I would tentatively recommend this assuming you know what you're in for.


Let Them Trade is a fairly simple and chill logistics based city builder where you construct and upgrade cities with associated production tiles. Each city can produce its own goods and cities can be interlinked with roads to allow for trade between them to collectively meet the needs of the people in all the cities. Efficient city planning paired with a research tree allows you to accumulate wealth and see the cities prosper.


I found the core experience of the game quite enjoyable, it's a fairly relaxing and low stakes game which you can complete within several hours as it does not take long to complete the research tree and max out all your cities. The visuals are simple but nice to look at, the music is pleasant and the game-play is pretty straightforward. I think it serves as a good game to play whilst you do something in the background like listen to a podcast etc.


I would however say, the game is fairly basic in its current state, perhaps too basic. The technology tree is very brief and feels a tad unfinished, like it should have more options but it doesn't. The game also has a bandit system where trade routes can be attacked but that whole aspect is more annoying than anything else (you can thankfully turn it off entirely). Throughout the game I do keep getting the feeling of wanting more, more resources, more cities, more technologies. Whilst the core game is fine, I feel like the line between relaxing and boring is very fine and Let Them Trade is teetering on the edge.


I think to improve the game moving forward, the devs should add more meat to the bones here, I don't think added complexity will take away from the laid back vibe the game is going for. I think some design decisions need refining as well, I think the individual perks of production tiles you can select are tedious to manage. There should just be a separate page where you can control the global selection of perks for a specific production tile type instead of clicking on them separately, something like a branching upgrade tree where you choose to specialise the tiles for specific purpose. I also think knights should have a patrol option seeing as you can only have 3 at the most and the range of guarding they provide is minuscule compared to the map size. Having them patrol the roads of a certain area seems far more sensical than constantly moving them around.


All that being said, if you go into the game expecting a simple, chill albeit brief city building/logistics experience, you will get that. However, if you're looking for something more involved that you can play for a longer amount of time with added complexity, probably look elsewhere.

POST PATCH UPDATE

My did this take a while, well the game has now had a major patch and things are...better. The game is still by default held at 30fps but now an option in the menu has been added that lets you choose between 30/60/90 fps although they do say if you put it above 60 you may experience some issues with the performance. In my experience the game runs much better than before I get a solid 60fps on maximum settings (not including NVIDIA crap) during fighting/walking/gliding/grappling with almost no hitching, however I must say while driving the batmobile you can get 60 around the outskirts of Gotham but in the center where its busy and there are more npc's and other cars it does drop to around 50fps quite frequently. While this is not great it is certainly better than the 20fps it used to be when driving the batmobile.

The options menu has had loads of changes more suitable to PC with texture settings actually having an option for "High" this time rather than just medium which brings me to the games graphics. The game looks marginally better although not really in any significantly noticeable way. While batman games always had that shiny polished look to all its textures, I find that the moody lighting and glossy textures tend to hide the fact that some of the textures just aren't that great meaning walls, backgrounds and such; but they are good where it matters I suppose such as the batsuit, batmobile and generally all character models.

So should you buy it? Sigh this is a rather hard question but let me try to expand. I feel like this game is in a playable state, not perfect...but playable. However, I urge everyone not to forget the disaster that was this games launch. In my opinion such a terrible launch and treatment of the PC community requires that we show WB and Rocksteady that this is not ok by voting with our wallets and not buying this game. By doing so, showing them that this is unacceptable and if this is the state in which you release your games and it takes you like what 3-4 months to fix this then you don't deserve our money and support. So if you don't have any strong reason to buy this game then please don't. There are better games out there that you can still buy, if however you are intent on buying this game then at least wait for a sale because working or no this game is not worth its standard price. Take note of this games launch and please don't preorder and keep an especially keen eye on WB games since its clear whatever they may be publish to PC will likely crash and burn since they don't give a damn about PC and PC should not give a damn about them.



ORIGNAL REVIEW

- Performance issues everywhere.
- Had to use ini files to uncap the default 30fps lock.
- I have drops to around 23fps on a rig that supersedes the recommended system requirements.
- Do you have an AMD graphics card? lol good luck m8

It's a shame because there is a good game somewhere in here but the performance issues make it unplayable, I strongly advise against buying this until it is patched and begins to work properly. As it stands right now DO NOT BUY IT