I purchased this game after watching splattercat's you tube video on the game and have obsessively played the game ever since. This game is amazeballs.

(Final Review Update Below. This game isn't perfect, but it is good. The negative reviews have a right to complain, but I don't think the game itself deserves this much negativity.)

Hey so, not gonna act like I'm an expert at this game, but I have been messing around with it for quite a bit when I can and I have some things to say that might be helpful for anyone trying to get into this. I'll break this down into Basic Info You Should Know, What's Good, And What Needs Work.

• You can switch the game to English at the main menu. On the left side, 4 spots down, you will open the settings. The 1st section of the setting there should be only one option, and that's the language setting. You can set the game to English from there if you desire, and from what I can tell the translations are pretty good! I've seen some games handle it A LOT worse.
  
  
• The early game can be interesting, but trial/error if you're still trying to figure out the UI, which does need work, so I've created a basic guide (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2995197206) for anyone who wants to give this game an actual shot. It is a good game, but going into it with knowledge is a game changer.
  
  
• If you want a pause feature, it is implemented into the game (thanking the comment that told me), it just does not work as of right now. There is a section for you to assign a button, but unfortunately it will not let me. You might have better luck, who knows.
  
  
• The Devs are here and they are actively working on the game. Previous points that I bought up in prior versions of this review have been remedied, but there are still some things that are being worked on.

• This game is a pretty fun economy/adventure/guild/city simulator in which you take on the role of a divine beast that carries a city on its back. Your job is to attract a variety of adventurers, citizens, and tourists to your developing city by exploring an expansive tech tree to create a place people will flock to for various desires. This being the core design, the game functions well and is competent. Everything that needs to work works, and things come together in a way that is both cohesive and enjoyable.
  
  
• Each adventurer is essentially their own character with a variety of racial passives, abilities, and likes/dislikes. They can get mounts, specialized gear, settle down, and stuff like that. Some are winged, some are robotic, some are human, etc. They develop relationships with one another, fuel your economy by slaying monsters and interacting with various aspects of your town, and can even ascend/grow via your own investment on top of systems that appear to resemble cultivation (I haven't gotten far enough to delve into this). I always wanted to play a game where I can play the role of a guild master developing individual adventurers and dishing out quests for them to undertake so this definitely scratches that itch.
  
  
• The Tech Tree is expansive, and boy do I mean that wholeheartedly. It seems to be broken up into 3 sections. The Junior Tech Tree is the surface level one where most of your basic to intermediate level shops/buildings/upgrades/tower-defense units/items/whatever come from (there is A LOT). There is also another Senior Tech Tree that isn't visible, but I imagine it has a similar level of depth (I am FAR from reaching it, but I hope it's interesting). The third tech tree is a sort-of skill tree that seems to be fueled by something else. There are slots for things like magic (mage academy, magic crystals, etc.), science (mount breeding, guns, etc.), cultivator (Qi, dragons/beasts/earth, etc.), and other trees like steam or nature. That alone convinces me that there is A LOT of game here to enjoy from a content standpoint, but I can only speak for what I have seen in terms of what is enjoyable.
  
  
• You are not alone in this world. There are thousands of other Leviathans that are generated alongside you when you create a world and they are actively competing against you. You will find Rival Adventurers as your people explore even the base area, and it seems they may actually pose some degree of threat as I've noticed them farming not too far off from where my people are- leveling up and what not. You already have to fight them to claim
  waypoints, so I wonder if there is more conflict down the road (I hope so, but can't say for certain). Your constantly ranked against these other Leviathans, and rewarded based on how your civilization hold up to theirs. Idk, I think it's pretty cool.
  
  
• There are some people who mention things like time-gating, but having played a bit deeper the issue does alleviate itself through various means. You can create well-defended, but constantly threatened resource farms, straight up use your economic prowess to outright buy things that might take a minute to gather, and increase the overall efficiency of everything you build to reduce whatever slog you might find yourself in. Upgrades and avenues for growth are abundant for both characters and buildings.

• The translation is by no means perfect, but it is pretty good. I've seen worse in games like Amazing Cultivation Simulator (which is pretty good in its own right), Tale of Immortal, and dozens of other games that are not native English.
  
  
• The UI is probably the biggest issue, and will probably require the most work from the devs. It feels unfinished and can be a bit clunky, but it is entirely navigable with some experience and everything, for the most part, does work. The best way to figure everything out is to hover over things for tooltips (where there are any), click on all of your buildings/buttons, and pay attention to what's being said. by quests, characters, and notifications.
  
  
• The tutorial itself is not bad, but it can be improved by simply implementing an arrow or circle depicting where it is I'm supposed to go next. Most of this is addressed in my guide, but overall you should have no problem figuring most things out if you've played games of this genre before.Once you get through it just keep messing around with different buttons and text on the UI. You'll figure things out in this game faster than most others that aren't native English, and I consider that a win.
  
  
  FINAL VERDICT:
  
  It is solid. Great vision and above average execution of that vision. The problem is that you need to dig your hands into a bit of murk before you can get your hands on anything solid.
  
  This is a problem in its own right because a lot of people will be turned off by their initial impression. The current reviews and rating of the game reflect that, but my hope is that the devs can remedy this. They don't have to overhaul the entirety of the UI, and they don't need to do much in terms of hotfixes, but they do need to get the English translation to a point where it is working right out of the box and they do need to improve the tutorial to better acquaint us with all of the buttons/tabs. Tooltips could also be improved a bit, but overall that is not an issue. They'll make more money in the long-term if they stick with it and devote time to it.
  
  Overall, I'm pretty optimistic about this game! I am having a blast with it and it scratches a lot of itches that I have been looking for in a game like this for awhile. It is not the cleanest or the prettiest, but it is good and I do want to encourage you to give it a look despite the negativity. I appreciate the developers for their hard work and look forward to the updates they will produce, assuming they have genuine intentions to improve the game. It has a lot of potential, give it a shot.
  
  
  Guide One Last Time:
  https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2995197206

This is the kind of game people call a rough gem. I won't repeat what everyone else said, which is useful enough. The game is incredibly deep, has countless mechanics, and succeeds at keeping me engaged - and I'm someone who finds it hard to find most games interesting. It's also pretty grindy past the first 10h or so - but even then there are still new mechanics to discover. I can only feel obsessed about the game.

The negative would be the UI, quite confusing, which adds to the fact to so many things are complex, unexplained, and for some of them have no answer on the internet. After 24h there are still things - and I mean things that are essential for progression - That I haven't unlocked or figured out yet.

Feels like one of these independent games that are both janky, a bit buggy, and extremely deep and interesting. If that's your kind of thing, you might love it.

Another low effort translation Chinese game with text overflow, with the same objects having different translations (Lumber mill in the quest log, Sawmill in the tech tree...), and with very obviously machine translated dialogue. It really does not cost that much to hire a translator and even less to have someone check if the strings actually fit the text boxes they are in - after all that money one pours into making a game on this scale.

The UI is incredibly small, there is no way of resizing it. Most of it is not very informative (partly because of the translation). It is also quite non-intuitive to use, and overall feels like a hassle more than something that should be helping me in a city builder game.

Especially placing buildings, something that is the heart of a colony sim, is incredibly tedious.

Time passes constantly, which is bad news for new players, since your adventurers will just up and leave before you can figure out what's going on. The tutorial does not mention that there is a pause button - the settings do have a Pause function under "keybinds", but you cannot bind any keys to it. It simply just does not work.

The graphics made my head hurt, there is some weird blurry effect everywhere and it is surely not my GPU acting up. After 30 minutes of playing, I had to close the game, it's nauseating.

The tech tree is another part that made me scratch my head. There is a weird fog effect that makes everything hard to read. There is also a fog of war (???) in the tech tree, which makes it hell for a new player to know how to progress. The beginner guide asked me to build a lumber mill - guess what, I had to tech Arrow Towers first (?????), which opened up some new options, one of which was the lumber mill (well, sawmill in the tech tree...)

The tutorial is Paradox-level bad, it overwhelms the new user and does not make it clear enough where the player should be clicking. There are several ways to "fail" the tutorial, at which point you cannot progress anymore and you have to start again.

Under all of this garbage, there is a very-well designed game that holds a lot of potential and might be a truly enjoyable experience. I just cannot be bothered to uncover them with all these issues present.

This has a spectacular concept, relatively decent execution, and can be a lot of fun. It delivers on the promise of building an adventuring town for adventurers, levels, gear, bounties, and more. There's tremendous depth. It's really rather cool, and I recommend it to anyone looking for this kind of hybrid genre fix. It's clever and beautiful and I've been having a great time with it.

However... this game is not user friendly.

The game would benefit from a top to bottom, expertly executed UI/UX overhaul. I'm talking hire a professional contractor to come in and go through every gameplay loop in the menus and every visual representation. Trying to figure out how to play at times can be positively arcane, and too frequently there's a "let's hunt through every building menu, tech menu, and more" effort to try to find the thing you're looking for. If the player has more than three quests they're not lost but they scroll off the non-scrollable quest menu, as another example of faulty UI/UX design. It also looks kinda late alpha in presentation, lacking the sleek polish that most games would have at launch.

Still worth a buy (especially at this price), but if Star Chess can hire someone or dedicate someone to seriously improve the user interface and user experience, this game would go from fun yet confusing to absolutely superb.

EDIT: Holy crap, I made a bug report on a few issues and the dev managed to fix the bugs overnight or explain things that were misunderstanding. That was an extremely fast turnaround.

Despite the jank, and the huge swaths of the game that are untranslated and are undocumented, I actually really like this game. There's no real fail state as dead characters will eventually revive and the economy is easy to maintain, part of the charm is actually in figuring out what you need to be doing through the jank translation.

The reason for the thumbs down is the game has some serious bugs that took me a while to figure out were actually bugs. The game is convoluted AF, and it took me 22 hours to realize that entire parts of the rather massive production chain are broken, certain items and buildings along my research tree are actually broken and I can't actually build or produce certain things that need to proceed.

Large chunks of the game aren't translated to English. I can understand the tutorial not having an English voiceover but the the text should be English so you can understand what you're supposed to be doing.

The game's English was machine-translated. I was able to comprehend what was going on well enough, but the quality of the translation was pretty awful. The game reminds me a lot of Majesty. You manage a town and there's these portals that send heroes to other realms where you can assign bounties that work very similarly to the flag system in Majesty - it seems neat but I only explored it on a surface level.

It's a shame, I think the game has potential and I'd love to keep playing, but I have a feeling I would get walled by the poor translation so I decided to refund it while I still can.

I thinking of writing more, but the game doesn't seem to be in a good state from a technical level so it's a short one. Content is there but it is generally unpolished and could use a balance pass in terms of growing adventurers with bloodline material items. For what is here I can say it is worth that 17 CAD, but at as you progress in the game the CPU gets hammered by un-optimized code as you gain more and more npcs, with more and more structures and more enemy npcs.

It's as if the more you progress in the game the more cpu bottle necked you are. I went from start of the game 120 fps to 20-30 fps as of the 61 hour mark. I enjoy the game and will continue to play it, but this is near the point of unplayable, so buyer beware.

Horribly unoptimized, poor and incomplete translations, chock full of jank, buggy with random crashes...

...and absolutely worth the full asking price as-is. They could double the price and never fix another bug and I'd still recommend it.

Like a fusion of Amazing Cultivation Simulator, Songs of Syx, and Dungeon Village with the layers and depth of mechanics cranked to 10.