Recent reviews by slavemaster

The Forest as a game is a mystery to me - because I simply can not understand how an unfinished unoriginal game that has nothing impressive in it can go out of early access and still get this much praise.

• I will start with the most obvious problem: basebuilding. While the game advertises itself with “build a base at day, defend it at night”, the base in question is broken on each and every level. First, building it takes a ridiculous amount of time because of the volume of the required resources. To make things worse - cutting all those trees to make a base makes the local population more aggressive and attacks on your base more often and as a result - instead of being more safe you end up being less safe with a base. The next reason why your base sucks that much is the fact that all of the things you build can be destroyed just in a couple of hits by some monsters or in under a minute by a group of cannibals - and destroyed buildings don’t just drop their materials - they disintegrate forcing you to waste even more time on logging and building. And the last problem with the base makes the whole situation just ridiculous - you don’t even need a base, as enemies are incapable of following you into caves or onto the boat where you can sleep freely and securely.
  
• Survival elements. I will never stop hating survival systems where the food and water are abundant and extremely easy to get, but the bars run out so fast that you are constantly nagged with hunger and thirst. And just so you understand how easy the food situation is here - you can forage for berries, hunt for wildlife or eat your enemies - and each of those options can sustain you easily, not to mention that you can combine them however you like.
  
• Combat. Oh god, I haven’t seen that much jank in a while. Sure, on one hand locals behave in an interesting way, with their running, screaming from a distance and everything, but when it comes to a fight having those lunatics run in and out without doing anything while you are incapable of catching up to them becomes annoying extremely fast. It becomes even more annoying when the same exact type of enemies either dies in 2 or 20 hits. It becomes infuriating when said enemies decide to ignore the staggering effect of your attacks and stunlock you with an unending flurry of blows. It could be tolerable if said combat was rare, but sadly you can barely pass a day without some lunatic trying to kill you or ruin your base. Combat just sucks and there is no other way to put it.
  
• Content for content's sake. This game has a lot of stuff that is simply a waste of time. For example - there is a snow biome and you can waste a lot of time crafting frost protection gear. Sadly the snow biome itself has nothing in it - so all of that collecting was a waste of time. Another example - there are 4 axes in the game. Even after finishing the game I can’t really tell if they had any difference between them or was it done just to make a list of tools bigger. Basebuilding too falls into that category - there is simply no use or function for it. I assume that at least some of those things are caused by an early release with some ideas gutted - but we will never know for sure.
  
• Inventory. Sure, having all of the objects visible on a blanket is a neat way of showing what you have - if you are not holding 50 different items. Now imagine that you do - sticks, stones, spears, bows, aforementioned 4 axes, 5 types of hides, a dozen types of berries, plants and herbal mixes - and now try to find anything in this cluttered mess. Yes, with time you do memorize where your things are, at least those that you use often. Finding stuff that you use rarely becomes increasingly annoying the further you go into the game.
  
• Exploration/spelunking. I get it, there are places even IRL with vast cave systems. I get it, the caves are dark without a proper source of light. What I don’t get at all - why isn't there a proper source of light in your whole god forsaken game? Lighter gives no light and goes off every few seconds. Flashlight is so bad that I could get more light from a single LED. If said caves were some kind of side content - it would be one thing, but it is your main plot route, how come exploring this route is inconvenient? Not to mention that there are a lot of places with nothing in it - like long swimming sections that serve only as a gear check to make sure you got a required item to pass - navigating those is not fun and is, in fact, extremely boring.
  
• Zero direction. In most other games this would not be a problem. However in this one you are supposed to go through caves in a certain order - the first one has a map and a compass, the next few give you tools that are required to get through the further caves. Sadly, with zero directions, we often entered caves that we cannot finish without items that we haven’t found at that point, and just as a cherry on top - we found the first cave (the one with the map) as our last cave. If your only chance to get the correct order is to check wiki - sorry, this is a bad game design.
  
• Plot/world. On paper you have one. But the more you see the more questions you have and the less coherent the story becomes. Ancient artifact from dead space that can resurrect people? Ok, how does it explain the fact that there is an entire tribe of cannibals here? Or the fact that someone hauled hundreds of dead people into the caves? And where did those people even come from, why don’t their bodies decompose? It just feels like different bits were thrown into the game to give it a creepy vibe with a “figure it out yourself” attitude because doing so was much easier than making a believable story and world.

Overall, I just can’t find even one thing in this game that was properly made. The whole experience was between boring and frustrating, I don’t think that I would even finish this game if I wasn’t playing with a friend. Don’t bother with this one and just go buy something that doesn’t suck.

Black Mesa starts as a fine remaster of the original Half Life, only to drop the act after a few chapters and say “actually, we know better how to make a good Half Life game”. Sorry, developers, but no, you don’t.

• New engine. First I will mention the obvious - yes, this game has a newer engine than the original HL - and considering how old the original is that is not really impressive. And the new engine isn’t really that new - it is a HL2 engine, so it is 20 years old at this point. The next problem here is that the physics part of the engine feels crudely bolted and not taken into account when remaking levels - there are way too many physical objects that just roll around, get stuck and behave erratically, not to mention that someone decided to add not one, but TWO achievements for carrying specific items through the entire game like HL2 did - and that makes the problems with the engine even more obvious. And just as a final nail to the coffin - on later levels I encountered multiple frame drops and crashes to Windows - problems I have never encountered in both HL and HL2.
  
• New areas and pacing. Half Life wasn’t a long game, but it was an extremely fun game that always had new things to impress you, always moved forward and ended with you in a “Oh wow, what a game” state. Sadly, this aspect of the original went completely over the developers head and they decided to expand the game, completely killing the pacing and making the whole experience boring. Do you remember the mined room that you had to jump through in the original? Sure, it was new, it was cool, it was used once in the game and you moved forward. None of the “newness” or “coolness” is in the remake, because this exact concept got repeated THREE TIMES. Another good example is tank fight - the thing was done once in the original, because sure, while it was cool - shooting a stationary target with rockets isn’t really that hard. In Black Mesa there are like 4 tanks - and yes, they all take way too long to kill, they add nothing new and they prolong the chapter they are in for no apparent reason. But the worst treatment was received by Xen - it was bloated to such an extent that finishing the entire original game takes less time than finishing what should be the last few zones. And it would be one thing if the content of said zones was fun - but it is not, at this point the game just reuses whatever it has already showed us and in the worst way possible: if it is platforming - it seems to go for ages, if it is combat - it is so bad and unbalanced that you are given UNLIMITED AMMO for your energy guns. If the first few hours of the game were fun, the next few were ok, the last 8 felt like a torture and I was just forcing myself through it hoping it will end soon.
  
• Music. Sure, I am not against music in the game - but not like that. For whatever reason it often kicks in the moments when you actually want to hear the game - to listen to military chatter in combat, footsteps and gunshots. Instead your eardrums are blasted with way too loud music to make the moment “cool” - while completely ignoring the fact that the gameplay became worse because of it.
  
• Weird balancing decisions. I just simply can not understand why compared to the original the game increases the number of enemies at the same exact time reduces ammo you can carry with you. 3 underbarrel nades instead of 10 - why? What did you achieve with that change? Why 10 spare bolts instead of 50? What reasoning is behind it? And I can swear, most of the guns feel less powerful than they were in the original. Once again - why? All those decisions just made the shooter part of the game worse, with no upsides.

Overall, the game is both infuriating and disappointing. If only the game stuck closer to the original as it did on the first levels - it would be much better. But with more and more content added it just grew out of control and lost the tight, captivating and fun gameplay the original had. Just go play the original again, this game is not a good Half Life adaptation.

Above Snakes takes the core idea of unlocking map chunks from Forager and tries to bolt a story onto it. Sadly it didn’t learn the lessons that Forager could teach and didn’t put enough effort into the story to make the game worth your time or money.

• Setting. The game claims this world is an alternative Wild West. Sadly, the only alternative thing about it is the fact that your main character is a woman that can do everything by herself, from logging to mining. Other than that this setting is a missed opportunity - even though there are a lot of mythical creatures to choose from, our only enemies in the game are zombies, bandits and local wildlife. Wendigos, spirits and other weird creatures are nowhere to be found.
  
• Map/exploration. On one hand the ability to dynamically create your map is really cool. There are, however, two big problems with it. First - the biomes aren’t that different - you are getting one plant and/or mineral specific to the biome in most cases, and unlocking new biomes requires you to progress with the plot, so getting new stuff is a rather slow process. Second - with you making the map bigger and bigger you are increasing your travel times through it significantly. And while there is a fast travel system, you are unable to place fast travel spots freely - those are locked to very specific unique map chunks. As a result most of the map is never visited after you have grinded enough of the resource this biome provides.
  
• Story. I can’t really call it anything but bad. It has no hook, it has no impact, all of the dialogues are abysmally written, the events are bland. It feels like the story should be the focus of the game, as there is simply no need for a story in a sandbox like that, but the quality of writing is simply too low to care.
  
• RPG elements. You have a few passive skills that level up with use and give bonuses. Sadly those bonuses are laughable and the whole system fails to have any impact on your gameplay - so it is quickly forgotten and never remembered again.
  
• Building. If you are willing to grind a lot to be able to construct the most basic and dull house you could imagine - be my guest, but as for me - there are simply not enough build options and no practical use in this whole building system, as it is way too basic.
  
• Combat. Once again, an atrocious and simplistic system that has everything you could imagine - from an unimpressive enemy roster to enemies damaging you before the attack animation plays and enemies ignoring their staggered state. With an unreliable dodge roll and stiff uncancelable melee animation it turns into arrow/bullet spam - and for those you just need to grind and craft enough arrows for the encounter. It is bad, it is rudimentary, it has neither the depth, nor the thrill.
  
• Zero automation. Everything, from collecting rocks to farming will be forever done by hand. And to make things worse with farming, UI is horrible - you press a button to select a plot, list through all of your seeds to choose the one you want to plant, press the button again to plant it, press to select a plot again and press some more to water it and put in fertilizers. And not imagine that you have to do it with every single plot you have. Just why do you hate us so much, developers?
  
• Survival elements. All the usual suspects are here - way too fast bar depletion, locations that require you to equip/unequip certain items (with an inconvenient menu). Survival here is basic and poorly done.

Overall, this game falls into the same pit that forager did: it has one cool idea, but this idea is not used to its full potential while the rest of the game is filled with shallow, basic systems that are just tedious. The game is simply not fun to play.

Forager is a project with a good enough core idea to spawn a bunch of clones, but as a standalone game it is extremely disappointing.

• Grind. It is overwhelming. Farming resources by itself isn’t really a very fun thing to do in forager (as you just hold one button on each resource node), but when you realise the amount of said resources that you require - it just goes from bad to worse. The main reason that you need those resources - every single building you place makes the next building of that type more expensive. And yes, it gets out of hand rapidly, to the point where the price gets to 20x of the base - and as far as I can tell there is no upper limit. And why would you want this many things of one type? The answer is simple:
  
• Waiting. The game just does not respect your time: every single simple craft takes time. Advanced crafts take even more time. Imagine that you require 150 of an advanced resource - and every single one of them crafts 5 minutes - and that doesn’t include the time to gather resources and to craft all of the intermediary ones. The amounts of resources that you need are so ridiculous that it takes minutes even IF you install a mod that cuts all of the craft times to 1 second - and playing with the default settings is just a torture.
  
• Combat. It was clearly added as an afterthought - it has no weight, it is extremely basic and lame, and yet, for some unknown reason, it is basically forced upon you, as some of the resources you require can only be obtained in combat. Most of the time enemies are just annoying, and whatever bosses the game has - none of them have interesting mechanics, just buffed up health and damage numbers.
  
• Progression. Instead of a logical progression of character with earned XP and your tech progression with discovered resources, the game combines two systems in one, giving you neither character progression, nor a well paced tech exploration. Instead, you will be forced to grind even more to earn enough XP to open a new building or ability - and if you are playing blind, as I did, you will regret the choice you made as the brand new building either doesn’t do anything useful or requires resources you have yet to discover. This makes the whole process of unlocking tech both disappointing and extremely tedious.
  
• Exploration. On paper you have several biomes and a few dungeons with puzzles. In practice, however, there are only a few biomes that on average have 2 new resources - that makes unlocking new land extremely dissatisfying, as you are not really unlocking anything new (even though you have to grind a lot of gold for each and every unlock). The dungeons are extremely simple and you have no reason to return to them after clearing them once - because they are nothing more than a new equipment tutorial - and in most cases said equipment can only be used in the way you are taught in that specific dungeon and has no other use whatsoever. Lame, boring, and feels like a missed opportunity. There are also a few extremely easy puzzles and fetch quests - but they too are way too basic and fail to be entertaining.
  
• Automation. In a game that requires you to craft hundreds and thousands of resources you could expect some automation - but alas, the best this game can do is putting resources in storage and enabling infinite crafting of an item. There isn’t even an option to auto harvest/replant/bulk plant your crops, making the whole farming aspect of the game an incredibly micro heavy process. Once again, basic, boring, a missed opportunity.
  
• Fun. This is the main problem - the game just isn’t fun. It mentions Stardew Valley and Terraria as similar games, but it has neither the fun of exploration and the vast building system of Terraria, nor it has an addicting process of grind, NPCs, events and QOL features Stardew Valley had. It just feels like using extremely popular games just to draw attention, even if it is nothing more than false advertising.
  
• Horrible UI/QOL. The UI is clunky, it sometimes will misread your input and use wrong items if you are in the inventory screen. It also forces tools onto your hotbar - even if said tools are useless or you will barely need them, leaving only a few slots for consumables. Achievement menu, progress menu - they all are done in the most basic and the least user friendly form possible.
  
• Technical side. At this point I am kicking a dead horse, but I am aware of many cases where people had their save file corrupted. On my side I have several crashes out of nowhere. Even though the game is extremely simple, it is not coded well.

Overall the game feels like the dev had no vision: there is one cool idea, that is completely killed by other mechanics that are either underdeveloped or overly grindy. If you are a fan of a similar game and want to check what inspired it - just watch it on youtube, if you want a fun game - go look somewhere else.

Vampyr is a narrative RPG with Souls-like combat. Sadly, there was not enough effort put into narration, there is no connection to combat and the combat itself is horrible. A bit more details now, I’ll start from mechanical things and move to narrative ones.

• Combat. Imagine a standard Dark Souls combat, only extremely jank: enemies hitting you outside of their swing animation, passing through each other, ignoring your attack that should stagger/interrupt them, sliding diagonally or teleporting to you instead of performing a straight rush attack. And don’t forget to top it off with a horrible camera/lockon system, that will behave erratically in tight spaces. There is also a surprising lack of thought put into magic - you are casting spells for blood, and to replenish blood you need to feed upon your enemies, to do that you need to stagger them. The problem is simple: if you are able to stagger them, it is easier and more effective to recover stamina and stagger them again, since they will only recover half of the stagger bar - there is simply no need for spells here, as they require more effort while providing inferior results. And there is also way too much combat - since the map is just a bunch of corridors with respawning enemies even moving between districts will force you to fight 5-6 times along the way, so it becomes irritating extremely fast, considering that you will be fighting mobs 10 levels higher than you turning the game into a slog.
  
• Controls. They are not good. There are like 5 separate actions bound to F, so if you are standing next to loot, teleport point and location transition - pressing F may do any of those things, even the prompt clearly shows something else. Movement itself feels floaty, especially in combat where sometimes you can’ make your character move out from AOE. And in case you decide to disable lockon to have better control of your movement - you are not hitting any ranged attacks (and some melee ones too) as it is extremely hard to face the exact direction you want.
  
• RPG system. I hate a system that doesn’t tell what it does. On paper there are a bunch of skills that have stated damage values and cost a certain amount of XP to level up. In practice, your skills will never do the stated damage - because those values are affected by difference in levels between you and your target - and this difference worked differently on different enemies - I fought the same exact bunch of enemies at lvl 26 and lvl 50 while they were level 33 - 2 of them took double the damage I dealt at lvl 26 while the third one took the same exact time to kill.
  
• Feeding system. On paper you have a choice of getting a bunch of XP for free or having to go through harder combat if you want to abstain and be a good guy. In practice you are unable to consume the best characters until you progress the main plot, and the ones you are able are extremely weak, all sick and you know nothing about them - so the powerup you get from them is simply way too insignificant to care and not worth making the region unstable or even destroying it. But lets say you want to cash in the whole area and get the most out of it - so you need to find clues about residents that are at times in random places, heal them from all of their illnesses (medicine for some of those will unlock in penultimate chapter), and gain enough hypnosis power to control the most resilient citizens (that will unlock in penultimate chapter). The problem is, however, that at this point you are far enough into the game to have everything you need so you don’t even need this XP anymore. And since level/damage scaling is extremely unreliable, as I mentioned before, you don’t get much out of this even if you commit and consume everyone to reach the max level.
  
• Characters. First things first, for whatever reason we have to investigate each and every citizen to get xp. But as soon as you do that - there are no further interactions with any of them. This is done to make sure you reach the end even if you consume someone - plot critical characters are protected from that - but it makes all of the interactions and quests NPCs may have extremely shallow and leading to nowhere. It almost feels like the game should question your humanity, if you are going to consume your friends to become stronger, but doesn’t give you enough interactions with characters to become friends in the first place. Also the quality of writing is all over the place - some characters are fine, others are extremely dull and generic.
  
• World. While visually it is extremely fitting - being dark and moody, all of the gameplay elements are integrated extremely poorly. Vampire hunters and vampires they hunt can be 10 feet away from each other being loud - yet they will never fight each other as they are just a bit outside of aggro range. Both sides of the conflict are autoleveling between chapters - and if I could agree with vampires getting more dangerous, but how come ordinary humans are evolving at the same rate as supernatural monstrosities? There are also those safe districts where all the NPCs are - and while going negative will kill the entire district and make it abandoned, there are zero consequences to making it 100% sanitised - a lame discount in a shop is all you're gonna get. All of this feels like a missed opportunity in a narrative heavy game.

I wish this game was focusing more on its narrative elements while completely cutting out the abysmal combat, but it didn’t so I can’t recommend this game. It is way too janky and way too lame, and even its best elements are not that well polished.

So, I finally got the game that has 96% positive reviews and a reputation of being the best game David Cage created. I will be honest, even with all that reputation I didn’t expect the game to be good - I merely expected it not to suck. Sadly, my expectations were set too high. Because instead of a story about androids becoming self-aware and fighting for their rights I got a reskin of American slavery - an EXTREMELY poorly adapted to be a sci-fi story - to the point where it is obvious in several ways.

• The world makes no sense. Androids are somehow universally hated, but represented everywhere, from dumb labour to mass media. They are simultaneously some kind of a technological marvel, yet even a jobless drug addict can easily afford one. They are modular and taken for disassembly if they malfunction - but there are also huge scrapyards where even working androids are just pressed into the dirt. It is kinda obvious that the world has no consistency and it changes just to fit the narrative - it is one thing when you get exposition and entirely another when you are presented with THE DRAMA. So how can I care about the world you are painting if it isn’t even a coherent thing?
  
• Androids. To put it simply - instead of androids you get people who act like androids. Or maybe the writer simply has no idea about technology, robotics and programming. Because who in his own mind would create androids who are made for SPECIFIC jobs, but are not optimised for said job and lacking any reward mechanism for doing their job properly, but at the same time are somehow capable of simulating emotions - you know, the thing that makes you less efficient at most jobs. While I could be fine with “emotions” for androids that were servicing customers, but a janitor? Really, why would you give emotions and the ability to cry to a Roomba? Not to mention that all of those emotions were supposed to be programmed into them - and yet, somehow, that programming doesn’t work half of the time (one of the characters is a sex worker that hates sex, totally not a human issue, trust me) and later just “evolves” to become “real” instead of simulation. At this point it is not a sci-fi story, but some kind of a shoddy fantasy novel from a guy who wishes his sexbot was real and would love him back.
  
• Zero exploration or thought put into the question if the androids are alive. We are just given the answer and are forced to roll with it, even in situations where it makes no sense at all.
  
• Freedom. It is a really serious topic. So tell me, how the definition of freedom in this game is “you are free - now do what I say”? Since when replacing slavery with tyranny is somehow a good thing? Did you not think about it for even a moment?
  
• Main heroes. Funnily enough, the one that starts on the “evil guys” team was the most interesting one. The revolutionary? Why would you pick some entitled dude as your main man in the fight for freedom when he never knew hardship but the first problem in his life suddenly made him a radical? Not to mention his extremely annoying, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ voice. Or was it some self insert? I have no idea. The last main character isn’t really better - a girl that does nothing, but everyone around her is going out of their way to help her (in case they are not white) or are cruel to her for no reason (in case they are white). Her entire plot line is both extremely boring and undermined in the end for no reason.
  
• God awful QTE. We all know that the main thing in that kind of game is the story- so why are you trying to make the QTEs even more annoying? There are way too many of them, most actions are split into subactions just to add another prompt, and most of those prompts are some weird mouse moves instead of a normal key press.
  
• Zero QOL features. Skipping a dialogue that you have seen? Speeding up a cutscene you already saw in the previous route? Or even skipping the TEN MINUTE CREDITS AFTER EACH ENDING? Forget about it, there is nothing you can do about it. Even though you have some checkpoints - half of main forks are not loadable - so you have to redo entire sections of the game if you want to check another route - which makes the process extremely tedious to the point of being not worth it.

Overall the game is terrible. From its story to gameplay - everything is lame and poorly done. If this is the best game of the studio - I am kinda worried how bad the rest of their game will be.

If you are buying the game - get the DLC too, because you are getting a lot of stuff from it.

• A bunch of side quests and a large new area to explore.
  
• Gods are finally doing something useful with the addition of devotion shrines that give challenges and pretty nice rewards, as well as the ability to become a champion of a deity that will help you in fights.
  
• You will be able to finish the world conquest that stopped before concluding properly in the main story.
  
• A new main story branch with the best ending in the game.
  
• New character classes for more build variety, always nice to have.
  
• A more dynamic world with a bunch of new events.

Once again, if you are planning to get the game - get this DLC too, it adds way too much to just pass it.

This game is a very interesting (even if somewhat janky) project. It is mostly an exploration ARPG with the TItan Quest/Grim Dawn RPG system. So, what does this game have?

• Titan Quest RPG system. There are more masteries than TQ had, but each of them has less skills in it and overall depth of the system isn’t really that high. It does its job tho and you can have 4 masteries activated at a time. The main difference from TQ is that all your stats are upgraded passively when you are using corresponding skills (which is an extremely underused system nowadays).
  
• Combat. The same as above - functional, working, but not really the best part of the game. It managed to both give me a feeling of being a demigod, when I just demolished everything in sight with magic, but at the same time there were a few cases where I was just shot dead in under a second by a few archer hobos - and those moments were extremely frustrating.
  
• Unusual and interesting setting. There aren’t really many games that go for slavic myths, so it felt much more fresh than the usual norse/egyptian/greek mythology.
  
• A rather big world that is actually interesting to explore. To be honest this is basically the selling point of the game. Most of my gameplay I spent just running around and exploring, and since the game doesn’t hold your hand and death for the character is one mistake away - the process was pretty thrilling. Considering that the game has alchemy and cooking - no matter where you go you will find at least something to do and to grab.
  
• Story. I would say that the lore that you find around and some of the side quests were pretty good, the main story without the DLC - kinda ok, not really great, but it was somewhat unusual.
  
• Jank. Well, there is some - a few strange ragdolls here, a few clippings into textures there - nothing major, but you can kind of tell that this is an indie project made by 2 people. Nothing gamebreaking though, so it is OK.

Overall - the game was really enjoyable. It is one of those that you sit to play - and finish it without taking a day off to play something else. I can easily recommend this game to anyone who wants a good exploration game - just make sure to grab the DCL too, it adds way too much to pass on it.

The problem with this DLC is simple: the core game already had way too many items/professions without giving them any depth, and DLC just makes it worse - even more items, even more buildings, even more professions. Does it add any depth? Nope. Does it do something unique that other games don’t offer? Nope. This DLC just adds nothing worthy of note, therefore I simply can’t recommend it.

Once again, we have a Banished clone that was released without a single new idea and without any improvements to a base that is more than a decade old.

• Horrible UI. Zero useful feedback, incomes are shown per year, but spendings are per month. All the numbers for incomes and spendings are not informative (spendings include one-time things like buildings, incomes vary significantly for no apparent reason).
  
• There are more resources than in banished, but they are just bloat with no interesting mechanics backing it up - just simple recipes for consumer goods.
  
• Upgrade mechanic, the only half descend idea, is extremely raw: instead of requiring a research and giving a nice bonus, they are available as soon as you finish said building - and, basically, required for it to operate properly, as upkeeps and production numbers without those upgrades are terrible to the point of the building itself being not worthy constructing if you can’t afford the upgrades immediately.
  
• Logistics are extremely unreliable: I often had my buildings not working despite having all the required resources in the warehouse right next to it or citizens starving to death despite food in storage nearby.
  
• Balancing is off - you are either having way too much or way too little, and with no proper graphs for consumption balancing food and luxury items is a nightmare. Some buildings are so bad that buying resources from the market was cheaper than producing some items in your colony.
  
• Terrible tech tree. Instead of meaningful upgrades it is just an unlock tree for the most basic and generic buildings you have ever seen.

Overall: this is just a very basic and poorly made Banished clone. Just play Banished again or get something better, this game is not worth your time.