I've been playing two games these past few days, Manor Lords and Terra Invicta. I usually don't buy early Early Access games but I've enjoyed both quite a bit. It helps that they're both my standard fare.
Manor Lords is the first time in years I bought an early access game at release, but I knew I would like it. If you aren't familiar, it is a medieval city builder that was first announced in 2020 (or something like that) and was very hotly anticipated. I feel bad for the solo dev because the amount of hype and the number of people waiting for its launch is staggering. His community posts for the game are all variations of
It tickles the city builder part of my brain which enjoys watching the growth of my city in a way that a game hasn't in a long time. Most city builders feel kind of unnatural when you're starting out because you are just making a modern city spontaneously appear (I would love for a modern city builder where there's an already existent city on the map you have to expand, without it being a scenario with goals). Manor Lords circumvents this feeling by having your city be a newly established settlement in the distant past. It feels more believable that I'm a lord overseeing an unsettled, resource rich fief as opposed to a mayor who manifests an entire modern city.
A big strength of the game are its aesthetics. Aesthetics can be hit or miss with some strategy, management, and (to a lesser extent) city builder games because that's not something particularly important to the genre. Manor Lords has some gorgeous textures and models, but, more importantly, its systems lend themselves to being visually pleasing. The game's equivalent to residential zoning is freeform, letting you mark the borders of where your citizens can build houses. These houses generate with fences and decorative props that fill in their zones. If your zoning is large enough, houses can have workshops or small farm plots attached to them. Some of these workshops become crucial to your settlement's development. Houses must be near your designated market square, otherwise they can't access all of their needs before the closer houses can. This create a fun balancing act; you have to ask yourself if you can afford to have smaller burgage plots that can't establish workshops if it means they're squished in closer to your market. All this works together to create a settlement that looks like it naturally grew.
I can see it developing into a really, really good game. Or, maybe, the dev will take his money and run. Couldn't blame him.
Terra Invicta is one of those games I've eyeballed for a long time but haven't made the jump into buying because there were other things on my radar. Now that summer is approaching and I've finished my coursework for the semester, I can take the time to learn the game.
By God does it take time to learn.
If you don't find the sound of "grand strategy sci-fi game about hostile first contact where you need to compete with factions to gain control of Earth governments to prepare a response to the aliens and also a single full-length campaign can last one hundred hours" then I don't know what to tell you.
I have tried and failed to get into Aurora 4X several times and bounced off it hard each time because it lacked the sort of flavor I like in a game. Terra Invicta has more of that flavor. It scratches my itch for a complex strategy game in a great way. I really enjoy the gradual buildup, making a plan for what countries you're going to try and gain control of before launching your faction into space, establishing stations and a fleet. I can't really say any more at this time because I haven't gotten very far into it yet. 100-hour campaign.
That's all, really.