I love the game at it's core and I think it has a lot of potential, unfortunately this game suffers from a colossal no-fun-syndrome due to the overly punishing hardcore nature of the game.
To be specific, it's really hard to survive alone in this game, that's right, the thing you have to be most concerned about in this game is being able to stay alive while your population expands. Just surviving random events and expanding is a huge unfun process. Constantly struggling to stay alive and stocking up on resources results in you having to stare at your monitor doing nothing while your resources pile up most of the time, because doing things punishes your income extremely hard you simply cannot do anything a lot of the time. This leads to extremely slow paced progression, and staleness, which makes you feel like you're not getting anything done, specially on winter, the happiness system makes the game even more punishing, as if it weren't enough already. Planning your next move while taking into consideration all the fun random events that can make your life miserable, not to mention the extremely fun blizzard event that I'm sure everyone loves, is about all you're gonna be doing most of the time.
If you enjoy thinking way more than playing and you're an extreme masochist then you're gonna love this game, if you're looking for a game with good balance between fun and difficulty you're not gonna find it here.

average game length 2 minutes

toxicity.
they ruined matchmaking when it was perfectly fine for everyone except extremely high mmr players.
updates are too infrequent, game gets stale fast.
balance changes are mostly based around the competitive scene rather than around 99.9% of the player base, so you can predict almost all the upcoming changes.
there's no events like there used to be back in 2013, now it's just lazy and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ free battle pass events to earn garbage from playing matchmaking, reminds me of those Japanese gacha games.
the game optimization is trash, it runs on pretty much every potato, but even if you have a good pc you will drop fps like crazy when the game reaches 30 mins or if theres a phantom lancer in your game.
bad development direction, they're trying to make it more casual to attract newer players, and so far failed terribly.
only plus I can give to this game from the last 2 years is that they removed shrines.