Reviews

• RBH1138

  Apr 29, 2022

  It's an abandoned game, and consumers should expect an unfinished game, that never really worked right when it was receiving updates. The guide to help teach you how to play is very poorly done, and you're left to repeatedly fail until you give up or try something different, even though you'll eventually run into an issue that can't be dealt with and have to start all over again. The game isn't hard, it's just poorly thought out, and the UI leaves the player wondering what to do. It's clear the art style was the focus, not the actual game-play or game itself.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 27, 2022

  Man, I really wanted to love this game.. :( And to top it all off, game looks abandoned by the devs, which is a shame.. the art is good, the fun survival mechanics are fun! Its a gem.. a unpolished turd covered gem... I cant recommend it, unless you love Sims and its super cheap, then get it, I guess, maybe if the Devs get some money they will come back. Its super fun.. when its working like it should. The game is complicated but not impossible, its fair, man, Its just so damn sad it was left like this.. The lore is great, take some time to read the story, some scenarios have good dialogue and events which just gives you a glimpse of what this game could have been. Game music is broken it cuts off and restarts and its super jarring. There is no autosaving so if (in typical sim game fashion), you get so focused on the game you forget to save for a long time, the game starts bogging down and glitchy stuff starts to happen and if you get unlucky, it may freeze and since you didnt save.. bye bye, Oh yeah, the game also doesnt close/exit properly and I need to force shutdown from steam library. When one of my guys died, whenever I tried to save, the game would crash.. it was awful. Right now, you can only play in scenarios which have the same map. If they added mod support so players could share their own maps and scenarios, it would have been great! Heck, give players access to fix the game! Luckily, you CAN 100% the game, took me 100 hours but I had to reload lots of times because reasons. If you are having trouble, I made a guide while I was suffering! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2878354358 There is one achievement which needs you to play on a beta test version of the game. Unfortunately, I just cant recommend this lovely game in this broken state, if the devs decide to come back and fix some issues, Im so willing to switch my review around, if anyone reads this and the game has updated for the better, let me know please! Unclaimed Worlds gets 10 golden turds out of 30 colonists who cant store items into containers properly.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 24, 2015

  Unclaimed World seems to have been dumped out of Early Access unfinshed. All the potential I hoped for never materialised. Do not buy. Unclaimed World has oodles of potential oozing out from between the flaws. But don't be tempted, the flaws are terrible and many. After playing 0.1.2.1 in January 2015. I'm going to probably give this game a year or more before trying again. And now I have given it a year - it's January 2016 - and things have changed but not drastically. First off, the good stuff. Unclaimed World is like Majesty and Dwarf Fortress at it's core. You designate tasks and one or more of your free-willed plebs will undertake them. There is no mico-managing workers. The banter between the various colonists is the perfect way to introduce the new world. The scenarios are not random so after a couple of tries you'll know which colonists you get and what their skills are. I like the graphical style and the smooth character animations, they give a good sense of pioneering on an alien planet. The character portraits, whilst somewhat caricatured, make knowing and empathising with said characters much easier. But. That's where the good stops. There are currently only three stages, the tutorial which is so hand-holdy it's a chore; and not one I've forced myself to complete. The first stage which is impossible to lose unless you try really, really had to get your colonists killed. And lastly the second stage which crashes fairly early in. Don't expect content, it's not here. The user interface is bad - but vastly impoved from when it was first released. And as things start to take shape it's now possible to see higher level issues with interface. Right click context sensitive menus have been a 'thing' for a very, very long time now. Unfortunately the devs have ignored years of progress and have a wierd left click, bring up a small box with an arrow, left click the arrow, bring up the context sensitive menu. Right clicking hides the interface but doesn't close anything. Left clicking brings back all the menus as they were. Unclaimed World is SLOW. The characters idle along at maybe 5 to 10 pixels a seond but have to traverse areas that are thousands of pixels across. Leaving the game to run whilst doing other things seems to be the only meaningful way to play. Even after three version bumps this is still a problem and I suspect it's a fatal one. I've added more detail in my first comment. And the speed gets worse on the (previously mentioned) second stage. The characters still move at about the same rate but the screen refreshes at less than a frame a second until eventually it becomes a slide show and crashes. I'm sure a simple 2D game should run better than this. The artificial intelligence in a game where units can't be directly controlled has to be good. But in Unclaimed World it's not. It's awful. I can't seem to prioritise tasks. Gathering seems to take precedence over everything. So if there are a couple of construction projects going on and I set a new gather task then everyone drops what they're doing and rushes (relatively) to all gather the same stick of firewood. Practicaly this means as long as there are gather tasks construcion tasks will not finish. Furthermore the AI in combat is even more deficient, with the characters commenting that they must attack as a group and then walking in one at a time; and only after the previous character has been killed. It's horrible. They also seem to get lost and will wander backwards and forwards through an enemy nest despite there not being any tasks near it. I still haven't found a good way to get the colonist to move and work as a unit. In closing, Unclaimed World has a lot of potential with a good exploration and command vibe but it is so far from being completed that it's barely even a tech demo - let alone a full game. Avoid.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 16, 2016

  Many reviews and ratings for this game are really out of date. I am writing this review as of version 0.9, have been playing since early Alpha, and have logged 80hrs on this game. I will say that a lot of those hours were very frustrating and felt like a slog BUT - the game is really improving. [u]What's not so great[/u]: Thankfully it's mostly stuff that's still in progress! * Finicky system for harvesting resources; sometimes they're visible but not harvesting * Balance still needed for food production and how the colonists perceive their level of supply and comfort * Lots of time waiting for colonists to finish tasks * No randomized maps * Sometimes difficulty is frustrating rather than challenging * Still has some instability/crashes [u]What's great[/u]: * Maps are handcrafted and beautiful, and highly dynamic and interactive * Feels like a fleshed out eco-system into which your colonists are intruding (not just hey there are rabbits and also wolves) * Highly varied animal species which each play unique role * TONNES of things to harvest, which can be over-harvested and lead to realistic resource scarcity, forcing your colonists to wait for them to regrow! You have to plan your settlement strategically * Cobbling together buildings and tools from realistic ingredients (not oh hey I need 5 wood and now magically have a workbench - you can see the ingredients in the design of each structure: i.e., this simple workbench has a big purple leaf as its awning, and this could break and need to be replaced) * Highly stratified task-management system to juggle priority of specific tasks and task categories * Each colonist has not just specific skill sets but different priorities for the colony (some want better food, others can live off survival rations but want more comfortable living arrangements) * Different scenarios in different timelines give different blends of survival/advanced technology perfect for a Space Western kind of genre. * Slowly and deliberately build from a collection of tents and eating fish to a developed industry town producing machine parts, finished rubber products, bombs, or moonshine! Overall the game really is a [u]joy[/u] to play, and I wait with baited breath for each content release. It feels very distinct from other similar games, such as Stonehearth, Rim World, and Clockwork Empires and has a lot to recommend it!
• gamedeal user

  Oct 5, 2016

  Unclaimed World is about humans trying to survive on an alien world. Different scenarios take place at different points in the history of the world, so you see the people of the planet at different times from early in the colonization to generations later. The alien world itself has lots of strange and new species of plants and creatures, and the look of the settings is interesting and beautiful. Gameplay revolves around managing the actions of your community of colonists by giving them tasks and prioritizing. A lot of the colony management is zone-based, where you drag and create zones and indicate the actions the colonists should take within that zone - scouting out new locations, gathering resources, patrolling for dangerous creatures, etc. You also manage the production of tools, buildings, food, etc. through a production menu that has an extensive technology tree. The developers have done a great job of making it easy to click through and access information which is great because the technology of the world is well-realized, you need the right materials and tools to gather or build things, and for the more complex technologies it's relatively easy to click through the different menus to see what you might be missing. Using all this you manage the colonist's needs for food, comfort, and security. To begin with you start off with basic hunter-gatherer technologies to establish a foundation for your colony, and as you accumulate food, dwellings for your settlers, and defenses, your colonists can vote to establish new policies that simultaneously give you access to more advanced technologies but also increase your colonists' expectations of each category, which means you can't rush farming without first getting a good amount of food stocked up from fishing, berrypicking, hunting, etc. I feel like this helps to realize the technology of the world and state of the settlement - your colonists will get upset if you look to set up farms where fields will yield crops month from now, but they need food [i]right now.[/i] If colonists get unhappy enough, they'll leave for a neighboring settlement. Which brings up another important aspect of the game - trade. You can establish trade with neighboring settlements in order to get access to tools and resources you need, and also you can entice new people with new skillsets to your settlement. This is often necessary as your small hunter-gatherer village will probably not start off with a blacksmith, so in order to advance your technology and create new tools and buildings you'll need to find a blacksmith and ask them to join you. The game has come a long way and the developers have been great about continuing to improve on and develop the game. They're extremely responsive to questions and bug reports, and it's been a pleasure seeing this game make its journey from vision of a strange alien planet to released game. If you're interested in city building sims, survival sims, or colony management sims (e.g. Banished) you'll probably enjoy this game. As a last note, I want to point out that many of the negative reviews of this game have come from early in Early Access and the complaints are regarding problems that have since been resolved or the absence of features that have since been added to the game. If you feel this review isn't helpful, feel free to ask any questions and I'll respond in the comments and amend my review to include the information. Thanks for reading.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 5, 2016

  Many reviews point that the game had poor AI and some bugs, but the current release seems (3 hours of playing so far, but I like the game) pretty solid. It's... a pretty peculiar game: a building/exploring/surviving game in which you try to survive on a planet (in various environment). But the design of the game is pretty unique, and also consider that you come from space, but you you'll need to discover again a lot of technologies during a normal game. A funny game, not perfect, but I think is worth of his price. The problems: there are a couple of bugs, but, so far, I haven't find any annoying problem. No, the main problem is, sadly, the UI design... It works, but I sincerely don't understand why creating a design so difficult to understand and to use. It's possible to create and repeate and programming tasks, but you fail to grasp all the possibilites and probably you'll find yourself to be annoyed. Overall: a good game, not overpriced, and pretty unique for his design, but also not for who don't like to do micromanagement tasks and slide some graphs.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 8, 2016

  While I usually like this type of game I just didn't find this fun. I think its mostly the interface which is both cluttered and has multiple layers of menus that are hard to navigate, but I also think this is compounded by gameplay which seems to involve a lot of production chains and is equally fiddly. While the graphics do look nice I din't think they were especially clear in terms of being able to tell you what's going on. Lastly I didn't get the feeling of emergent gameplay which is what I usually like about similar sandbox style games. Even though you don't directly control your colonists, there is little sense that anything much will happen if you don't intervene. I sort of feel bad for not recommending this because I suppose a lot of this is a matter of taste and it could be said that the developers weren't trying to make "that kind of game" but I think this will pop up as recommended for a lot of people like me who like games like Rimworld, Prison Architect, Planetbase or just straight citybuilders.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 24, 2016

  I really wanted to like this game. Around 6 months ago I tried it but it was far from complete and I thought they are trying hard lets give them some time and try again. After all that time I installed it again. They fixed some of the bugs but most of them are still there. People are always starving. You just spend most of your time trying to get people to eat so they wont die or leave. When you try to build new stuff it is even more annoying. Sometimes they will build it like an hour later and sometimes they wont even bother. Every 10 minutes you have to save it or it will slow down like hell eventhough I have the latest Alienware 17 so it is definitely a programming issue or even worse it will crash. In 3 hours game time it crashed more than 5 times. It is a great idea with bad elements. There is still some fun to be had and spend time. I wouldn't say it is unfixable but it needs proffessional focusing. I dont believe most gamers would be as patient as me. 5/10
• gamedeal user

  Feb 9, 2017

  I really like the premise, and the ideas behind this game, but the UI is hands down one of the worst things that I've ever seen. For the love of the players, please redesign the way the interface functions, or give us a way to choose what style of interface we want. As is, this is essentially unplayable. I'll seriously reconsider my review / recommendation if or when we get an interface that is actually usable.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 27, 2017

  Unfortunately buying this game while still in early access was a mistake. I cannot recommend it. After a long development, the final game still feels like an early access version. The UI is horrible and one of the UI that really are the exact opposite of what an UI should do. It is not responsive, easy to control, easy to be informed and it is not interactive. You need excessively many clicks to do the most basic things. The graphic is nice – until u realize you cannot zoom in. It is like having an ant farm – just boring. Content wise this game doesn’t offer much and after a few hours, you are just done.