a huge group. You can only set the general zone they should patrol, but they will find their own paths which often leads to some houses not getting enough patrols to satisfy their needs, simply because the doomstack decides to move close and then turn back instead of properly reaching the house. This zoning also brings another issue: If you split up your village, like you are supposed to, then guards from village 1 will move to village 2 to patrol there and immediately return because they spent too much time travelling, despite village 2 having its own watchtower with its own patrollers... who do the same. Even if the zones between these two arent connected, they will still move like this. The game is also extremely slow. I am pretty much permanently playing at x3 speed and the game is still mostly just waiting and not doing anything because everything happens at such a slow pace. Sure it speeds up in the endgame because your productions become several times bigger, but it makes the early game a terrible slog. But these are just a few annoying examples, there are so so many more. Nothing is really working as it should. Everything is either broken or missing crucial QoL features. You can't even close menus with ESC!

Looks good at first glance, it has plenty of cool features and the style is nice too... but it has bugs, it crashes frequently, it's graphics are unoptiimized, the UI makes the city managing tedious and hard. Citizens keep getting stuck, the problem warnings are constantly popping up (it's a good thing to be notified, but do I want an alarm every time a single citizen can't find it's way home?!). The zoning tool is a good idea, but very soon they'll overlap and you can't make any sense of it. It has a good foundation for a good game, but it is just not there currently. It was in early access so long, I don't get it how it came out as this hot mess of a game.

Its a really fun and addicting game, especially when you start to understand the game more and more and really start to see your village grow in to a big and powerful empire. One downside to this game is that it crashes out of nowhere and it happens at the worst timing every time. I've played it for a couple hours now and as i'm writing this it has crashed about 6 to 8 times for me.

This is a tough review because I really like the game. Unfortunately, the game's current state is abysmal. If this game was still in early access, I would be able to recommend it based on where it is now. However, I am concerned about this games future given the Dev's decision to launch this "1.0" build. The game-play is fun but all the systems and supply chains are very shallow. The 'rustic food' production, for example, quickly results in spamming the same fishing hut or gatherer hut 10 times, with no real way to improve existing buildings or supply chain. You villagers never stop needing the lower level 'Rustic Food,' so you are stuck adding more and more huts. The 'monument' buildings are fun at first. It is essentially Lego pieces that you build your big buildings (Church, Castle, Manor, etc) with. The lack of variety of the building blocks quickly becomes apparent though. Especially when you have a larger city and need to have the same monuments multiple times. The 'edit' building mode that you use to make these buildings is the source of many headaches. The mode constantly causes crashes in the middle of building your giant castle that you spend 20+ minutes decorating. The game's performance is rough. Especially as you start getting to 300+ villagers. With a RTX 4080 and a 7800X3D at 1440p, I am getting sub 50FPS with big frame spikes. The game also randomly pins my CPU and GPU at 100%. Overall, I would say this game is fun when it works correctly and frustrating most of the time. The Dev's may say it left early access, but the game does not. I do not think this game is currently worth the $35. I have to give this game a 'not recommended' but I hope that the team is able to turn it around. My plan is to revisit this game in April when hopefully some issues are resolved.

I enjoyed my time with the early access version of this game and was looking forward to playing more now that it's out in 1.0, but unfortunately the new update has cut my frame rate in half - on a system that can easily run Cyberpunk or Anno 1800 at a solid 120+ FPS, I'm now barely cracking 60 on even a relatively small village. I have no idea if this is a bug that will eventually be fixed, or if the developers really decided to tank performance in favor of minor graphical upgrades, but either way it's a serious disappointment.

At it's core, this game has a solid foundation. ;) I've really enjoyed this game so far. The only thing that stopped me from playing until the sun came up was the CTDs. I've encountered 3 of them in the 15 hours I've played. Hopefully those get fixed soon. There are also some production chains that need to be tweaked (wheat to flour to bread ratios seem off). I never played the pre 1.0 version of this game so I don't know what it was like before. I know there are some who don't like the changes that were made for the 1.0 version. There are complaints about optimization, which I can agree with. I've read that how trees are rendered and their shadows are probably a huge factor (there's a lot of trees!). I'm not an expert, just a gamer who likes pretty scenery. There are some things that aren't explained well in the game. For example, I've read that some people misintepreted the "remove resources" command to mean "harvest resources" and were confused why the resources disappeared forever (d'oh!). For myself, I don't quite understand the difference between having patrollers vs. guards as they feel redundant. There are a few other minor things that I'm still unsure about.

I've been playing this game for some time now, and what's so fantastic to this game, is that it is relaxing. I have a busy life. But this game takes the edge of, and doesn't interfere with my busy life. I have it on during saturdays and sundays and can occasionally walk away from the PC to do something else, and come back to find my wealth has risen or my construction project is finished. Love the game! Can't wait for the Full release to go live!

At the time of writing this review, I have 500 hours+ in early access, I have played the full release demo and I a few hours in the full release game. I absolutely recommend this game! It is a fantastic medieval city builder, with very intuitive building, decoration, expanding, resource gathering, trading, upgrading tree, progression with both buildings and higher tiers of citizens, quests and challenging achievements. The way you can basically generate entirely your own maps and change the ruleset for your games for it to suit you, gives you the abilitiy to play the game almost exactly like you want. I also like the military system of the game, where your military is necessary as passive bonuses for your cities, such as patrols. You can also send them on missions “off-screen”, where they can return with amazing loot if successful. The only thing this game is lacking when you compare it to other games, is fighting. There is no fighting on-screen in this game - which I like! (think Manor Lords on “peaceful”). The art style is cozy but less realistic, the design of the buildings and the freedom to create whatever city you want is amazing. The game is also easily mod-able if you want to add even more options! I would say this game beats out any other city builder in this format, including Manor Lords, Ostriv, Banished, Farthest Frontiers or Dawn of Man, just to mention a few. NB! READ THIS! The only thing I dislike about this game is its poor optimization. The game will simply eat your hardware in its current state. Currently, the game will take my GPU to literally 100% utility, like it’s running a benchmark. The game will do the same with your CPU, if that’s your bottleneck for more frames. My CPU at one point actually got hotter running this game than running a Cinebench benchmark. The game luckily has implemented a FPS/Framerate limit. Use this, and set it to 10-20 below what you can run, and it will save your hardware. There isn't a brightness slider in the video options either, and since the game doesn't support HDR, I have to manually increase brightness in the HDR settings when playing this game, then back when playing something else. I hope the devs this year spend most of their time tuning the performance and adding additional options in the graphics menu, as the game itself is a fantastic and complete game (finally)!

GRIDLESS BUILDING Not many gridless village builders. This one is one of the best especially with the new customization options and sandbox settings. Generate your own maps as well. TRY IT BEFORE YOU BUY IT Oh and there is a demo. Devs who include demos for their games deserve extra kudos IMO. 8 thumbs up.