Common'hood

I would like to be able to recommend this game, but I can't. Not only does it feel incredibly unpolished.. but it has frequent bugs including part of progression being bugged. That said I bought it for the building system which has a lot of potential and I hoped to see it see more love by the devs who seem to have cut and run with whatever they got.

So the Positives:
-The building system ignoring the glitches, and lack of polish, extremely flexible allowing the player to build pretty much any structure they want without curves. Some modern game engines currently in development are still trying to reach this level of flexible construction.
-Setting, topical reference to modern economic and social situations brings you into the story
-Characters, aren't out of this world but they fit the setting and the only type of people who could build a collective and have it work: either extremely self improvement driven or already established and passionate in their niche.
-Progression in broad strokes, finding research materials, research, build tools, make finished products, use new tools and products to advance further into the factory.


The Negative
-Glitchs, frequent and hard to avoid, it is hard to say where to start, I had areas load in incorrectly, breaking the exits and trapping me in the void... then autosaving me into having to load a manual save. The building system regularly overlaps things which obviously shouldn't and the plan following sometimes ignores parts which have been supplied. Seemingly Random crashes also occur at least once ever hour or so, might be a memory leak.
-The details of Progression, while the broad strokes are masterful inline with metroidvanias if the factory was a bit better laid out... The details leave much to be desired, materials are not something collected by chopping trees and drying them out, or dissassembling machinery such as the pumpjacks found in the third buildable area... instead there are just resource depos lying around and intact scrap available for use. Books in a factory is a stretch, probably should be purchased from the market and tools are singular instead of something you make, which makes sense in a metroidvania game where your character does everything with their fists and not their know how but is baffling in this setting.
-Monetary system, is extremely unbalanced with some easily farmed preservatives being work trucks and expensive tool sets, imagine selling 50 bottles of ketchup and buying multiple welders.... not happening IRL. Also one of the last errors the devs added before running away breaks the progression of paying for trucks etc to get better goods from the store, unlocking everything on a reload.
-collective management, instead of everyone being inventive, self motivated and independant, people are just told exactly what to do and will not think of something to do when your orders are done or not given... takes away personality from the characters, unlike some things might indicate, there seems to be little to no effect from not fulfilling their likes and needs and no real bonus for doing so.
-Environmental effects on the collective, there are none. no police you have to hide things from or stay ahead of, no rain, no growth outside of your planters....

This game is very much an abandoned early access level game... sadly the potential was great but it was abandoned.

I wish I could do more than the simple thumbs up or down. This is an alright game in total. To me, it has the perfect premise. But it's a buggy mess, and legitimately an unfinished game. This is an excellent prototype/proof of concept for a game that needs another year or two of development to realize.

The UI is bad, and takes a while to figure out how to navigate around the bugs. You get the hang of its idiosyncrasies before too long, but just because we learn how to avoid the bugs doesn't mean the UI isn't buggy crap. Bugs aside, there are many perplexing UI choices that any QA worker could have helped improve.

It's frustrating, because I want to give this game a whole-hearted recommendation for its content. But the product itself needs more development and QA.

I'm really rooting for it, but it seems the devs have moved on from the game. I hope that a modding community gets their hands on this, or another studio makes a spiritual successor.

Still worth a play if you're dealing with capitalist despair and are willing to navigate an unfinished game's minefield of bugs to envision a better future.

Abandoned it seems

I enjoyed the idea of the game. However, in almost the hour I played, I came across several game breaking bugs that meant I had to start over. So I only really got to day 2. I'm sure it would get better after that if the game actually worked, and from looking at the community it seems that there is little communication from the Devs regarding fixing these issues. I'll be keeping a check on it and if there is indication that it's improving I'll probably come back and buy it again, but for now it wasn't worth the money.

Great concept and I wish that I could recommend it in good faith, but i just can't. I spent a lot of time in the game and not for the purpose of just playing it - a lot of time was spent simply trying to make some things work. There are so many glitches in the game, stories that won't progress because the last mission didn't save properly, materials that will go missing if you double click to add it where it's supposed to go instead of clicking and dragging...the list is honestly pretty large. I saw one of the YouTubers that I watch playing the game and I looked forward to playing it as well; the concept is a good one. Rebuilding, learning, researching, etc. but the execution is very poor.
If you have a lot of patience and are willing to go back and forth, sometimes restarting the whole game from scratch, then it's worth a shot.

chillin game
I love it 8/10

Was really liking it, then got too buggy
The other characters stopped dong anything
Wish I had read other reviews before buying.

Love this game. Its a little confusing at first with all the different machinery you need to learn to use, and what their use is. But once you learn, and catch on its a really cool game.

Don't buy this. if you're on the fence and it looks good? don't buy it. if its on sale and you like simulation/ building/farming games don't buy it. Why? I struggled through so many bugs to make it to 20 hours of play time and poof! the bugs have overwhelmed me. Items in the game that take ages to build disappeared. The NPCS just stopped functioning and just stand there... no matter how you refresh them... no matter how you interact and how many times you fix it this bug WILL come back.

As a new player you will get little to no instruction. There have been no fixes to this game and it is considered a finished game by its developer.

would you buy a half made coffee? say they just gave you hot water in a cup then added your milk and sugar... no beans. Nobody wants hot milky sugar water (not a sex joke).

This game has promise but seems to be abandoned. It's still very buggy and unfinished.

This game is so bugged and annoying yet so addictive...
If you don't mind it's unfinished and abandoned by developers, buy it BUT ONLY ON SALE and consider this:
- it takes ~40 hours to finish the main quest and all available side quests,
- you are unable to gain maximum trust with all the characters because the game is unfinished,
- you are unable to complete all achievements (because as above),
- you are unable to finish whole "research tree" (because as above),
- to finish given character's quests, they will be sent somewhere far away where you will have to go on foot, only to watch a cutscene; then go back to your base, wasting time.

Someone make a copy of this, leave the good parts, remove the annoying parts, fix bugs, and the game would be perfect.

So many bugs with placement, items can just disappear into the ether if you hit the wrong button, and the core gameplay feature (creating a community of NPCs that all work together) is flat out broken.

NPCs will just stand on their beds all day, no matter what their assigned job is. There seems to be no fix to this, and it can happen at any time (seems to start as soon as you finish the introduction section). So you will end up doing everything yourself, which makes the entire game into a farming sim to keep your non-functional NPCs from starving.

Definitely only get it on sale, if you plan to get it at all. I wouldn't though, especially since the devs are completely AFK. Not a word from them in months, no news on if it's been abandoned or not, but it seems like it has been. It's a shame, because the game has potential, but it's squandered by all the bugs and lack of direction.

This is NOT an Early Access Game, it's supposedly a full release. It plays like an early build of an Early Access game though, and it doesn't seem to be getting any more updates.

Buyer Beware.