Forebearers

There is no way this game is worth $20.00. There is no campaign or any real objectives. After a brief tutorial, it opens up into a sandbox city building RTS where it's left up to you to figure everything out. And while you are attempting to learn and strategize, your village is constantly under attack. Yes, this is one of those games where if you don't build up a defense quickly, your buildings will get destroyed by enemies. The main issue I had with trying to defend against these attacks was with the guardians, as have many others who have reported in the Steam discussions. Guardians are troops that you can create. However, controlling them is highly frustrating. You can't just hold the mouse to highlight and then right click to move them. You must click on a banner icon near the mini map and then select an order out of a menu. The problem is that they never stay together, they constantly disobey orders and retreat back to the village, and they pretty much have a mind of their own... all while your village is under attack. Seriously, the guardian factor absolutely ruins the city building aspect of this game.

Another issue is that getting new villagers is not an easy task. And even when you do obtain them, they constantly leave, which makes it incredibly frustrating to have enough people to gather resources and build up the village. Other issues with this game are that the music volume has to be reset every time you play and there is no quick save. The developer has also abandoned this game, so there will be no more patches to address any of these issues. I therefore cannot recommend this game based on my experience.

I love this genre and the basics are pretty ok - but there are too many bugs and too many missing UI elements. My transporters are just stopping and not doing anything while resources stockpile in their building. This leads to no food making and everyone dies out because of a bug.

If bugs would be fixed and additional UI elements introduces (with an end game incentives) - I would try it again

Game have its potentials but it have some bugs (I could buy a Stone Camp and a Log camp OVER the already existing camp, at the tutorial stage) and a clumsy interface that just made this game... not fun.

Hope you fix it on the near future. Game sure has potential.

This game is nearly unplayable due to the bugs and, as far as I can tell, has been abandoned by it's developers! Do not waste your money.

Not enough instructions. Have farms, water and farmers. How do I get seeds??? no info. See items that look like mines but no idea what they are and nothing works on them. Some things have info when you click, some do not. All my people dies of starvation although I had lots of farms and hunters and fishing.

For EA its off to a good start...DEFINITELY needs major improvements, but I had fun so far.

Things that need to be improved:

Camera pan speed options
Control of villagers/attack units. Half the time they don't follow your commands
Label resources when you hover over them
randomness of villagers joining makes the game feel slow at times with no control over it
general pacing of the game is slow and boring at times
Better construction priority AI/options
Bit more variety of buildings (which I'm sure is coming)
More layers of complexity for end-game buildings (again, probably will come in time)

I'll be checking back on this one when updates hit and hoping for the best!

Boring and repetitive... not much to do... Wish there was a campaign...
And now, starting a new game, it crashes after you put down a well (tried 2 different computers, so no way to play this again...)

I adore games like this and Banished. It was challenging to balance at first and when I expanded it takes a while for villagers to reach one place to the other especially builders and resources (So slow to gather). However, it has potential to be enjoyable.

I encounter a lot of bugs one particularly annoying is when I play the game for a long time, it kind of lags to the point it is super slow to do anything at all.

Also, it would be nice if my villagers can breed with each other instead of just trying to find refugees. Probably a breeding hut later in the game or something.

Not even a minute in and I'm encountering game breaking bugs. The control scheme is also sub-par, the tutorial non-existent, the graphics unoptimized and laggy, and the settings menu broken. Refunding immediately.

Can't recommend it in it's current state.

1. Military and moving units is really janky. First of all there's no multi selection through the mouse. I.e. you can't drag a box around units to select them. You have to select unit groups from flags next to the minimap. Secondly, you can't really just click to move units somewhere. You have to give them an order to do something at a specific location, which is a lot of extra clicking over time (once on the ground where you want to put the order, then again to select the type of order). And unless it's the "defend" order, they'll reset and go back to base whenever they finish said order. This is made extra annoying by the fact that a group doesn't stay together which means you are forced to use defend orders to ensure they stay together (or they'll individually return to base when they reach a certain point). Scouting is also kind of annoying. When you give a scout order and the unit arrives there, they magically scout out a radius around them that is way larger than their normal sight range. This means you have to constantly give exploration orders one inch at a time to scout efficiently. I wish they just had a set sight range at least. And it'd be nice if you could select an auto exploration option or something.

2. The GUI is rather... bad. For example: There are a bunch of icons that can appear over your villagers heads that illustrate that they have some kind of status. The problem is that you have no way of knowing what they actually mean. For example, there's an icon that looks like a stomach. That one should be fairly obvious, right? Initially I thought it was simply that they were hungry. But nope, it's that they are sick from eating raw food and need healing or they refuse to do anything. I think a bare minimum this game needs is some kind of information panel that displays information about the villager you've selected and explain the statuses properly.

3. Bugs, bugs, bugs. For example, I've got one villager that constantly loops in it's sit-down-on-bench animation no matter what she's doing (moving, working, whatever). Another much more common bug is that a worker will constantly switch between working and idling, basically standing in place doing nothing at all, requiring you to manually discover the issue and reassign the villager to unstuck them. Another bug is that when a soldier gets low on hp he'll run away. If you give them a new order they'll just lock in place and refuse to do anything. You have to wait to let them get back to the village and recover before giving a new order.

I hope it'll improve in the future, I haven't really gotten around to playing with things like walls yet.

Hello everyone! I think this is a good early access game that needs a bit of polish but is a soild game and is playable with a few bugs at the moment. If you like AOE and city/settlement builders I think this game would be worth a try. I would recommend this game but just with the friendly reminder that it is still in early access! Check out my review I made for my YT channel here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoigZOUmcFk&t=86s
Happy gaming!

A very promising and intuitive city(village?)-building game. The game is stable and I have yet to encounter any gamebreaking bugs, which is impressive considering it's a first release from an indie developer.

There is a good amount of features and buildings already, and I look forward to more being added as development continues.

This is a game to have on our watchlist or in our library. Think Banished 2.0. In current state there is no mod support, hope the dev will add that, and this game will be even better. The game itsef is a mix of various games such as Banished, Universim, age of empires. Is this a bad thing? In my opinion, no. The game is in EA, so the future will tell if it was a good call or not. If you like the games mention above. Give this one go. I fell in love right from the start.

Although, the game has some flaws. One, that I don't like is that you have to find ppl to come to our village. I prefer the Banished way over this.

Sorry but this was a good idea but falls short on one major issue. Populatoin growth. Sadly you never have enough to fully expand your village. Then desease claims the few you find as you explore even though you have a healer and herb garden which is how your meant to deal with this.Yes there are many more minor fixes need to sort out bugs like some areas of the map can't be explored for some reason. Then storms damage buildings that won't be repaired by your builders though you have the repair kits from your blacksmith. It could be a good game if more thought was put into it, the bugs sorted and the population grew more steadily as you built dwellings more like Banished. Too slow growth really is the killer though.

This game is terribly unfinished, even for an early access game. It is still full of bugs, some of which really can make the gameplay annoying. I was hesitating for a while, if I should rate it up or down. If the devs don't stop the development, it could turn out to be a nice piece of work, but some of it should have been done before releasing the game even in the early access phase. However, if the develpment doesn't stop, I should reconsider my review.

Pros:
- some nice ideas about crafting;
- military (although a little bit underdeveloped yet)
- development potential

Cons:
- terrible bugs - for example:
a) the plague spreads between the villagers, but they don't visit the healer, which results in half of your settlement whiped out, even though you could easily heal them;
b) new settlers sometimes spawn in unreachable places
c) fighters draw back in the midst of the fight to satisfy their needs, which often ends up in them being killed
d) many, many more
- poorly thought system of gaining new settlers - you can only find them by exploring the map, and there are too few to enable your village to grow properly;
- unintuitive and annoying controls (e.g. sending troops anywhere on the map takes a few actions, and you can't change your orders once you've placed them - the troops must first reach their destination and will follow there with the only exception of seeing an enemy, in which case they will run into a fight, and you are unable to call them back)
- almost no stats that could help you in planning, which results in your actions getting a bit random.
- due to the bugs and underdevelopment, you can't tell not only if the building will work, but sometimes also if it actually works properly after you've built it
- desperately needs further development, looks a bit like an early alpha version

In general, the game got me interested for a couple of hours, but the bugs made further gameplay unbearable. I would love to see it grow, however, so I will come back to it in a couple of months to check if anything has changed. After dealing with the bugs, some good ideas for the devs would be introducing a tech tree, developing the military system and adding new buildings.

I was just searching for a new game to enjoy and found Forebearers. The game looked promising and so I bought it. Now after 5 hours of playing it I write this review. Forebearers is for an early access title pretty fun. Gameplay and controals are well done and even tought not everything is working properly (can´t proceed at a certant point), its nice to have a survival and building game that adds combat too. The game may be hard to play in its current state, but I enjoy it none the less. This is only my own opinion to the game, hope others like it too:)

UPDATE:

12/20/2018
Please visit community hub > general discussions for "Praise and Question?" to see a continuation of the discussion with answers from the dev! <3

12/19/2018
Found the log -- bottom left corner! My bad dev didn't see it on the "?" lol
4th time had a villager stuck in a building and died. Mostly seen when loading back from a save.

Peeps still dying from not tending to a need first before recovery (when has some recovery still) or idle or putting a need Example.. like eating over warmth when eating has more in the bar than warmth does.

Had one gurl Zesir whose warmth bar was glitched and she had the cold icon on but the warmth bar never decreased from where it was so she never had to go warm herself but she still had to tend to the other needs. (was awesome! lmao)

12/18/2018
I decided to hop back on and lo and behold... some bugs are fixed! Can you say... YAY!? I am impressed at the speed this dev has went to fix some of the issues found! Xoxo dev I am going to keep on rockin' this game!

Still having issues with characters getting stuck (as in house) and idling instead of warming/eating/drinking or recovering and not eating/drinking/warming fast enough.

Suggestion?
Maybe as the society improves (as in stone house instead of tent) give them a larger pool/bar of warmth? As the food type improves give them a large pool/bar for food? idk. Maybe have numbers on the bars/pools? (instead of making em literally bigger on the screen lmao)

12/12/2018
This game is awesome and it reminds me of Banished. The biggest issues I've had thus far is that the people would rather recover stamina than go warm up/eat/drink. I was on a "no one dies" kick but had this stonemason that wanted to recover his stamina first rather than go warm up and thus died from the cold (I even put him back as a regular citizen but he'd still rather idle/recover than go warm up, gah!). I even tried just reloading from the point before he died.... (multiple times I might add) but nothing I tried worked and he still died from the cold (I know a warmer home would do but jeesh I just would rather him weigh in one hand recover stamina ((he had half stamina)) or in the other go warm up or die.. *shrugs*) Also, a log of events would be nice. (to see what's been going on since the beginning) or at least in the past hour instead of having to constantly monitor the pop-ups and then missing some events that have happened. Some times the wolves get stuck on top of the cave (archers can get em, rawr) otherwise the peeps would just stand there while the wolf bites em until they run back to the village. Still a fun game! I have replayed it multiple times due to my own imperfections and what I wanted but it is slowly getting to where I want it! Thanks dev! <3 <3

This game has the potential to be very enjoyable like the game Banished, but with a military aspect. Unfortunately, in its current state, it is entirely too buggy. Simple things, for instance with just the wall mechanics, has problems with properly enclosing, walls meeting up with nature barriers, and just wall placement has major issues. In its current state, I just can't enjoy this game. I hope they resolve their issues in the future.

fun game concept but it does have a ways to go. if you like northgard this game is for you. you build a tribe, build a nation, ransack everyone in your way. the only downfalls for me was you dont get villagers unless you find some in the wilderness, very slow camera move speed, and its only single player with 3 maps. to be fair it is in early access and i believe it will evolve into something wonderful.

Relaxing village builder with a chilled pace and decent graphics

Some graphical bugs as to be expected in EA (such as guardians sticking in rocks, trees sprouting just into the water and, most annoyingly, the camera rotation often stopping working) but by and large a nicely put together effort

In my first 2 games I haven't found it particularly challenging to balance resources and grow basically as fast as I can find new colonists and build houses, but hopefully this will be enhanced as the game is tweaked. Certainly it is a lot less challenging to manage the population that many other games I've played recently in this genre, but on the other hand this does make for a relaxing experience. No mechanic around children to grow the population makes it feel a little contrived (you have to go into the world and find refugees to join you) but maybe this will be added later

The mechanics with the guardians (soldiers) do need some work though - they are very awkward to control in any sort of group and cannot easily be multi-selected and given revised orders if say 6 of them are waiting and 2 others have got stuck on terrain (happens a lot!). This means a lot of extra clicking to respond to a raid, or even just exploring the map, which is frustrating

Beyond the items I've called out above it plays perfectly well and it quite enjoyable in it's current form. There are lots of areas the devs could take things including deeper effects of the rather attractive snow and more complexity in the resource chains (personally, I'd love to see the different biomes link up on a single map with trade caravans taking specific resources between them for some really deep game play but who knows...)

In summary, a good start for a game just hitting Early Access - I've certainly played a lot that are less polished on Day 1 of EA! It feels like it has lots of potential for more depth if the devs continue to expand it during the EA process

Bonus points for no crashes to desktop at such an early stage :)

I'll be watching the development of this game further and look forward to playing more of it.