Fortifend

Lots of potential but way to many frustrating parts to make it fun for long. No proper undo action, so try placing stuff at your own peril. Putting a gate at the wrong place and your fully invested workshop is just gone, as an example. No clear explanation of stuff you do or results of actions. Building description is always obstructing the view of your placement of your building. In a game where proper placement is crucial! Walls don't connect to cliffs or rivers. So you always have a nice bypass for the monsters instead of the gates you placed intentionally. And the game places convenient roads to these bypasses, so the monsters get even faster and easier to them! Proper defense with towers gets crippling expensive upkeep wise. So you should only do the bare minimum to keep afloat. Especially with workforces. No real influence on the most crucial economic factor of your settlement. Workforce! Just try to keep them alive, but do that at your workforces expense. So you don't get enough resources and workforces to defend from another attack angle. And you can't place the houses in a protected region, as they sprout just like mushrooms all over the place. The monsters are just boring blobs. Nothing to get excited about. No real cool tactics, just hoping the pathfinding is in your benefits and that the houses don't get built in the monsters main route. So, lots of potential, but so much frustration! It's a shame, as I find the maps really great looking! edit add on: path prediction sucks a$$, especially when swimming spawn is involved! Better save, before you place your main defense for that winter! No real difficulty setting in endless mode. Only hard and very hard. Spawn bonuses immediately ramp up. Almost doubling spawn armor in the second winter. Really? What's the matter not to have several difficulty settings in endless mode? Just for the point calculation? You made a beautiful game! What's wrong to want to play it cassualy, build a nice town and then test it against a flod of monsters later. But you loose all relaxing building experience, because everything needs to be efficent, otherwise its just over and frustrating, and it's less fun to play the campaing maps again, as they have a time limit and annoy with their tasks. So you built a casual looking game that wants only to be hardcore. But for hardcore, you don't give me the proper tools for educated guesses, planning and placement!

Since the game has only couple of reviews, I decided to chip in. While I would recommend the game, I think the gameplay loop is rather repetitive, as mentioned by other reviews. The game has very appealing graphics and I like the art style of city buildings a lot. The biggest feature the game has is how the paths in the game are made and how the city evolves. It, generally, feels very natural and complex to see new houses spawn, and how they gravitate towards (I guess) roads and lowlands. Another interesting feature is field of view of the towers, which can and will block each other, if not placed strategically. What the game lacks is complexity in some gameplay areas, which leads to player facing very similar problems. I don't think it is something unfixable, so I kinda look to forward to updates! Lastly, I run the game on mac on Sikarugir and it runs fine! That's also the reason why Steam thinks I played 0.1 hours, when you run multiple instances of Steam, wine and normal one, internet connection will remain only in one of the instances. For some reason in that case Steam didn't record the actual gameplay time, which is roughly 8-9 hours.

I really like this game, but I feel it is very linear, and shallow overall. The loop is basically the same at 30 minutes in as it would be at 3 hours in. The maps are gorgeous, the organic road forming, and housing placements by citizens are exceptionally cool. But the demon visuals are hard to distinguish at times in the background of everything. One of the biggest flaws to me is having the attacks always in the winter, which negates the use of water barriers as part of your defense, and that really depresses my feeling about the game significantly. Another downer for me is wall placement is pretty janky, it's square forms only, no angles or curves. It's still a fun game, but I don't think it's the current price point fun. I'd probably have kept it as a novelty if it was closer to half of the price it is now. I will keep an eye on it. If they remove the forced attacks during winter to make water barriers viable (or a different non-freezing biome perhaps), and the price drops. I'll pick it up again.