TL;DR: This game is *awe-inspiringly* anal-retentive. If you've been looking for a city-builder that lets you micromanage your pops' lives right down to what they sleep on at night and what sort of companion animal they keep? Welcome, friend. The graphics are profoundly All Right, as is the music/sounds. But you're here for the fiddly ****, aren't you. Just own it.

If Tropico 6 is Endless Space 2, then Settlement Survival is Stellaris.


Now I came across this game while looking for a city-builder with as much charm as Tropico 6 but, perhaps, a touch more depth. I found a lot of recs for a lot of different games, but most of them were either too aesthetically unpleasing for my tastes (give me COLORS, or at the very least some STYLE); too 'charmless'/dry (why would I want to build just another modern American city???); or too determined to raise my poor, blameless blood pressure.

Don't get me wrong -- when I play a city-builder, I *want* the challenges inherent to deep, serious micromanagement. I just don't want to spend all my time constantly fighting the game to keep my pops alive, healthy, and not committing violent rebellion. Basically, if a game isn't profoundly nerf-able? I'm profoundly not there.

So here comes Settlement Survival, which was apparently released in a state where you couldn't play sandbox until you had beaten the incredibly challenging game -- haha no. I walked away and put this bad boy on Ignore. I came back and checked after dozens of hours on Tropico 6, though, and, lo and behold, sandbox is open from the start.

But let me tell you about sandbox, friends and neighbors:

You can, if you wish, play with the deep and, yes, awe-inspiringly anal-retentive tech tree off, meaning you can have the fun of researching all those techs without so much pressure.

You can, if you wish, crank the difficulty of the sandbox seed, just in case you're a ridiculous masochist.

You can, if you wish, play with all sorts of special goodies to build -- I'm not spoiling.

Sandbox is big and glorious. You will quickly rue spreading out your buildings too far on your great, big map. You will marvel at the insane -- but searchable -- number of potential resources. You will wait impatiently for the merchant ships, and chew your nails over letting immigrants join your settlement. Aliens and serial killers will wander by, but if you follow the instructions in the tutorial, you're going to be okay. You'll cheer every time your hunters bring home a baby animal for you to raise, and you will wonder how one village can possibly use so much wood.

I'm having so much fun with this, y'all -- and you will, too, if you enjoy games that make you spin about 9,000 plates at once.

Buy it.

TL;DR: This game is beautiful, soothing, and scratches just about every itch a 4X gamer could possibly have while being neither too shallow nor too lost in the weeds of esoterica. It also has one of the best soundtracks out there.

More detail: I've been playing Gal. Civ. games for many, many years now -- off and on, to be sure, but I absolutely always keep coming back to them. While I find the campaigns far too narrow for my tastes, the more open-universe options available -- the universe customization is about as good as you can get in a 4X game -- are positively grand.

I say this as someone who will always prefer low-key, low-stress, easy-peasy experiences in my gameplay -- I've just plain grown out of needing games to raise my blood pressure, you know? So if you've got a game that lets me nit-pick about where to place colonies, and where to place buildings on my colonies, and how high to raise taxes, and so on, and you also make that game positively lovely to look at and listen to, and you *also* make it possible for me to nerf my opponents until everyone is just as friendly as they can be and the universe looks like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood?

Yeah, I'm there. And I'll keep coming back, year after year after year.

Now I should say -- if you're looking for an experience that lets you nit-pick every last aspect of your colonies, right down to what individual pops are doing when? No, friend, you need Stellaris for that. *shoos you off* If, however, you want to straddle the line between anal-retentiveness and 'ooh, shiny'? Buy this.