TownsFolk

Obnoxiously luck-based. You can get up to the point where the king demands over 140 population and food in spite of you having about 15 population and +4 per turn with 10 turns to go. You somehow manage to pull everything together so you'll make it with one turn to spare, and then a random event hits you with the choice between losing 80 population or -12 food for 10 turns. There's a campaign mode, but the game can give you an absolutely unplayable start, like if you have wolves two tiles away from your town hall that get revealed after you built the only housing you can afford, so you're now in an irrecoverable death spiral with no resources because all the other tiles are mountains or oceans so you have almost no population, no food, and no means of gaining any while your population is eaten by wolves. In skirmish mode, this just leads to frequent restarts until you get a good start, (which is already a plague on the Diet Civiilzation subgenre,) but in campaign mode, this ruins a run that you've played for hours. Add to this, the "Civpedia" of this game is blank until you actually build a building. (And you need to unlock the information on buildings for EACH FACTION, so st…

The game mechanics are decent. BUT. For mouse and keyboard the controls are horrendous. Sure they work, but there are SO MANY CLICKS. Want to build something? Klick the tile, click arrow keys until you find the building you want to build (a radial menu would have been a million times more convient), than click "build". Also if you have a controller plugged in the game will show it's hotkeys, even when you use mouse/keyboard (in this day and age games should auto-detect what inputs you actually use). You can do much better in the 4X-genre, especially on PC.

Townsfolk is one of my go to chill games. It's got a great balance of strategizing your decisions and weighing up the risks. I really enjoy how quick it is to get into, as well as the campaign. This one is a real gem with plenty of layers!

- When you are on controller and the hex in focus is at the bottom or top of the map, right/left on the Dpad don't work about half the time. - B is "Go back" in menus in almost all games, but not this one. You need to Press down (sometimes 3X) then A. - When you are on mouse + keyboard, when you click a hex to explore, you then need to click the center of the screen. It's clunky and frequent. - There are few hotkeys. Let me hover over a hex and press "E" to explore, or something. - Can't skip turn while in a build menu. I tend to enjoy this type of game, but there is too much clunk and I don't want to deal with it. Maybe I'd enjoy it if I kept pushing through it... Sorry.

The best part of this game is honestly the tons of fun gamemodes and intense but rewarding resource management. The random events and occurences in the game always keep you on your toes but forces you to have all of the resources in case of emergency. The different factions to play as also changes the playstyle so much and makes it interesting. The game can be extremely difficult on harder difficulties but also relaxed on the easier difficulties. I honestly recommend this game to anyone, its super fun if you are looking for resource management and exploration games. ( Also technically a colony simulator game ).

I liked the demo I played last year but somehow, between it and release, they completely messed up the balance with insane RNG.