This really is a tough one. I like the game, its art style, the organic non-grid building and emerging path structures, the beautifully animated construction phases, the relatively serene and peaceful atmosphere ("relative" because you can "send out your troops", which plays out more like a dice roll with a couple of modifiers applied than a real strategy game, but you can get your pixel soldiers killed)

Then there are the bugs, of which there are plenty, ranging from "bah, 'tis but a flesh wound" to joy-sapping annoyances like the idiotic pathfinding, to reportedly save game breaking errors (which I have frankly not encountered, but the number of bug reports about those is not insignificant).

I don't know whoever thought it was a good idea to "release" this game from early access; I have been playing intermittently for some four or five years in EA, and it feels like another four or five years wouldn't have been too long to iron out at least a couple of the more annoying shortcomings. Who knows if the game would have been ready by 2030, but it certainly was not ready in 2025.

Foundation is playable, and it is beautiful and highly addictive, and it is indeed enjoyable, but calling it a smooth and bug-free "release" version is just pretentious.

Not recommended in 2025 if you are looking for a polished experience – maybe check back in a couple more years – but do give it a try if you are willing to accept that you're but a paying beta tester.

That said – if you'll excuse me, I have a city to look after.

I love this game, and that's the only reason I'm going to criticize it. No idea why anyone wastes time complaining about things they clearly don't like in the first place. So my 2 criticisms are as follows..

1) White text on a light background. I play this game one third blind to the text, and I still love it, but this is silly.

2) The roofs of the high density houses look awful (and the houses all look fantastic before this point). The artists clearly did some research for the architecture, or just understand how water works, and although the game is cartoony (nothing wrong with that) it just looks all wrong if you know anything about building.
Some might say they took artistic license, but my complaint is not against their artistry, it's purely based on gravity and water erosion, very basic parts of life. Being a carpenter/cabinet maker for 3 decades, I cannot unsee obvious architectural failures. The mishmash of rooftops they have would literally doom those buildings to fail in just a few years. That's why no one ever builds roofs like that.
My guess is the devs were just crunched for time and will hopefully fix it, but for now I've just added a mod to increase housing and am trying to make sure I don't upgrade to high density. But again, I only mention these things because the game is so good it earned my constructive criticism.


Now I'm going to go play it some more and hopefully figure out why my peeps paths are blocked, and spend way too much time admiring the countryside before making small incursions into it to feed my peeps, while leaving plenty of the wild areas for them, and me, and the boars, to enjoy..
Can't forget the boars.. it's always all about the boars: our supreme overlords.

Have a great day everyone!