I didn't like it at all when it first launched into early access. I saw it's been there for over a year now and added a few updates, some of which sounded like it might be pushing the game in a direction I might enjoy playing, but after spending several more hours overnight on the game, I plan to uninstall it and relegate it to being another city builder I don't like or plan to play again.

I think it's overly complicated to the point of being more tedious and micro managing focused than actually enjoyable. So many core aspects of the game are things I don't wanna deal with in most city builders-thinks like crop rotation to preserve the soil or making sure it's not too sandy or got too much clay and all that. Rat catchers to protect grain silos which are different from root cellars and needed to store different kinds of food. The whole food management system to begin with-I thought I would grow to at least tolerate it, but it annoys me seeing how many different things I'm going to have to build just to manage basic things and then after they're built, I have to keep checking back up on them and moving around their work area because they're depleting the resources in the area.

It's a whole slew of systems I could tolerate in a game like Against the Storm because that's more of a roguelite city builder and the maps/runs don't last that long, but it's clear you're meant to stick with these cities for dozens of hours or more at a time. It's not fun having to come back and check on so many things while I'm also trying to keep track of so many other things. It feels more like a stressful day at work being pulled in too many directions at once than a fun game to spend time on.

Making sure the hunter is producing enough hides to supply your town with coats and shoes for the cobbler and tannery to make, plus ensuring you keep adding new trees to be marked for harvesting because in the first few years of the game, you have no means to replant trees-you're just slowly getting rid of all the ones in your immediate area. And you need those trees for the ground water they help maintain, so chopping them down for wood screws you over there. Building all but one type of decoration to improve the visual appeal of your city costs gold and 3 years into the game I don't even know how to produce gold ingots. I only just upgraded my town center to level 2 cause I couldn't produce enough planks from wood to upgrade it. You need it to make so many other buildings before you can upgrade your town hall to unlock more buildings. The game now wants me to make a school and I see all the other buildings I unlocked alongside it and the gold ingots cost to build the school and I'm out. I'm done with this game. I'll just go play City Skylines again if I wanna go through all the minutia of building a city. This is overly tedious and complex to the point of being frustratingly annoying.

If you like this game and can get into it, great for you. It is not for me. I much prefer more relaxing city builders like Kingdoms Reborn or Banished. This stuff isn't for me-it's for the people who like to micromanage every little aspect of their town every second they're playing. I unfortunately spent most of my time thinking profanities about this game and wondering if it's at least going to be less frustrating once I get the basic buildings set up and figure out how to start upgrading and expanding my town.

Surprisingly bad performance and some odd technical bug that makes the game freeze every time you click on a building

"Farthest Frontier", "Fabledom", "Foundation" : Three medieval era settlement builders, these are the ones I consider above average, but still have problems as they coming out of Early Access. Farthest Frontier: is the most graphically impressive, but that comes at a cost as the game starts to struggle with performance in the mid game. It also has my least favorite harvest system, as you to mark the areas where harvesting is allowed and as the resources get used up(which is fairly quickly) you have to set new harvesting areas. This creates a lot of boring busy work and forgetting to set a new area can you cause issues as you suddenly find shortages of necessary material and food. Fabledom: is the most cutesy of the three, a nice fairytale aesthetic, but I do not like the tax system and the game lacks late game content. The tax system works similar to others, the more citizens you have the more revenue you get, the problem is this is your ONLY stable way of getting funds. Your settlement has growth levels and as it grows you not only have to pay money for building upkeep, but also a tithe to your family and I found that this tithe ramps up more than the taxes you can collect. Also, there might be some bugs with the system, as when I assign new citizens to jobs I suddenly lose money, which makes no sense, as them doing business should create tax revenue, not reduce it. There is a military and Hero you can setup to do quests for neighboring kingdoms, but I find the system to be barebones and a lot of times, they don't have anything to do, but sit around and drain my money (as they all have upkeep costs). Foundation: Similar to Fabledom, but without the Fairy tale aesthetic, the game still looks good and is a standard chill medieval settlement builder/grower. It is solid is and doesn't have a "twist" on the formula, but that also means it isn't trying to stretch what it is creating a mess. My rating on all of these games = 6/10 These are above average settlement builders, that still have some problems, but are more enjoyable and playable than the others (at least for me). I was able to build 1-2 settlements to close to the end with each before I got bored, which translates to 12-24 hours of playtime. If you want some settlement builders for cheap and to just relax and build (no disaster stress, like Frostpunk), these are worth picking up on sale and playing for a weekend.