After getting bored of Dwarf Fortress, and RimWorld, I decided this might be a fun stop-gap while building up the encouragement to jump back into either. Unfortunately after mastering bronze armor/weapon production this game is nothing but a snooze fest. The raids are easy to beat and the most infuriating aspect is seeing a skilled worker die and having to wait hours until someone else is semi-competent to be able to accomplish something in the first try.

Things I wish it had:
Some way to interact with the world map or do something once you've built a self-sufficient colony. send raiders, build ships to cross oceans, start new settlments, etc.

Focus on difficulty to actually encourage arcane/iron armor exploitation, less pointless micro-management more fun, whether it's a 4X approach, dungeon crawler, or tower defense, find something that is an expansive and far-reaching goal for people to want to achieve. Take advantage of the current art style and incorporate the difficulty from Hero's Hour or Rise to Ruins... do something. In it's current state it's nothing more than dwarf fortress knock-off with an identity crisis.

Things that are bad:
It took me about 8 hours to figure out that clicking on the object name in the room management takes you to the auto-complete rules. While the system works almost exactly like Dwarf Fortress, its somewhat pointless to micro-manage. The game seems to be focusing on combat/arcane/exploration, why have to micro-manage farming, cooking, armor production when the end result is no different? Just let us plop down a room and let it automatically make anything we need if the resources exist... set a global stockpile limit and priority and just let them figure it out.

Animal husbandry is useless. Wool sucks more than plant fibers anyways, just kill everything and move on. Fishing and farming is more than adequate to sustain at least 30 people throughout the year.

Things that are boring:
World exploration is abysmally slow and serves zero challenge. It took 90% of my playthrough to tunnel down to the bottom of the world while watching builders walk up and down the 100 or so ladders for a single piece of wood to build the next ladders. There is nothing stopping you from just noob tubing straight to the core and letting your dudes scale the walls back up. At least I tried to build ladders.... Still, once the treasures beneath are un-earthed, there is literally nothing left to do.

Things that I liked:
You have complete freedom to terraform to your heart's content, (Dwarf Fortress is utterly infuriating in this regard)

Boring. That's all. While performance is also not great; vsync to 30 really inst the worst. My main complaint is that the early game is just plain boring. Anyone with a pulse should be able to amass at least $5 million even in a city with negative cash flow, From then on it just becomes an endless road builder. Do you try to fill in every square with a perfect grid? or do you just plop down as many crazy roads as you can imagine? No idea, zone and zone and zone and eventually you'll get enough population to float through what seems like sandbox difficulty. It's just not fun, zone a new mega square, wait for people to move in, get milestone, rinse repeat. No determinable challenge or difficult decision making, you just find somewhere a service building fits and plop away. Sure, you could try to make your industry the best it could possibly be, but there is no incentive to it other than keeping you from walking away in boredom. Just disappointing, that's all.

After many hours I struggle to find the ambition to progress any further after cycle 1100 in chapter 3. Unfortunately, I've come to the sad realization that, after struggling every step of the way to maintain sanity, I have not collected enough cryopods to achieve self sustainability. I've spent far too much iron on maintenance for the last thousand cycles and there is not enough iron left in the map of Chapter 3 to make it out. This game will chew you up and spit you out if you don't understand the limiting factors on progression early on. You will spend many tens of hours struggling to reach the next nut, only for you to realize very late in the game that you cannot win and you've strung yourself on for so long to be disappointed in this reality. Perhaps don't make your first run on the highest difficulty, but for anyone who struggles with repeatability, you may find easier levels too easy to provoke any sense of challenge. Don't get me wrong, I like the game a lot, enough to spend many hours playing and learning how to play it, I'm just very disappointed to learn that I've wasted many hours to not be able to make it to the end. While I embrace failure, It seems cruel to endure 20+ hours of trying so hard to continue to the next chapter to make it to a point where you have no chance to continue and are forced to start over. My advise is to understand how iron and cryopods are finite resources that require certain milestones to be met for you to be able to finish.

So far, Excellent. Although I have to say the most obnoxious part is fumbling around with the damn controllers. The scariest part of the game is getting caught in a corner fumbling around to get a magazine off the ground and in the gun. It gets quite obnoxious when we all know if it weren't for awful motion controls there would be no need to waste 3 magazines killing 2 headcrabs.

Best way to make your toaster pop.

Far too much micromanagement late game. God forbid you are in a war, because not a single person on earth has enough patience to manage their units, keep traders full and working, protect their religious expansion, counterspy, defend cities, build air units, trade great works, strategically place a navy, find tiles to improve, settle new cities, dig up and build archeology units, spend faith points, change government civics, assign governors, manage loyalty, protect city states, keep alliances, trade away excess luxuries, fight off warmonger penalties, enter agreements; and don’t forget... you still need to pick district improvements, upgrade units, pick research, civic cards, stay out of a dark age... etc.

It's just too much garbage to handle, if you focus on a single endeavor you will lose, somehow you need to manage every single aspect or have a score 1.5x higher than other civs on a lower difficulty that offers no challenge. It's imperative to focus on winning the game 100 turns before the last or you will be overwhelmed with the amount of micromanagement. Which is a difficult prospect considering the whole premise of Civ has always been that the person with the most land wins, which you cant achieve unless you are in a war.

Don’t expect to win, just hang in there the best you can and click options at random until the game ends. if you didn’t win, just lower the difficulty. If you are captured, lower it by two. If the lower difficulty is not challenging, then just start a new game once you reach the modern era. Hopefully this is addressed in the next expansion

Plenty of things to run out of, plenty of ways to die.

Far too easy, directed, and not diverse enough to keep my attention. Everything is incredbly dumbed down, there is practically no elements to micro-manage especially in a psuedo-simulation style game. Many icons seem like placeholders that were never fully developed, and overall the only things that look polished are the animations. Many other aspects of the game seem unfinished or not fully fleshed out. The game could have been great, but feels rushed to meet a deadline. Anyone with any experience in a sim game can easilly beat the career in 4-5 hours, and without a true sandbox, the re-playability is non existent. Would not reccomend for anyone looking for a challenging hospital sim, but to be fair I did not like Cities Skylines on first release either, and felt rather similar. I just dont see the same potential in this game, so I am refunding.

I would highly recommend Big Pharma if you want something similar with all the micro-managing challenge that is glaringly absent in this game, until Project Hospital is released. Don't get me wrong, the game has a ton of character, but is that character conducive to a true sim game experience; not really. More time should have been spent elsewhere in development.

I never really enjoyed the game simply because I hate losing, and when you spend an hour in a mission with random people, and you end up loosing; it just becomes a boring rage enduing grind to ultimately get nowhere. Don't get me wrong, the game is fun and all with the right DLC's and a competent team of players, but for people who just want to hop on and have some fun, it is impossible and will make you ragequit within a few matches.