Recent reviews by Shylock

If you have always dreamed of building your own medieval village, this is your game.
Manor Lords offers a highly customizable experience where you will build up your village(s) from nothing until you have a sprawling city. You will manage food, water and other needs like clothing and luxuries, while also having to use your military to fight against invasions and rival lords (the military part is optional)
The randomly spread ressources allow each gameplay to be a fresh start, and the visuals and soundtrack will definetly keep your eyes and ears glued to the screen.

This game is in Early Access and there are certainly some smaller rough edges that need polishing, but it is still very much playable and enjoyable at its current state

My experience so far:
Severe dehydration, vomited countless times, got bitten by a spider, killed a native with my bare hands

And I haven't even started the game

It's like The SIms, but for history buffs and people who are into incest

This game is filled with unneccessary violence and toxic masculinity - and I loved every minute of it

This is probably the best thing to happen to RimWorld since it's Steam-release or perhaps the Caravan-Update.

Too often, I found myself in the vanilla game and thought "Man, cannibalism isn't all that bad, why are my colonists crying about it?"
But NO MORE, thanks to this incredibly well-thought DLC. Now YOU decide on what your colonists like and dislike, you can spend a lot of time customising your ideoligion until everything is to your liking.
As you may have guessed from the name already, you can create an ideology or a religion, although they function kinda similar. And no worries, if you don't care about the Ideology itself that much, you can use presets, a very barbones Ideoligion or an adaptable one which you can flesh out while playing.

The possibilities truly are endless with this DLC.
Want some christian cattle-herders who sacrifice their animals to god? You can do that.
You want some drug-loving transhumanists who want to get rid of the boundaries of flesh? You can do that.
Or perhaps you want to play some mountain-dwelling cannibals? Also possible. Make them nudists if you want to.

This is such a game changer that everyone who enjoyed RimWorld should definetly buy it.

While this is the "worse" of the two DLC we have for RimWorld today, it still CAN be worth it's price. Before buying, ask yourself those questions:
- Do you like bionic enhancements?
- Do you like the idea of psychic powers that work like magic?
- Are you fine with the idea that, in order to obtain said psychic powers, one of your pawns will become a noble that refuses to do most work types?
- Would you like to build and design a fancy throneroom?

If you answered most of those with "yes", view this review as a recommendation for you. Otherwise, spend your money elsewhere, preferable on the DLC "Ideology"

Original review:
I always wanted to play as post-apocalyptic beaver society.
Thanks to this game, my dream has finally come true

Updated review:
I think this game deserves a more serious review now, simply because it is a great game and a shining example of early access.
But what is this game about?
Beavers. It's all about the beavers, those lovely little creatues, who somehow gained enough brainpower to build an advanced society full of technological marvels. Timberborn is a city-builder, which requires you to carefully lead your beavers through the harsh post-apocalypse. As you would expect from a game about beavers, you settle close to a river, which flows with clean water, the basis of your survival. However, every now and then, this river will either dry out or flow with toxic wastewater instead of clean water, which you will have to manage in order to survive. Your beavers need water, food and a shelter above their head, otherwise they will die. So you will have to make use of the terrain around you to grow crops, stack food and water and build houses. The terrain can be manipulated by terraforming, but this requires quite a lot of labour/ressources, so especially at the beginning, you will have to adjust your buildings to the terrain, later you can do it the other way around! The "Normal" difficulty is a little bit challenging at the beginning, but once you have figured everything out and build the basics, this game becomes quite relaxed and is my personal go-to-game after a long day. There is a harder difficulty available if you crave a challenge though.

The developers are steadily updating the game, making heavy use of public beta-builds, where they add content and rebalance things before they go live. They are not afraid to remove things that do not work out in the game (for example, they removed the "healer" building, because the building was needing an exclusive ressource and the healer had nothing to do much of the time). I think this shows that they truly care about the best experience for us players, by not clinging to stuff they once thought was a good idea.
Regarding features, this can already be considered a full game and is worth its price, and I'm excited of the things to come!

Mediocre at its best times, now completely abandoned

This game is ideal when you want to play a game, but at the same time don't really want to play a game because you're too exhausted

Early-Access done right. The game already has enough features to keep you busy for a while, especially the building system is already very fleshed out, although some more walls/floors would be nice to have.
The multiplayer is also functional, and it is very easy to set up a temporal server to show your friends around your world. Since your character and his inventory is not bound to a world (like, for example, Minecraft or The Forest), you can still make progress on other peoples world and level your character or gather stuff to bring to your own world.

The general gameplay consists of: Explore, gather ressources, fight enemies, craft items and gear. Gear up and explore the next area. Rinse and repeat. The game usually keeps you out of High-Level-Areas through hints, hazards or strong mobs, It is recommended to follow the intended path when exploring areas, and this "soft-blocking" has not bothered me at all so far.

Combat is quite functional already, with lots of different weapons and a few special attacks. Different enemies may require different approaches/weapons, so the choice of gear actually feels meaningful.

I really hope this game gets even better in the future, although this is already worth the 20 bucks.