So after the first hour of playing i can already pin point a few issues i encountered that will not disappear and cause issues later on, but might not be a problem to you.

The design
The game starts off by expecting you to build the first standard structures, which are a Bonfire, Hunting cabin, a Logging camp and Huts.
Already here the first problem occurs, because you are forced to build in a specific order to get access to the next buildings.
Lets say you dont want a Hunter but instead start with a fisher hut.
You cant.
The fisher hut will be unlocked by constructing the carpenter shop.
They arent related to each other, mind. No need to have a carpenter shop at all for anything to function.
Its just a gatekeeper.

You also dont have the option to ignore those buildings.

Well, the game needs the hunting cabin because it acts as a storage for food.
Yeah, even fish from the fishing hut are store there.
Why? No idea.
When you move on, it wants you to construct a storage building. No you cant store food or wood there.
Its only a gatekeeper for mineral production (iron).
You cant set what you want to store in which quantity, which makes it one of the weirdest things in such a game.

One might assume that a storage and a worker would operate in a way to supply buildings with stored resources, collect them or allows to manage some storing aspects/logics.
But it doesnt. Its simply there.
Thats it.
A weird design decision to lock buildings that way, taking any player agency and control away.

The next issue arises from a maximum building quantity. You are only allowed to have a building in an exact amount. One farm, 4 houses, one bonfire, 2 storages and so on.
No, you cant build more than those until later.

Its incredibly limited in choice, options and replayability.
As every new playthrough has you going through the exact same things for the first 4 hours, it becomes a boring slog without any player agency.
Maps dont come with different starting conditions as well.

If to start fresh and follow a different strategy, by lets say focussing on fisher huts or farms to then rushing for iron tools at the risk of ending up with more early casualties and villagers having no huts:
I cant.

The first hours playing will be the same.
And basically, my playthrough will not look different to your playthrough.
We might have arranged a buildings slightly different, but since maps are small and there not being any real choice or meaning behind placement (as villagers dont have to walk long for transportation) it stays undercomplex and thus not interesting.

Because of a lack of choice, it also doesnt feel rewarding. Where other games cause some sort of accomplishment, i dont have that here at all.
In fact, i had no fun the first hour because i didnt do much more than just placing buildings in a scripted order and deciding which villager will occupy a certain job.

The Design reeks of Mobile Port and knowing it is a mobile game, it all makes sense.

Visual Design and UI
It looks good, no doubt. It has an appealing style, but thats basically its only pro.
Even here, i would criticize that because of the limited map generation and because of the fixed and scripted gameplay, you will only see more of the same every time you play.
Playing a new campaign, wont suddenly cause that you start at a desert biome and your first hours will have you starring at the same buildings and same map properties.
It has a good looking style, but doesnt make use of that by offering a lot of different things to see.

The UI is not good, because its unresponsive.
Again, its the mobile port causing an issue. You cant select a building to build and then, when you decide not to place it, press the right mouse button to deselect it.
In fact, there is no usage of the right mouse button whatsoever to navigate the games UI. When you selected a villager, you cant deselect by right clicking.
A deselect only can be done by clicking twice with the left mouse button.
This can cause some problems, because when you do, you might select a new entity although you didnt want to.
It also makes it really sluggish to use the menus, which you do a lot.

Selecting specific entities for example selecting a villager for a level up, can be a tricky task when he/she is close to any other object.
You will have to wait until they run on open field, otherwise you just cant do it.
Thats a problem especially for larger settlements, gladly, i didnt end up in that situation as of now.

The next issue is missing tooltips. A character has a trait. You selected a building and to assign a villager and you see an icon.
You hover over it, but nothing appears.
Your character has 3 stats, Strength, Agility and Intelligence.
Hovering over it, doesnt give any info. Clicking it, nope.
Does strength indicate working speed, agility movement speed?
Once a character levels up you will find out what they do. Somehow intelligence means "working faster".
Why? I dont know.

And again, repeatedly, it feels like it being a mobile port holds it back.
Its obviously designed around the idea of not having any way to right click or to have tooltip infos for certain symbols, simply because a mobile device doesnt offer those functions well.
Thats instantly visible once you notice how you cancel the placement of a building, it has a specific X-icon on the top middle screen to cancel it.
I could possibly overlook the right click issue, if there were any tooltips.

The UI is clunky, bad to use, not PC friendly in fact not even designed around the idea of a PC, provides no real information where it should and in fact holds it back although it shouldnt.

Bugs and polishing
I noticed one bug indicating i had a event message, but clicking the event note icon showed nothing.
The game also didnt seem to bother reporting me that a villager died and how.

The german translation is laughable. Google translate, but done badly and with english text inbetween.
That alone was already a bad sign nearly causing a refund.
Leaving buttons and other areas completely untranslated, is an indication of a lazy job.
I hate to use that phrase, but if you dont bother to recheck if everything is properly translated, then it was a lazy attempt of providing the feature.
It feels like the developer just wanted to checkmark translations to sell more copies, but didnt bother to provide good quality.


What does it offer
- An options menu that doesnt offer a lot of options. Which is ok considering its visual style.
- One Gamemode. Start a New Game, thats it. No way to customize your new game, no way to select a difficulty, no way to perform an alternative start, select a unique starting condition (like different colonist groups) or anything the like.
- Standard buildings but quite a good selection.
- You can assign workers to your buildings.
- Villagers have stats and a trait, but nothing special here. Its not like they have a personality or anything.
- Combat with monsters.
- A world map with trade, which is a big plus.

Rating
It plays and feels like a bad mobile port in every way.
Low quality translations aside, i dont forgive bad UI handling, no information on icons or other areas and a prescripted limited way to play a game like this.
The game design feels like the designer decided i had to play it the exact way he/she played it, which results in me just following someones orders on what to do.
Like a bad tutorial not declared as a tutorial.
Given, it could open up later. But after 2 hours with it, i have no hope and honestly, with it just playing and feeling like a bad mobile port and not a proper PC Game, im not sure why i would take that risk any way.
There are other games doing something similar, but better.

I hoped to add this game to my selection of nice small strategy games, but it doesnt even scratch at the bottom of my most basic expectations.

"But its so cheap", yeah, but its also that bad.

At first glance the game seems pretty clean. But after a while when you start your 2nd city you start noticing missing features that just makes the game tedious.
Example you have to click on the human icon, click a character, check if they have weapon/tool, armor, cart and then click the human icon, click a new character and you have to do it with everybody all the time. There should have been some feature to like hold ALT or something to see if everybody is equipped or not and what work they are currently doing. Also kinda annoying if you defeat the enemies after 10 secounds you still have to wait the entire night out while doing absolutetly nothing. Has potential but defiently seems more like a phone game because of the missing features.

This game is a 5/10. Medicore gameplay and Poorly designed user interface.

The game basically plays like one of those mobile or browser games that disguises itself as a village building game with buildings being all on rails and fixed. It gives you freedom to place your buildings anywhere but like those mobile games that have "fixed slots" for X buildings only you will realize there isn't much strategy here. Ever play those mobile games that start off forcing you to click here build this mission with this X quest completes and it gives you rewards. It hand holds you through the various buildings.

This game cost more than those $1 mobile games for being on a PC, but all the controls are clumsy. Managing villagers are the worst. At the start of the game, you are given only 1 chore which is Builder. Use this time to review your villagers. Once you start assigning them to chores, finding your villagers and their unique traits is tedious. You have to click through chore icon screen and every villager to find what you're looking for to do some planning or decision making.

As an example, you got a cart, or crafted your first weapon. You want to find the best guy to equip it. It's the most tedious an annoying task. There is no view ALL villagers list. You have to view them through each chore and juggle them around. If you're looking for some advance game play here its sorely lacking. Wait for the 60% off discount before buying this game. $5 or less.

Wish I had played the demo during the steam festival before buying this game.

As a fan of city building games, I really like this game. The day is calm and beautiful where you build and expand your settlement, while during the night you encounter deadly monsters and attacks from enemies. Each villager has unique perks. It creates a interesting dynamic. You could either create a tough army to defend your settlement, create efficient workers to increase your production pool to help expand your settlement faster or balance between the two. It's a lovely game.

Repetitive gameplay, Clunky controls, and my villagers get stuck on buildings for 3/4 of the day.

There seems to be a good game here, but it's buried beneath terrible controls and an unnecessarily convoluted menu.

1) The pointer (despite being tiny) is not very precise. One example of the impact: if a building is either paused or unstaffed, the icon showing this status blocks any attempt to select characters walking near the icon. This means that building houses is a frustrating exercise - if you place them before you're ready to build (by pausing), you have a relatively large area where it's impossible to select npc's or other buildings. The same thing happens if there's any extra room in a house. I've lost npc's (perma-death) when a fight occurs behind the icon above a building. It's just a bizarre limitation. This also means selecting any single npc can be tricky. I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with the game speed controls just to wait for a time when I have an unobstructed view of the character. This experience can be particularly frustrating because the controls are "hit the space bar until you get the speed you want". The cycle is "Paused --> Normal Speed --> High Speed". So - when waiting on NPC movement for unobstructed access to an NPC or building we're left with "make it go very fast for a moment" as the only speed change option. It's a bizarre design choice. The good news is that there are menus specifically for the npc's. The bad news...

2) The npc menus are lousy. There's no list of all characters - they are grouped by job type. This wouldn't be too horrible if the characters had more than male/female shapes to distinguish them. Trying to find a single specific character requires lots of experimentation. One example: health can not be seen in the character menu. It can only be seen on the screen.

3) The menus related to crafted items are awful. The crafting system isn't bad, but there's no way to see a list of all unassigned items. There's also no way to see a list of characters with items they have equipped. This causes some headaches (which has also lead to some npc deaths).

I actually think there's a good game in here, but the interface is just...bad. It's a major distraction and doesn't seem to offer any positive value for the trade off, I wanted to like this game - I do like this type of game, and I think the underlying game system is solid. It's just unnecessarily frustrating to reach it.

It's a little bit tragically that I have to not recommend this game. As a fan of the first Bonfire game, despite it's flaws, I was looking forward to The Bonfire 2. Overall, the gameplay isn't bad, and there there's not much on it's own that breaks my ability to recommend it, but all together it just adds up to small problems that just ended up making me feel like I didn't enjoy my time with it.

Among the issues I have with this game is that when your settlement grows larger, the UI for managing your people becomes incredibly clunky, especially when a guard dies and you need to replace them. The fully upgraded bonfire allows you 12 guards, and if one of them dies, you have to scroll all the way down the list of the 11 remaining ones in order to click 'add new guard'. Not the worst thing, but it becomes tedious, and it applies for all buildings, and especially your builders in the later game.

Another issue is with the end game equipment. Unless my game broke or something similar, the only way I noticed to get material for the end game equipment was off enemies (luck), or by trading another resource that is a pain to set up for one, yes, just one meteor shard. This is harsh especially when you need 50 shards in order to build the cauldron, before you can even make the end game equipment.

Adding on to this, you have the ability to train your townsfolk, and that training has the ability to fail, crippling, making them drunk, or possessed, becoming less than useless. It's a huge pain when you have an otherwise perfect townsperson for an archer, and they take a literal arrow to the knee. You can't try again, obviously.

Making all of the previous things worse of course, is the fact that your townspeople do not fight intelligently, the guards will always seem to be on the far side of the island, shoving themselves into the woods when a pirate ship lands and kills your archers that you placed by the bonfire to protect the people you can't build huts for yet.

Finally, this game came out a long while ago, I bought it recently on sale because I'd wanted to grab it. When I reached what I assumed was the end of the first act of the game, I found out it was actually just the end of content of the game, with a promise of 'more content in future updates'. Which, frankly, I didn't sign up for. I was assuming the full game was here, and it was not. That was the straw that broke the back and really just disappointed me in the game. Not to mention the game managed to actually freeze and soft-locked me in the ending cutscene without playing it.

I didn't have the highest hopes for the this game, but even my hopes for 'enjoyable without issue' weren't met.

The Bonfire 2 simplifies colony management into a fun and easily accessible package. The hardcore will miss some elements of micromanaging, but overall, I think most will be very pleased with the features and level of customization. I played a couple sessions and made some videos if you would like to see the game in action.
https://youtu.be/uwZyDGF_2AA

This game needs a lot of fixing. the AI is a complete joke. When your town is getting raided by monsters, idiot guards men decide to go take a stroll in the opposite direction.

The game itself is pretty bland as you build and gather resources by the day and defend your town by night. I think that once you defeat the monsters at night it should fast forward till morning. Not having something like this is a massive time waster.

It could've been a good game which can support your dophamine in a relaxing atmosphere, if not for the gamebraking problems:
- the balance doesn't feel right: the speed of the game is low even on 2x, and the night (at least the first 50 of them) have big parts of nothingness, that parts could be transferred to day, so that a couple of builders could build most of the buildings during one day. Without such changes it looks like developers trying to keep you longer in the game by playing little dirty tricks. But why they intend to do it is a mystery, because the game has no inner monetization.
- some minor bugs ruin game experience, and the developers seems to be not interested in fixing it: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1155880/discussions/0/2941369009256603954/

But the game has a low cost, and it can give you the value for that money. If at least bugs were fixed, it could cost more and still be reasonable.