Foundation

I will recommend this game once the major bugs have been fixed. As it stands currently, you'll have a hard time growing your city beyond 200 citizens, before the bugs will make everything fall apart.
Otherwise good, relaxing, and fun game.

This really is a tough one. I like the game, its art style, the organic non-grid building and emerging path structures, the beautifully animated construction phases, the relatively serene and peaceful atmosphere ("relative" because you can "send out your troops", which plays out more like a dice roll with a couple of modifiers applied than a real strategy game, but you can get your pixel soldiers killed)

Then there are the bugs, of which there are plenty, ranging from "bah, 'tis but a flesh wound" to joy-sapping annoyances like the idiotic pathfinding, to reportedly save game breaking errors (which I have frankly not encountered, but the number of bug reports about those is not insignificant).

I don't know whoever thought it was a good idea to "release" this game from early access; I have been playing intermittently for some four or five years in EA, and it feels like another four or five years wouldn't have been too long to iron out at least a couple of the more annoying shortcomings. Who knows if the game would have been ready by 2030, but it certainly was not ready in 2025.

Foundation is playable, and it is beautiful and highly addictive, and it is indeed enjoyable, but calling it a smooth and bug-free "release" version is just pretentious.

Not recommended in 2025 if you are looking for a polished experience – maybe check back in a couple more years – but do give it a try if you are willing to accept that you're but a paying beta tester.

That said – if you'll excuse me, I have a city to look after.

Think i put the most hours into this over any recent game and it's hard for me to like games the older i get (33) as my taste is becoming more niche, so kudos to that.

The game is simple, calm but tickles my ocd with the layout, planning and micromanagement enough to keep me engaged and not stressed. Graphically it's not the typical game i buy, but it's cute.

I had to have a few restarts, because your first villages really are your own tutorial and when you learn what not to do in the next, you can actually concentrate on a good layout.

The progression tree is deep enough that it keeps you wanting to play longer, especially through the different 'arcs' - i'd save i've completed all of those now and can't see myself playing further unless new content was added, like a 4th progession arc or expanding deeper into the ones we already have - management of the towns at 500+ pop can become problematic

overall a really nice, cute little city builder that i'd definitely recommend to people who like the genre - tutorial could be better, i found myself googling a lot/watching youtube videos of other players

This is my first ever game review, because I really want this game to succeed. I found this game to be enchanting and relaxing. It is exactly the kind of game I want to immerse myself into. I made a wonderful coastal village, taking steps slowly to avoid running out of materials, money, and upgrading my housing and needs before progressing with new steps. Then, suddenly, for no reason after a few days of play, all my Builders stopped. All of them. They never returned to work. Unassigning and reassigning did nothing. Firing them all and hiring new builders did nothing. Destroying all the Builder's Offices and setting up just one right next to the build I needed did nothing. Destroying the house that they would not build did nothing. I wasn't having fun anymore - I was playing a simulation of a builders' strike.

I'm not currently recommending the game as it is my opinion the game is entirely too buggy. It's SO buggy that I think it should be in Early Access and not selling as though it's ready for full release. That said, there ARE updates and the Devs appear to be working on the bugs. Though I notice bug fixes often enough seem to result in yet more bugs.

So what are the bugs? Well, for me the most irritating bug is regular game crashes. I don't think I've had a play session yet without at least one crash, and most of them involve 2 or more crashes. Crashes usually close the game and a crash report with the option of reporting it pops up, though I've had a couple of crashes that simply froze the game, and one froze my laptop requiring a reboot. In 80 hours of play time, I'm guessing I have somewhere between 15 and 25 crashes, so a crash roughly every 3-5 hours. On that note, I'm playing on a relatively new (less than 1.5 years old) high end Alienware with all of my drivers/bios updated, so it shouldn't be a computer issue.

A current secondary bug is an NPC pathing error warning that starts in the very early game just after you get your initial camp set up and have built just a couple of the basic early game buildings. The warning states an NPC had their route blocked. The problem is, the NPC never had their route blocked. Once the pathing error starts, it rarely ever goes away for any length of time. The game has an in game event log, and after playing for a few hours that event log is page after page of NPC pathing error warnings.

As for other bugs, just take a look at the Steam discussion boards and you'll see a LOT of bug reports every day. I think that speaks for itself.

Like so many game companies, the Developer/Publisher has already put out a DLC in order to sell more/make more without fixing major bugs, such as the regular game crashes.

As a City builder the game has some aspects I like, but it's not completely unique.

Game graphics are nice, but not necessarily high end, and the game soundtrack is enjoyable to listen to.

Other than that, if you really feel a need to get it, I'd recommend waiting to buy it on sale.

Really nice, chill and cute city builder game, except for the city part. When going over 500 inhabitants, which is needed to complete really any challenge, the game starts to chug.

5950x and RTX 3090 won't do me any good, since it's the coding thats the problem (I've seen Unity engine blamed for this). Apparently the game is run single-thread, which on the year of our Lord 2025 is kinda unfathomable . Also i've read around Steam and Discord that with big cities the code starts to fail and all kind of supply chain issues appear, which i've kind of noticed and wondered the reason for.

Wait for optimization before buying.

I've grown up with city builders, I've basically played Settlers, Anno and their siblings all my life. This one is my favorite so and by far.

Will it be yours? That depends on what you like about city builders. Did you play Settlers for the combat? Then no, this one probably isn't for you - there is none. It is perfect for me because I love and live for slow, visible progression.

For me, whether or not a city builder feels good depends on the balance of direct action taken by the player and the resulting NPC activity to be observed. Player action should never have instant results but should trigger a process. That's why Settlers always felt better than Anno to me because I didn't just drop a house there, I told my settlers where to build a house and then I watched them get the materials and build it over a couple of minutes. Settlers 3 and 4 gave us organic dirt path formation outside of player control and Foundation took that idea and perfected it by making the roads "magnetic": You don't have a hundred paths fanning out from a church door. People use existing paths and only branch off from those once it would be too big of a detour for their destination. Build a house on top of a road and watch them trample a new path around it. Demolish a building and watch the grass slowly reclaim the ground where it stood.

Every decision the devs made seems to have been with one goal in mind: make it feel organic and alive.
There is no grid. Houses and roads don't just exist in sterile 90° angles to eachother. Unless you are a complete neat freak and want to micro-manage everything your villagers do, the streets and houses of your towns will be crooked and imperfect. While you have direct control over all trade buildings, churches, manor houses and taverns, you don't directly build residential buildings but you assign residential building *areas* and the villagers decide how and where they build their huts there. You provide better living conditions and then watch villagers upgrade their houses on their own.
You don't need flat ground to build a house, you can build entire towns on a slope.
Combined with the modular building system for most non-residential houses, no two towns look the same.

I've played this game in early access for years and enjoyed it a lot while still waiting for something even better. I was looking forward to Manor Lords because of its realistic and atmospheric look but when it came out, I was disappointed by the instant road mechanic for roads that try so hard to look organic. I realized that early-access-Foundation was better at scratching my itch for visual progression. And when it came out of early access with a bang - overhauled graphics and mechanics - I fell in love with it all over again and stopped waiting for the better city builder to come. Foundation is giving me all I ever wanted out of this genre.

If there were something I would add if I could, dynamic weather and maybe even seasons would be cool. The cosmetic lighting changes and rain/fog are nice but I'd love for them to just happen instead of what is basically a photo mode switch. And imagine how cool it would look for the grass to slowly start peeking through the snow at the end of winter or the leaves turning golden in the fall.
But I realize that these are tall orders, especially for a game that is already ticking all of my hyper-focus boxes. It's my go-to comfort game to relax after a long day at work or to play during phone calls with my dad or while listening to podcasts and audiobooks. You can see at the top how many hours I played Foundation over the past 5 years and with the full release improvements, I don't see myself stopping for another 5.

Alright, so Foundation is basically what happens when a city-builder decides, "Hey, what if we didn’t do grids?" And honestly? It slaps. Instead of forcing your town into neat little squares, buildings just happen—villagers walk somewhere, roads form naturally, and suddenly you’ve got a whole medieval settlement that looks like an actual village instead of a perfectly optimized spreadsheet.

You start with a handful of peasants, some wood, and a dream. Fast forward a few hours, and you’re managing trade routes, building castles, and wondering why half your villagers refuse to take jobs that are right there. It’s got that perfect mix of relaxing and oh god why is my economy crumbling.

Why It’s Fire:
- No grids, just vibes – Your town grows on its own, so every playthrough feels unique.
- Mild chaos but in a fun way – There are no disasters or invaders, just you trying to make a functioning economy (which is somehow harder).
- Looks amazing – Zoom in and you’ll see villagers actually doing their little tasks. It’s weirdly satisfying.

Why It’s Also Lowkey Janky:
- Late-game kinda falls off – Once you’ve built everything, it’s like, now what? As with a lot of other games.
- Villager AI is... questionable – Sometimes they take the dumbest routes possible or ignore job openings for no reason.

If you like city-builders but want something more organic, Foundation is 100% worth it imo. It’s still getting updates, and even now, it’s one of the best medieval city-builders out there. Super chill, super addicting, and just the right amount of wtf are my villagers doing.

I am in the same boat as many of the other negative reviews for this game.

I really enjoyed the core game play, building up your town is satisfying and engaging but the performance issues have killed this for me. I have a reasonably decent PC (4070Ti) and while it isn't the best of the best I struggle to see why I am having such issues. .
Even with Graphics settings set to their lowest once I cleared about 200-300 population the FPS tanked to the point where having persevered to a decent sized town of about 1k my FPS is between 2 and 15 with major hitches should I try to actually do anything. This leaves the game as less of a city builder and more of a small village sim .
This issue seems well documented online from a quick google and seems to be linked to the game engine.

I have had some of the other issues people have mentioned such as villagers leaving because they are hungry even when my stores and markets are bursting with food but suspect I just have to "get gud".
The above is a real shame as other than that I was having a ball playing this and was in the process of building a suitably silly castle on a nearby hill which I suspect is what the Devs were going after with the modular building design. I have just got bored of doing it in stop-motion.

There is no way this game should use so much CPU and GPU resources. Maxed out single CPU core and GPU usage much higher than it needs to be for a builder game.

Started supporting this game in early access back when the main draw was that it had truly organic path generation. Since then it has grown into a fully fledged unique and dynamic population management game. I loved playing each update and I'm so glad I chose to support its development all those years ago. I never doubted that this would be an amazing game someday.

It's really a great game
It's just missing a way to be able to see the input/output production stats, like what's the production/min or smt
But despite that, that's probably the most enjoyable city builder I ever played

I was loving this game. However, all of the hours i have put into the game have ultimately ended in disappointment. The end game quests all seem to be bugged if not extremely unclear with the win conditions needed. This make all the effort seem like a wast of time. For example, the final quest to win the monastery, " host the abbes," was completed with 130% happiness and still ended in failure despite ONLY listing a requirement of having a happiness of 95% by the end. If there were other conditions to win they were not shown. That's not fun, that's a wast of my time.

I'm hoping for a fix in the future, it really is a wonderful game even without the quests and scenarios.

It's by far my favourite city builder. It has an astonishing mixture of charm, heart, beauty and clever gameplay. The pure freedom and fun of creating naturalistic cities and custom buildings is something that instantly made me feel grid-based citybuilders are outdated.

I also love the tempo of gameplay: It's slow enough for the game to be relaxing and fun, but at the same time there's enough pressure to make me constantly focused on short and long term goals and keep me engaged. "Leisure stress" is the best way to describe it.

Lastly, what deserves a seperate paragraph: It has an absolutely astonishing soundtrack. It's just... Beautiful. I've enjoyed my fair share of semi-authentic medieval folk from various underground music scenes (some more goth or political than others) but some of the tracks from Foundation top even that. It's just worth playing for the OST alone.

Great game, but is currently unplayable due to crashing every 5 minutes

Purchased the game during EA and played it for several hours.
At that point, really enjoyed what was there but wasn't much content.

Came back later after considerable developments had been made.
Game just would not launch.

Searched around for info from the Devs and a response that was effectively 'Works on my machine.'
Cool story. Figured I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.

Figured now that the game has been out for quite a while, the issues have surely been ironed out.
Hit start, not a damn thing happens.
Hit stop. It's been sitting in 'Stopping' status ever since.
Searching around for launching issues shows that this is not an isolated issue.

Great job homie dawg.
Hope it still works on your machine.

Great game if your heating at home is broken. Do not fret! Foundation will make sure that your room stays warm at cozy 74°C.

Or if you love the sound of fighter jets but sadly they never fly through the skies over your house, this game will bring you the authentic sound right into your home!

Serious review: It's such a shame that even without placing the first building, Foundation causes my GPU (RTX 3090) and CPU (Ryzen 9 7900x) to burn up, making the fans roar so loudly it gets annoying. And no, I don't have a bad cooling system or too much dust in my PC since other games run silently and fine. The only solution is to cap the fps at 50 or lower which is unacceptable to me. Changing the settings even to low has no influence whatsoever.

I wish this was better optimized, the game looks great and I really, really would have loved to play this.

Until this gets fixed, I will not buy the game again (refunded it). :(

There is a really, truly, fun, enjoyable game in here somewhere.
Unfortunately it's currently being hampered by 2 major issues, both related to the housing/population aspect, that I cannot even wrap my head around why you would design the way they did:

1. The houses themselves. The way it works is you "paint" an area that you want to have houses in, and your builders will automatically build them within that area. Houses can then be upgraded, both in terms of quality and density, once they meet certain requirements like having nice decorations around, fortifications, etc. Additionally, the quality upgrades require higher status villagers (commoners and citizens respectively) to move in for that upgrade to trigger. This is the reason you upgrade the quality in the first place, as these higher status villagers will not move in to a house until the other requirements for said upgrade are met, meaning they will be homeless until they have somewhere to move in, decreasing happiness and eventually causing them to leave your village altogether. This is a perfectly fine system on its own, but for some reason the developers made it so that if a requirement which was previously met no longer is, the house will downgrade back to its previous form. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that this bleeds your resources because every time a house downgrades, it for whatever reason needs to be rebuilt and then rebuilt again once the requirements are fulfilled, which is not only frustrating but straight up makes no logical sense??? You're telling me you have to rebuild the entire house, in a worse shape, just because the road outside no longer has stone pavement??? Why not just make the house "inactive" in some way, put a debuff on it, anything but downgrading! However, even with this mechanic everything would be fine if it wasn't for the second major problem:

2. The villagers. God, the villagers are stupid. When they're not busy starving themselves because they don't know how to go to the market to buy food, they like to get themselves stuck in completely open spaces, or inside buildings they chose to enter. And there is no unstuck button, no reset of any kind. They are just there now until they manage to unstuck themselves or until their happiness goes down so much from not having their needs met (since, you know, they're stuck) that they leave your village. And if they happened to be the only commoner/citizen in the house they were living in... you can start to piece together the problem. But even then, even then it wouldn't be so bad if you could just decide yourself where a villager should live. You can pick what villager has what job. But their house? No, they just pick the one closest-ish (but sometimes it truly seems random) to their workplace, assuming it meets their potential requirements. So if you want to move them around you have to first kick them out of their current house, kick out someone else from another house, and hope that that villager occupies the other one's spot first. Oh, and did I mention when you kick a villager out they can take (in-game) days or even weeks to move in somewhere else? These people will straight up choose to be homeless for up to several weeks when there is an open spot in a house near them begging for them to move in. Or worse, sometimes they just don't move in anywhere at all! They are just eternally homeless now while the game tells you "Housing inefficient", even though they have every opportunity to move in somewhere.

I could go on about how the builders will be sitting at their workshop "Waiting for work" when at the same time I have an unfinished building "Waiting for workers" (and yes, it is close enough to them), or the insanely frustrating way they create paths, because you can't actually create your own paths in this game, the villagers make them themselves based on where they walk and how often they use said path. If they stop using it, it fades away with time. A cool mechanic in a game where the AI actually has, you know, intelligence. But in this game it results in ugly, crooked, sometimes strangely impractical paths that you have to forcefully "correct" with the use of objects blocking the way and steering them where you want. Beyond this there are other minor issues, most of them relating to the villagers, like how once you reach ~250 villagers the game starts to get pretty laggy, but I think I'll leave it at that because this ended up being wayyy longer than I had planned.

I really want to like this game, and in many ways I do, but these little frustrating things eventually build up to the point where they can't be ignored and severely impact your enjoyment, so for that reason I cannot recommend it; not until these problems are fixed.

Housing Insufficient. No access to rustic food. No access to refined food. Path blocked. Housing Insufficient.

Just a constant stream of notifications telling you that your villagers aren't happy but the game gives you essentially no insight into why your granaries over here aren't filling up and supplying your markets but the granaries over here are full but no one is taking the food to the market. Don't bother trying to figure out how the bread pipeline works, it won't ever be enough to keep your mills going, your bread supply is always going to be fucked.

I want to like this game, it just makes it too hard to understand what is wrong with your supply lines. If stuff is too far away to be fed by my wheat farms, just tell me.

Why, why, why does no one go to my inns Foundation? They are fully stocked and staffed, and yet I get fucking hundreds of "no entertainment" notifications. Fuck offfff.

The game is fun but i can't recommend at this point i would of even refunded the game if i could. Once i reach about 200 to 300 in population the whole game get's choppy and studdery. I go from being able to run the game on the highest settings and once the chopping starts no matter what setting i put it on it doesn't fix it. Very annoying can't even play it anymore until they figure it out and fix this.

Love this game but since the full release it's been VERY glitchy. The pre-release wasn't nearly this bad.
If you're looking to buy it, wait until it's either on special (by a lot) or has more updates.

A very peaceful and relaxing city builder. Not very challenging (at least on the default rule-set), but highly satisfying. I enjoyed my time with it.

However, It has a large optimization issues. I had to turn off the shadows, because of their significant performance impact (20-50 fps difference). I do believe these will be eventually fixed tho.

The AI pathing in the game is awful, especially when you're required to build fortifications that refuse to snap with gates. Patrols don't patrol intelligently, so you'll have guards all clumped together rather than hitting different areas, and some areas are never patrolled at all. Eventually you end up in the death spiral of citizens leaving that you can't recover from all because the pathing is bad and the upgraded density housing requires patrols. For this supposedly being a relaxed game, I find it anything but. It was in EA forever and even after hitting 1.0 I've had nothing but issues, which makes me not want to play it more often.

After retesting the game systems, I can say Foundation is a joy for the eye, challenging in its economy, but sometimes still frustrating by its polish.

This game is about contemplation, building the exact medieval town you wish for, where you wish for (with a great map design tool).
The ingame systems are going to keep you on your toes and wanting to optimize to avoid a happiness crisis, leaving you with no pops, great balancing overhaul.
However I have encountered one game breaking bug, and many smaller UI/glitch issues. My town island suddenly had its main bridges stop working, even by checking with official discord we could not solve it. Many UIs are not intuitive still even if it is an improvement from the beta. Some monuments cannot be edited as a "out of range" part is no longer visible, hence not deletable.

I would recommend to get this game now regardless, the team is very active and has already pushed 2 patchs in less than a mounth, this game has come a long way and player feedback is being implemented.

The core software is very good and polished. The zoning and building addon features work good on a technical level. However, there are basic issues with the mechanics that prevent me from wanting to play any further. For instance, once a serf tastes a refined food, they'll only want refined food forever and get a negative moodlet. There is no way to leverage rustic food sources into refined food through cooking, you just need to build an entirely new food chain. There's only 3 refined food in the game, so the tree of food options is actually very narrow and limiting. At minimum, being able to control who market stalls sell to would be a boost.

I'd like to see the devs put in some work on game balance and mechanics before I'd consider giving it a try again. There are a lot of really promising elements here.

Fun game with lots of potential. Biggest drawback for me is a bug, where when you play at x3 speed, your efficiency drops. Seems to be known for almost 6 years now, so I dont think it'll be fixed soon. Most noticeable on wheat production. Game breaking in my opinion. If you like to watch paint dry, go ahead and play on x1 speed. I would've refunded if I had known for this bug earlier. Maybe one day they fix it, then I'll change my review as well.

This is a tough review because I really like the game. Unfortunately, the game's current state is abysmal. If this game was still in early access, I would be able to recommend it based on where it is now. However, I am concerned about this games future given the Dev's decision to launch this "1.0" build.

The game-play is fun but all the systems and supply chains are very shallow. The 'rustic food' production, for example, quickly results in spamming the same fishing hut or gatherer hut 10 times, with no real way to improve existing buildings or supply chain. You villagers never stop needing the lower level 'Rustic Food,' so you are stuck adding more and more huts.

The 'monument' buildings are fun at first. It is essentially Lego pieces that you build your big buildings (Church, Castle, Manor, etc) with. The lack of variety of the building blocks quickly becomes apparent though. Especially when you have a larger city and need to have the same monuments multiple times. The 'edit' building mode that you use to make these buildings is the source of many headaches. The mode constantly causes crashes in the middle of building your giant castle that you spend 20+ minutes decorating.

The game's performance is rough. Especially as you start getting to 300+ villagers. With a RTX 4080 and a 7800X3D at 1440p, I am getting sub 50FPS with big frame spikes. The game also randomly pins my CPU and GPU at 100%.

Overall, I would say this game is fun when it works correctly and frustrating most of the time. The Dev's may say it left early access, but the game does not. I do not think this game is currently worth the $35. I have to give this game a 'not recommended' but I hope that the team is able to turn it around. My plan is to revisit this game in April when hopefully some issues are resolved.

Game is unplayable, refuses to start. You see people suggesting removing AV, adding launch options. None of these work consistently and this problem has plagued the game since 2019. Its long since past they find the cause and fix this issue.

Game crashed and all autosaves were somehow rolled back to population ~50 when my town was close to 700. Fun game but I wouldn't risk wasting your time until the devs fix whatever issue caused this. Game is 95% there but the 5% left is extremely important.

Released in 1.0... but it still literally is in early access. Whatever, the game is fine, I guess, but that kind of false advertisement is just bad. stop it

Broken and unfinished? Or just inadequate design?

There are too many things going on that simply aren't explained. A notification says "a house requirement is no longer met". Click on it and...it does nothing? Sometimes it shows you the house, sometimes it doesn't? Click on the house and it seems like maybe it is missing some "beautification" in order to upgrade the house, except the house...never had any beautification around it so how did it upgrade in the first place?

The game just suffers from a lack of critical feedback at every step. You are running out of refined food. How much are you producing? Hell if I know. Is it because there aren't enough berry bushes? I dunno, almost impossible to figure out. The boars keep disappearing from the woods; is hunting a finite resource? My shepherds aren't producing enough wool...do the sheep need to multiply first?

None of this is explained sufficiently. The tooltips are inadequate and even reading through the reference manual doesn't provide enough information.

Listen it's a cute little game, but it ends up just being frustrating once you get past the cuteness. There are too many things going on and too little feedback about what is happening and what you need to do to fix it.

Unpleasant to play. There's bugs that make production buildings output less if you speed up the time.

Has the potential to be absolutely amazing, but right now it is not.

There are several pressing issues with food generation (playing at 3x speed produces less wheat than at 2x for some weird reason), pathing of villages (constant "can't reach destination" errors) and more.

Game is still unfinished (literally, there are features that are not complete yet) and extremely buggy.
I've yet to even play it because it crashes every time while loading the world. This is nothing more that a CTD simulator for some people, such as myself.
Edit: On going work is improving stability, and though I find this game fun, I still can't recommend it unless you want to gamble on playability.

Trying to manage the economy in this game is jank and boring. The game gives you a choice early on to make money through taxation or pure trade. Don't choose pure trade. The trade options you have early game leave you not able to pull enough money in to maintain things let alone build the things you need to trade more. Then the economy leaves you sitting there doing nothing waiting for traders to arrive to pay you half of what you need to do anything. I spent most of the game waiting.

Very difficult to recommend this game. Even after 6 years, this wasn't even close to leave early access, and yet it did.

The principle of it is amazing, being able to see a settlement grow organically, modular buildings, etc. In reality it's riddled with problems that I think they know they can't fix and that's why they decided to end EA and just roll with it.

On a game design, fixable side, there is a giant problem with pace. I almost always play on max speed and even there it's way too slow and you'll spend most of your time just staring at the game, a video on your second screen, waiting for builders to show up, some stocks to go up, etc. Also, the game internal economy is severely unbalanced. As someone mentioned in another review, it will require like 24 of your population to make just enough products so that your baker can make one piece of bread, same for cows with milk and cheese, basically every "complex" production that has more than one direct connection is basically impossible to fulfill correctly.

But there is a way more problematic aspect, and this probably can't be fixed: THE GAME IS RIDDLED WITH BUGS.
First of all, on an SSD with a computer that runs Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra with full Ray Tracing, it will take MINUTES for the initial load (reminds me of the terribly optimized Cities Skylines).
Buildings disappearing, builders refusing to finish some constructions for some reasons, population incapable of using a bridge and going all around a lake instead, CTDs when editing a building and trying to rewind the last change you just did, and way, way more.

I think the biggest problem, is that this "gridless organic" system is very cool on paper, but prone to fatally bug out at some point. The villagers CONSTANTLY have pathfinding issues. Again, they will not use bridges that would clearly make their journey faster, and you're really asking for trouble when you're moving buildings, because that will happen very often that the game shows you that it's accessible but it will never be emptied again, as if there was no path to it, no matter how much you try to move it after in every direction possible. I can't count how many times I had to just delete the building and remaking it in the exact same place, because the pathfinding to its entrances was broken after I moved it.

It's interesting because I played it for around 30 hours a first time during early access, and stopped because it was still too buggy for me. It's ok, that's what EA is for, I know what I'm getting.
But after seeing it reached 1.0, I went again, even bought the stupid day one DLC as support (because I'm a dev too, and I appreciate dedication to a project for 6 years). And it's funny because I now see that I did exactly the same thing than last time: played around 30 hours and just decided to give up because it's too buggy, especially when you get above 200 pops. Sure, there are more stuff and it looks prettier, but core mechanics are still somehow broken, not reliable.

Except here it's not EA anymore. Quite a disappointment.
I'm hoping devs will stick to it and try to fix it, but I'm afraid these are core technical issues.

A fun and addictive game marred by game-breaking bugs

I've found this game to be seriously fun and addictive—one of the few I've played recently that truly has that "just one more turn" feeling. It's engaging and keeps you coming back for more, up until the moment you start encountering some game-breaking bugs.

Unfortunately, these issues are hard to overlook including,

- Larger structures disconnecting / parts disappearing
- Inability to transport goods or stock your stockpiles & markets effectively despite a surplus of goods, materials and transporters
- Inability to save the game/Crashes that require a power off to resolve

All of these issues become increasingly prevalent later in the game once you have 200+ settlers and continue right through to 700+ settlers.

Very cute and cozy little village builder.
The devs had some good ideas and i can see what they were intending to achieve, however unfortunately the game is still completely riddled with bugs or features that don't work nearly as well as they should.

A lot of very needed features just aren't there. Like citizens automatically moving to places closer to their workplace. By the time you progress out of the very early game, you are constantly bombarded by "not enough housing" notifications due to citizens not being able to find a home close to their workplace, despite there being houses literally next to their workplace with enough space left inside.

Its also very annoying that citizens will find their own paths and generate them that way. Its a cool idea but at the same time they also absolutely refuse to build houses ontop of old pathways, so you have to wait 1-2h+ for them to slowly disappear before they will build there.

Speaking of paths, the citizens require you to build watchposts which will send out patrols to make them happy, however you can not select how exactly they will patrol. They always do a doomstack of all patrollers available that will then move in a huge group. You can only set the general zone they should patrol, but they will find their own paths which often leads to some houses not getting enough patrols to satisfy their needs, simply because the doomstack decides to move close and then turn back instead of properly reaching the house.
This zoning also brings another issue: If you split up your village, like you are supposed to, then guards from village 1 will move to village 2 to patrol there and immediately return because they spent too much time travelling, despite village 2 having its own watchtower with its own patrollers... who do the same. Even if the zones between these two arent connected, they will still move like this.

The game is also extremely slow. I am pretty much permanently playing at x3 speed and the game is still mostly just waiting and not doing anything because everything happens at such a slow pace. Sure it speeds up in the endgame because your productions become several times bigger, but it makes the early game a terrible slog.

But these are just a few annoying examples, there are so so many more. Nothing is really working as it should. Everything is either broken or missing crucial QoL features. You can't even close menus with ESC!

I would love to recommend this game because the concept is great, and it's highly addictive (like REALLY). But I won’t do that. Its technical state is just terrible—crashes, poor performance, and game-breaking bugs are simply overwhelming.

Game crashes while upgrading or expanding buildings are so common that you start saving before every major upgrade.
Unless, of course, the game refuses to save anymore, leaving your only option (aside from autosaves) to exit & save.

It's also common for workers to get stuck and stop transporting goods.
Oh, and after some time, traders from other cities get stuck as well. No money or goods flow, your entire economy collapses, and there’s no point in playing anymore—unless, of course, you start over, only to reach the same point again.

Sorry to sat that I cannot recommend the game in its current state. I am a big fan of city builder games having spent over 800 hours on Anno 1800 and 100 hours on Manor Lords.I enjoyed the demo and bought the full version .Everything was enjoyable at first and I managed to get to a population of 200 and that is when the problems started. There is a three tier housing system which upgrades the buildings automatically based on the populations status. Unfortunately the buildings are constantly downgrading which uses materials as well . So a constant cycle of upgrades and downgrades puts you in a death cycle of which there is no recovery. It is a real shame and if the Devs ever get it sorted it will be a classic.

What is there works and is decent, but the game eats computer resources like crazy for what it is. The gridless building and modifiable buildings aspects are cool, but it doesn't seem a ton different/better than when I first played it in EA over a year ago.

I would not recommend it, not because it is bad, but just because I am sort of indifferent to it, and the question is "do I recommend it?". I will probably give it a couple more hours to catch me before giving up on it.

I hate to leave a negative review for what is a very promising game that comes close to greatness.
It's fine to spend years in early access but at the end of that process people should have a reasonable expectation of quality and completeness.
This game made substantial changes between early access and full release that were not adequately tested, making a joke of the whole early access process. Why not just stay in early access with latest changes until they are stable? Some of us avoid early access precisely to avoid wasting time with games that are not complete.
Right now the game is buggy, poorly balanced and has serious optimisation issues. I look forward to updating my review once these are issues are addressed.

I don't often write reviews for games, but I feel the need to for Foundation. It's a charming, beautiful game with a lot of heart. If you enjoyed Banished or games similar, then you know what to expect. And as much as I enjoyed my first few hours, I just can't look past the infuriating number of bugs I'm experiencing. Fishers that won't launch their boats a few meters to go fish, bridges that can be built but not used, annoying UI elements such as having to leave the modify menu for some buildings to upgrade them (Manor) but require you to be in the upgrade UI for others (lumber camp). Not to mention the handful of crashes that I've experienced.

If this were an Early Access title still, I'd wholeheartedly recommend it. For a 1.0 finished launch, it's unacceptable. I'm hoping the developers continue to work out these bugs, and that I can flip my review to recommended in the future.

Until the housing upgrade fiasco is patched it is NOT worth playing this game because you will end up being very frustrated and probably loose a ton of hard worked for resources. There is a complex work around where you have to delete and rebuild houses and fix patrol paths manually. How the devs could have released this new upgrade in version 1 i don't know. Look at the discussion board for further reference.

This is difficult for me to do - giving a "not recommended" review just isn't in my nature. Having said that, I'll add more context to explain exactly where I'm headed with this review: Not Recommended - At This Time.
I have 485 hours on record for this game - 450 of that on the early access version which was easily one of the most stable EA's I've ever played.

The premise and primary mechanics of the game are absolutely outstanding. Even before the expanded graphics that went into 1.0, I felt the game had a beauty that always fostered immersion (missed by many other titles out there). The potential of this game continues to garner deep appreciation from a large following - even in its current state. Alas, for me, the 1.0 version is just not 'there' yet.
The expanded graphics I mentioned earlier are easily one of the biggest offenders and yet that's simultaneously one of the things I looked forward to the most in the lead-up to release. Polymorph Games, having made their own engine for this game, really stretched themselves on this such that I'm having difficulty calling the effort "ambitious" - perhaps others might even call it foolish. They've added perhaps hundreds of new graphical, animated elements to the game without much apparent optimization. Additionally, many of the items and mechanics (both new and changed) simply don't work as I believe you intended. All of these things were preventable had you taken ample time prior to release - another 3 months or so at least.

And that segues to the real crux of my "not recommended" review: guys, this was just too early.
They spent months working on the 1.0 version and then spent a few weeks with it in a much-restricted demo - just a few weeks? - before 1.0 launch. I'm gonna call that "unwise".

I am however thrilled to see the almost daily release of hotfixes/patches correcting numerous CTD's and hope this pace continues to fixing many of the other bugs reported by the community. They have far to go before this really is 1.0 material.
I promise to revisit this review as I fully believe Polymorph will make every effort to bring the game to a true gold standard. I look forward to watching their progress.

This game has a nice concept buts it is NOT release ready. It's still very much half baked and there is so much left to be desired. The progression system is so very tedious and the game balance is so shaky you. You guys have been working on this for SO long and it still doesn't stack up to other Indie city builder games that are dominating the space such as Falconeer Bulwark which is made by ONE guy, or like Tiny Glade which is made by two people or like Memoria Polis. I'm not sure what the issue is but you guys really need to tighten up the interface, the readouts are still SO small, I dunno it all still feels so rushed. There were also a lot of things that were cool and unique that you guys totally cut from the release version. I loved when I could PICK which tree the forester would plant, etc. Or I loved clicking on the number of generated sheep...its just such a let down.

Seems like it could be a good game, but after a long time in development the game repeatedly crashes (multiple times in the same hour) and game mechanics just break (patrol routes stop working.)

Very disappointing.

Looks good at first glance, it has plenty of cool features and the style is nice too... but it has bugs, it crashes frequently, it's graphics are unoptiimized, the UI makes the city managing tedious and hard. Citizens keep getting stuck, the problem warnings are constantly popping up (it's a good thing to be notified, but do I want an alarm every time a single citizen can't find it's way home?!).
The zoning tool is a good idea, but very soon they'll overlap and you can't make any sense of it.
It has a good foundation for a good game, but it is just not there currently. It was in early access so long, I don't get it how it came out as this hot mess of a game.

Man I really want to love and play this game but the crashes make the game unplayable.
and I cannot recommend the game as it is.

There are some issue with balance as well. Like based on the building sizes the want be to build big old modular structures but then I get 2 guys every 6 days to staff them. With no way to increase immigration consistently.

Patrolling is way too under powered as well. I have like 30+ guys patrolling and I cannot get density. and the only way to get patrolling stations to cover the city is to build loads of tiny manor houses?!?

Also city walls on the coast? I don't want to have to draw an underwater wall to get protection around the city? Either make it so the coast counts as protective barrier or make like "Sea-towers" idk?

Even with all that I would still sink like 100+ hours into this, but with the crashes every 15 mins, I am giving up. All I want to do is build a really nice big city in casual mode and I cannot.

Let me know when this is fixed and I might come back.

I had high hopes for Foundation. The medieval city-builder looks great, but technical issues ruin the experience.
Terrible Performance even on a strong PC, the game stutters, FPS drops are common, and crashes are frequent.
Workers get stuck, buildings don’t place correctly, and menus are unresponsive.
After four hours of progress, a crash wiped everything. The auto-save simply doesn’t work — unacceptable!

In its current state, I cannot recommend Foundation. If you're patient and willing to wait for fixes, give it a shot.
Otherwise, stay away.

Not Recommended!