I streamed this game for this review. The link to the VOD will be below.
Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this game, but it's not without some flaws.
Orrstead, a low-poly city builder, uses randomly generated islands where you can grow your new settlement.
After picking your island, you will build your people-spawning monolith and then from there begin constructing your new civilization through ploppable buildings.
While there are no “Residential, Commercial, Industrial” meters to balance, you will be balancing your building materials, your gold, food, and population.
The unique thing that leads to thoughtful optimization is the building range; where certain buildings must be within a range of another building in order to gain its benefits or even apply bonuses, and of course, account for a citizen’s commute from home to the ploppable building they work at to optimize your economy.
This is where things can get a little bit punishing for a game that feels a bit more relaxed;
- placement of buildings is key, and learning the basic requirements of building placement comes from trial and error. Additionally, where you start is very important and you cannot change this after the fact.
- Going hand in hand with not knowing basic requirements, building descriptions are uninformative fluff text. HOWEVER, it's worth noting that the dev did watch my stream and said that descriptions will be fixed to be more informative! But I am basing this review off of the experience I had, which did not feature improved descriptions.
- Poorly optimized commutes for your citizens can quickly lead to resource bleeding sending you on a spiral of failure.
- Buildings will harm happiness or sink your supplies quickly but give little warning that they do.
The combination of these 4 aspects likely lead to a very poor first experience as you will eventually realize how disastrous your city is and realize that a restart is necessary. On the one hand, it's really great learning the game and seeing how to optimize things better for the future - that's part of the fun! On the other hand, it feels really bad to have to just scrap your town and restart. I can see that as being a major quit point for some players.
Ideally, Orrstead would teach the player enough to know the appropriate way to set up a basic town and then leave the optimizing for them to figure out on their own.
It would be great if there was a non-randomly generated tutorial island to help players learn the basic functions of buildings and maybe some basic “optimized” routes for the early game.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.