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The Governor is a city-builder combined with turn-based combat. The game appears to be a small game, but there's actually a lot to do in this game, even in its current Early Access build. (If everything goes according to plan, it will only be in Early Access for a few months.)

You play the role of the governor of a town in the Wild West, and your goal is to keep peace within the town that is full of outlaws.

There is a tutorial, and it doesn't explain everything, which would get really tedious. So it gives you the basics and you will discover the rest along the way.

You will see on the map that your town/city has 6 regions. Each one has its own buildings and problems to deal with. You will need to upgrade buildings and solve the problems that arise within each region in order to improve your city. Your performance determines what buildings you have access to as well.

As each week passes, you will get new assignments to clear threats in town. You will earn gold and experience if you succeed. In addition, there are more difficult threats which will reward you some blue diamonds. In order to clear these threats, you can go in yourself, or you can send in a team. Usually your team's level determines the mission's success rate.

If you fail a mission, you can repeat it the following week. You will lose experience for failures, so you are better off to choose a mission that you have a higher chance of winning.

With money that you earn, you can unlock new upgrades for buildings, but you can also upgrade your weapons, armor, etc.

As I mentioned above, there are many things to do in this game, but I won't outline all of the details. You will find it rather enjoyable to make some discoveries yourself, I am sure.

What I will say briefly is about the battles, as they are turn-based, but also luck based. You and your enemies fight simultaneously. Most of the time you can perform 2 actions, you can shoot and move or stay in the same place, while the enemies do the same. This results in an anticipatory pattern, in that if you shoot while the enemy decides to move, you will miss. I will let you discover more on your own.

While there's not much that looks fancy, it looks fine for an indie project. I believe there is only one developer for this game.

The game can be fully played with a mouse.

The music is typical in the style of westerns. I am not a huge fan of it, but it fits well in this game.

The current base price in Early Access is very good, at €6.59 EU/$7.99 US, especially right now with a 30% discount.
The planned release price will be double the current Early Access price.

Here's a first-look at the beginning of the game, a sample of the gameplay, without commentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzTa0SJqr44

The Governor is clearly a game with plenty of love and attention. It has quite a bit of content in the city-building aspect and that is where I would primarily place this game.

Its battles are seemingly turn-based but also significantly luck-based. I am not sure if I am a fan of these luck-based battles, because I prefer a more tactical component in turn-based combat.

I do enjoy that there are so many things to do and so many things to unlock, with a clear focus on city-building, and everything that supplements it.

I do think that the developer should add Steam achievements, as it's a way to draw in more players.

Overall, it's an enjoyable game for a good price.

I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.

TLDR: The Governor is part strategy game, part role playing game, part TB combat game; unfortunately in its current state, it doesn't do any of these things well. If it improves during/following Early Access, I will update my review but currently, I cannot recommend it.

+ Interesting western-themed game that combines strategy (town management) and some role-playing, backstopped by frequent turn-based combat

+ Shows promise in the above respect; you can improve your character, get new equipment for stat buffs, hire patrols, upgrade buildings, etc.

+ With sufficient refinement and more content, it can be fun to play

- Battle positions are pre-determined; there is no cover, no LOS, just an RNG chance to hit and guess where your opponent may be moving to. Forget about weapon / ballistic physics here

- The heart of the game is combat; if you fail too may missions, you can't improve your town, buy new equipment, etc. So if the combat system sucks, then you cannot progress much further

- There is a LOT of combat; it feels grindy and you feel helpless due to the RNG factor. I might as well be playing slots in a casino since it really depends mostly on your luck (your stats can influence a little, but if you can't win battles, you can't improve your stats)

- Mission completion isn't persistent; if you eliminate a threat, it re-appears next week. If you can't get the security level in a sector high enough, you can't build certain buildings. i.e. Improving your town is contingent on eliminating ALL threats in a sector WITHIN A WEEK. If you get injured, you have to spend time healing to remove the debuffs. And once you run out of time and the next week comes round... yep, the threats reappear and you have to start all over again...

- Currently, there is only one difficulty setting and one save game. So you cannot try different things. In my opinion, this rogue-lite feature adds to the frustration and does nothing to enhance game-play

The Governor has an interesting concept, and does hold some promise. But it hasn't been thought through well enough, needs serious re-balancing, and cannot be recommended at this stage.



4.5/10

The Governor is a gem even in its Alpha-stage.

REMEMBER this is an ALPHA game!!!

There's only a single developer working on this project, and so far, he has done an exceptional job creating a western frontier with lots of detail. Sadly there is limited gameplay, and battle mechanics are not great. You can easily beat bots without a real strategy.

A few things to mention about the game is that you start off controlling the capital city surrounded by different tribes, settlements, and villages. Your goal is to unite these places under your state to win. As mentioned before, there is a lot of beautiful detail for a game in this price range. A significant part of this game is building structures in which you can hire employees and earn revenue to build more buildings to attract skilled workers so you can buy more buildings or invest in settlements to gain favor.

Your citizens will protect your settlements that are under your protection from bandits. You don't necessarily have to protect every tribe or village, but it's a good idea if you don't want to lose any reputation points.

Are you interested yet? If not, that is understandable. Alpha games don't get much love, and usually, I wouldn't spend money on getting one. Still, this game shows a lot of promise, and the sole developer in this project has shown a lot of compassion and dedication that I feel confident supporting the game because I know it will be worth it.

If you're not interested in buying the game in its current state, then I would recommend keeping up with it. So far, I'm enjoying it and am supporting the project.

**Things I wish to see in this game would include better battle mechanics, in which case weapons can do a lot more damage, so it would be a better idea to invest in dodging or taking cover instead of ganging up on a bandit one at a time.

When I think of the wild west, I think of wagon convoys that can trade goods and have to need protection from bandits and hostile tribes.

Very interesting take on combat. I like that the actions happen at the same time so we have to predict what the enemy will do. I also like the city building aspects of the game. I am very excited to see more :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEQG7iBd23w

Another game that flew completly below my (already quite sensible, if i may say so) gaming radar.

Considering how few decent western style games are out there, i am glad that i catched it.

Firstly i was a little concerned about the amount of frustration the fighting system may bring, but although i had some gunfights that felt more like a square dance with guns, i really enjoy it so far.

Looking forward to digging deeper into it and see how it develops, but for now a big like.
A like deserved alone for the fact that there is a demo, also.

"ANCIENT SOULS : The Governor" is a Digital Homicide style asset flip, or what Valve calls a "Fake Game". The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unity asset store packs, specifically POLYGON - Western Pack[www.unrealengine.com] tutorial/demo/game asset pack from the real developers, Synty Studios, plus a few others, dumped them all in a blender, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers. It's important to also note the "developers" here didn't credit any of the artists and real, actual game developers who created the assets here, so this is plagiarism, as well as cash grab shovelware.

Comically I just reviewed another asset flip from Whale Rock Games abusing the same Synty Western Pack, so getting the same asset twice in one day makes me feel so lucky. Deja Vu all over again! Sigh.

The game was abandoned roughly 1 year after launch and hasn't been updated in three years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed.

In fairness some effort was expended in trying to make the stolen/uncredited assets into a real game, as there's a grand strategy/business simulator component and a tactical combat component, but these are badly done. It's evident based on the uncredited use of stock assets and the unethical abuse of Valve's Early Access program that the developer was acting in bad faith, and to nobody's surprise, when games are made in bad faith, they don't turn out to be very good, which is why you should not buy them.

Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.

Furthering the unethical nature of this developer, while they are selling this incomplete game under Valve's failed Early Access program, they're abusing that program, and not working on this game full time, as they have other projects in the works. That means there's ZERO confidence anyone who buys this in Early Access will receive a complete game, and it's possible that they're being scammed.

ANCIENT SOULS : The Governor has the ridiculous, laughable price of around $8 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the unethical nature of the developer. Remember that if you buy a game from an unethical developer, you're putting your money at risk.

Profile Features Limited!

Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game. As if the other reasons supplied here are not sufficient to warn anyone away from this train wreck.