Anvil Saga

The game is compelling, but lots of bugs, including loss of your save. I was surprised to see a pixel-graphics-based game offer me "Low" suggested settings when I run with an AMD 7 7800X3D (8 physical cores @4.2GHz) 64GB RAM, and an AMD Radeon RX 7800 48GB RAM video card. I bumped the settings up to High, but was met with awful stuttering and bad frame rate. I dropped it back down to "Low" and played about 8 hours on the story mode. Gameplay is a fun sim-based colony manager where you have to decide which orders to accept, both story-driven and random. The random orders might affect factions, or offer higher/lower returns, while story-based orders have very specific affects and may alter storyline outcomes down the road. Characters are fun and well written, and you may run into some unique surprises with your own workers; one of mine left angrily when I supported the other side of the war! The interface can be a little clunky and not obvious as to where pop-up confirmation windows appear (sometimes off-screen) which have to be zoomed-out and searched for to identify. I had multiple sessions where a window would get "stuck" during a selection and disable all other buttons until I saved, quit, and restarted. Some tutorial prompts would say I had completed a quest before the story had moved to the next checkpoint. Finally, I decided to launch the game with the settings on "Medium", but loading the game had the same slowness as before, so I saved and quit to relaunch with "Low" again. To my dismay, my save is gone, nowhere to be found. Relaunching shows an empty save store. Completely unacceptable bug. I have zero interest in investing any more time into a game where I'm unsure if my progress will be wiped out.

While the graphics are stylish and the overall atmosphere is charming, it is quite unpolished and does fall short on many other aspects: Some bugs, though nothing game-breaking so far, and more importantly, a rather unbalanced gameplay. There are impossible order requirements and quest timers in the beginning of the game. The faction favour system is rather buggy so that in the end I have 100 relation with all factions and 0 with one other, even though I paid attention to make it even. Also, a lot of features and mechanics are not explained well or at all and you are left wondering if they have any effect or if they are just bugged. After a few hours you will have seen all the gameplay there is and most of it is comprised of waiting and repetitive actions. There isn't really much decision making involved and after not even a single year in-game and 8 hours of playing in "hard mode", I upgraded everything I can and now there's really not much left to do.

It's a decent management game. But there are some bugs with the save files, so watch out for that.

shit