RPS says Aquatico fails to push back at all. Which is an odd choice for a “survival” game.
I have seen it described as a “chill” city builder. Perhaps that’s what they mean when they say that.
I played a bit of Aquatico yesterday, and frankly I was not impressed. The tutorial was a raw build order, without explaining any of the concepts. And the following game seemed not to be all that different. Research a new building → build the building. Repeat.
I am going to give it a bit more of a chance this weekend, but so far, I am not very impressed.
I tried the Aquatico demo during Steam’s Nextfest thingy this fall and I agree with RPS’s assessment. There was no pushback that I could see, just waiting for enough resources to build the next building. Very, very bland gameplay. Sounds like that didn’t change in the full release.
PC Gamer wasn’t too fond of it either.
Anyone know how long the Urbek tutorial goes on for? I just built the airport.
I don’t recall but that seems like something you’d build near the end of it. So I suspect you’re very close.
Was about to buy Aquatico based on screenshots alone, then dipped into the thread. Thanks QT3! It still looks good to me, as in it LOOKS good.
We should all keep in mind the reasonably low cost too.
They are likely going for a easy-to-play, lower cost entry to train players and start the revenue train. Then challenges come later with a mix of free and paid DLC. This seems to be a popular model these days - which I actually support more than early access, if they produce at least a decent base experience.
In any case, I’ll try the demo but hold off for later, plus to see what Surviging the Abyss looks like.
I love turn based city builders and spent some time with this. I feel like it’s really close to being great, but the game’s difficulty is all over the place due to random factors outside of the player’s control.
Most of this comes from the game’s chaotic random map generator. Your colony needs certain nearby resources – water, minerals, floodplains – but there’s no guarantee that the map will have an area where these aren’t separated by impassable terrain. You can remove impassable terrain, but again it’s based on luck, as which tiles you can change are decided by randomly drawing cards from a deck.
I found I had to repeatedly restart my map to roll a good one. This seems to be expected by the developers, as they made it easy and even tied a (mocking) achievement to it. But it’s a frustrating design.
Once you get past the early game, you unlock ways to spend resources to remove the random elements, and I had fun with it. But it was annoying getting there.
Having watched videos (but without playing any of them) I gotta say Surviving the Abyss looks the most promising. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, but of the three releases this week to me that one seems to hold the most promise.
Start 1/23, Steam is having a base builder fest.
dual layer city builder!
And there’s a demo on Steam right now! I’m willing to try anything SteamWorld.
Intriguing. I’m not a fan of the theme, but this team does make good games.
Came here to post about Steamworld Build and I see everyone else in the frigging world had the same idea!
Excellent, we (I) need more controller-driven city builders and Image & Form have pretty good form! :)
From the trailer, the underground bits look intriguingly Dungeon Keeper-esque. May just be superficial, but here’s hoping.