Recent reviews by Lyklex

Excellent little game to just casually place blocks wherever mindlessly. Unlock more blocks by experimenting placement of blocks. So casual. So chill.

Hands down one of my favorite games of the year. I'm not sure how I came across it, but I played the Demo and I was hooked. It's a great game to come home to and unwind for a round.

Day 1: Ten minutes in and I need a barf bag. For comparison I usually feel this way after 3 hours of Minecraft. Despite this and the terrible dimension lines on the logo, I would still recommend this game. I had already completed the igloo house in the demo, so it was nice that I didn't have to redo that. The foliage was a huge issue for me with the mud house.

Day 2: I made the FOV a higher number and turned down mouse sensitivity, I left the graphics on Ultra. I played an hour and a half before I started feeling sick again trying to build the walls up on the log cabin. I had finished the mud house with no issues, I attribute part of that with taking small strides around the map instead of a full sprint.

When I originally played this game in Spring 2022, it was fantastic. While the game felt rather too easy, it played smoothly. I grew bored after 22 hours but today picked it back up.
I started a new save under the Valley map, and this game has gone rather downhill. After an hour and a half, I struggle to figure out how to fix Serfs getting stuck; Some loop between leaving their workplace and arriving at their workplace while others can't leave their homes or move around a simple tree. I tried pausing productions, firing, and removing workplaces. I also tried adding more Lumber camps and wells to see if I can clear up paths but it gets the builders stuck.
What once felt like a relaxing Banished 3.0 now feels like a heap of movement bugs.

After I bought the Pre-release version and played it for a few hours this summer, I knew this game was going to suck me into its cult. I held off until it released so I could go ham on obtaining achievements. I spent that weekend almost solely playing this game, obtained about a third of the achievements then realized I needed to chill. My boyfriend asked if I joined a cult, no but I started one.

I almost desperately wanted to love this game, but after a 10 hour speed-run of this game, with 63 hours into the oh-so-similar game Banished, there's major reasons why I would suggest Banished over Patron. Also I play both games vanilla/un-modded, but these issues can still be relevant.

1. High Learning Curve. You need to be dedicated to figuring out most of the game on your own, but if you've played Banished this will take about two hours to adjust. The tutorial is honestly a joke. It cuts off far too early to understand all of the mechanics, especially if Patron will be your first survival city-builder. During the tutorial you'll get a prompt to follow, but while you're still working on one it'll keep throwing new lessons at you before you've had time to finish the one you're on. They only cover the basics, but at a rapid pace than what you're doing.

2. Organization of Stock and Placing Buildings. Patron lumps all of your storage across all of your depots and warehouses, which is great but at the same time they include items you don't produce, bulking up the stock menu. You can't sort by category of item type, or locked for production. You can't see an overlay of how multiple versions of a building such as schools cover your map. You have to go to the buildings menu, sort by building, then click each one while taking note by grid where they lay to get a nice layout. Speaking on placing buildings, it's nice that they include efficiency percentage for placement, I just wish it had a heat-map instead of a Hot-Cold guessing game with the percentages. There's really not enough heat-maps.

3. Building Menu versus Banished's Building flip-through. In Banished you can click a button to essentially flip-through all of the related buildings. If I want to go through and see my blacksmith buildings, I can just keep clicking that one button to see the next and it loops. Patron's Building Menu however, is labeled by the three main categories: Housing, Town, and Production. These are tabbed with subtabs of every building + a see-all tab for those categories (Tents, Wooden Houses, Stone Houses, Two-Story House....) As much as I love being able to see all of the buildings at once and their upgrades, there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason as to how they organized the building tabs in the menu. You could argue that they're possibly in order of unlock, but aside from Housing, it's difficult to quickly locate a particular building in the menu. This further complicates trying to oversee your production as it's still faster than clicking random buildings in the vicinity. This is compounded when you own a massive amount of the same building. I started with Wooden Houses, and upgraded any over 200 coins in income to stone. If I had stuck with that method and only upgraded the Stone Houses that were say over 300 coins in income, it would be easier to flip through who gets an upgrade. However, with 50+ of the same house, it's easy to get lost at what house you're looking at in the menu.

4. Not Actually Difficult. As I previously mentioned, I put in 63 hours into Banished, 10 into Patron. I have 46/85 (54%) of the achievements in Patron already, and the locked ones don't sound difficult at all. By Year 10 money was no concern. By Year 30 I have over 100K coins, and 80K items stockpiled. 300 Citizens. In Banished, I struggle for achievements and to keep my little village alive. I have 13 of 36 (36%) of Banished's achievements. I fight to keep the balance of deaths and births with food and clothing production. In Patron, I don't worry about squeezing what work I can out of my citizens, it's easy to have abundance, and it comes early.

Overall, Patron is a Banished copycat, adding in new productions and societal requirements without the struggle of survival difficulty, just the struggle of the User Interface. I hope they resolve some of the issues I've brought up or at least educate someone trying to decide. Thank you.

I know I don't have much time into this game but it's nice to jump on every now and then to relieve some quick stress and take my mind off things.

More bugs than A Bugs Life movie. It freezes often regardless of video quality, roughly every four minutes, up until you CTRL+ALT+DEL then cancel. That fix won't last though, and inevitably, I thought it killed my computer. I'm no tech-wizard, but I had to hard-shut down, let it rest, tried a few more times that evening, and it wouldn't do much more than come up with a black screen and some white lines at the top. I let it rest another three to four days, and my computer is somehow operating again. Needless to say, the first thing I did afterwards was uninstall this game. It's unfortunate that a game that seems so enjoyable, is barely operatable. Also, the quality when you do manage to play it? It's about as bad as playing Sims 2 when you know video quality has improved since 2004.

A game from my childhood that I now kick butt at within a few hours easily. It definitely is a nice game for kids and adults who feel an urge of nostalgia coming on from the early 2000 era.