Recent reviews by The John of Strategy

Got this game, played it. Instantly love it. Played for about 20 hours on a friends computer and decided to buy it.
Change nothing, just make more. I recently learned it is made by one person or a small group of people. Whomever you may be: take your time brother of gamers, what ever it is you are doing, just keep doing THAT, it is working.

Solid for the 25 bucks i payed for it.

+ Looks good
+ Fairly relaxing once you understand how the farms work
+ harvesting resources etc fairly unique

- Trading mechanic is rather annoying and limited (only 2 traders capped, merchants are random and don't stay very long)
- Some things are unnecessarily expensive to upgrade (stone roads and walls) and don't provide much benefit
- "klunky optimal" placement of some buildings (market and rat catchers, theaters) gives the best result but an ugly city. Larger radius' for ammenities buildings and proper placement of roads should be stimulated more imo.
- Trees regrow a tad too slow on some maps for longer sustained playthroughs even with work camps
- Combat feels misplaced. Either have a game with proper armies (rts) or don't. Again a flavor thing but the guard houses and soldiers are so expensive that properly defending against raids is a micro intense and fairly annoying thing to do after a while. (constantly disabling and enabling watchtowers, etc). With cheaper defenses and more waves it would be a fun feature (city survival type thing), now it just misses the spot.

Overal: Positive and fun. Recommended.

+ Unique in many ways (pollution and population of animals and plants is a very cool game mechanic and not just a gimmick)
+ Unique progression (decorating house and eating better foods in balanced way)
+ Can easily play for 200+ hours before game starts to feel a bit grindy
+ Both fun coop and singleplayer

- A bit grindy after a while
- Best played with a community, which can be hard to find
- Some features feel unfinished (fishing and hunting are very basic, among others)
- Building mechanic can be a bit annoying (placing blocks can be a nightmare sometimes)

Played for 15 minutes and decided to park it for now. Probably refund it later. I plan to grab it when its on sale.

Its a good game with a lot of different options making it a fairly unique experience for a total war game. Not worth the current full price. I'd pick it up for 25 easily, for 30 probably and for 40 MAYBE.

Wait for a sale, I'm gonna grab it when its 30 bucks (christmas sale perhaps?) or less and you can probably get 4 decent campaigns out of it.

Was a good game, but then they made changes. I wanted to come back to it after not playing for a year or 2 and now its just horrible.

Still best game ever made. Content is content. I enjoyed it. Inflation is a thing. Buy it if you like it, don't if you don't like it. simple enough. I've payed 120 bucks for a couple of dnd books...

Fun for both solo and 2-3 player coop.

10 hours in. Free to play. Game has been out for about 5 years as i understand it.
For free to play it is fun. You can sail around, do some trade and combat is simple and intuitive. Mechanics are decent, not great, UI is a bit hard to grasp at first but also simple. It was fun so far. I would not spend a single dollar on this game at this stage, perhaps if i end up playing it more than 50 hours i would look into buying the admirality DLC, just to support the servers that host this thing, but beyond that it's just a fine game. Not great, but fun enough.

The game is great. Although a bit too much technical stuff for my taste, it's still the best of this type of game in my opinion. For those who want to tinker in creative mode or come up with complex systems this game is perfect. For those that are looking to just chill in a colony of pixeldudes, it's fine.