PREVIEW: Retro-Pixel Castles

PREVIEW: Retro-Pixel Castles

GAME INFO:

Name: Retro-Pixel Castles

Genre: Village simulator

Developer: Raymond Doerr

Publisher: SixtyGig Games

Type: Single player

NOTE: This game is in early access on Steam, in other words it’s in early development stage!

Retro-Pixel Castles is at heart a village simulator. But, where most village simulators focus mostly on balancing your village, RPC also throws in a heavy blend of raw survival and tactical gameplay. If you could imagine a roguelike village sim, that’s what this game is all about!

Immediately from main menu you can guess that game is in early development phase. There is no settings option in the game, instead if you want to change game settings, than you need to go to the game folder and find server.properties file, in which you can change settings (resolution etc.). I am a little bit disappointed because I can’t change settings in the game and for some people who are unexperienced, that might be a problem, but hopefully settings option will come soon to the game.

There are total of 10 maps that you can choose currently and of course those that you create. I like that every time you start a map, each time you will be on different location. After choosing your map, beautiful pixel world shows up. 24 men, women and children are under your command to survive. Your first task is to place your village center, a main place for your villagers. Take your time and choose wisely the location of Village Center, it’s important in the beginning of the game. Village center will need wood and stone of course, to gather resources, on the left side of the screen, you have brush and four type of resource to gather (wood, stone, food, crystal) just click and move brush over resource and your villagers will start gathering. Don’t forget to put how many people will work on village center, cause you can’t mark villagers like in strategy games.When village center is done, build tab on the right of the screen opens. Few categories are available for now: framing, housing, lighting, resource gathering, resource storage and walls. Of course as game development continues, more and more categories will be added in-game.

I don’t have so much experience in playing this kind of games, where you need to build to survive and guide your people to survive. I’ve played Banished and didn’t like it very much, but Retro-Pixel Castles is somehow different. From graphics, controls, way to guide your people, I just have that feeling it’s completely different game, but in much better way.

In upper side of screen you can see your resources: wood, stone, food and right from that: population, average happiness and average hunger. Watch them closely otherwise, game over. I recommend first building either small farm or farm after village center is done, cause villagers needs to eat, to contain their health, to have energy to work or better to say: to be more productive.   know that there is a tutorial that you can enter from the game. You need to be a good tactician, cause in the start you only have 24 people, so you must  organise them very well. Don’t gather only one resource or build only one building.

Next is building houses. There are three types of houses: tent, small shack and small hovel. Tents are the fastest to build, but they only have enough room for four villagers. Small Shack is a little bit bigger and they have room for 8 people and of course Small Hovel is the biggest, but needs the most resources and slow building time. It’s up to you, but since you are on the beginning of your journey I recommend you either tent or small shack and then later when your people starts to marry and have kids, than you should build small hovel. One bad thing about this game is that it doesn’t have pause option and so if you need to go to toilet, to eat or just to do something else, you cannot pause the game and that’s very bad, cause most of the time your villagers are gonna suffer and probably die, you’ll have a very bloody screen.

As I said, your villagers can marry and have kids, which means bigger population which means bigger farms, bigger houses and then you’ll need to build food storage building, wood storage and stone storage. As your village or castle gets bigger, you’ll need to build walls, but for now walls don’t have any function, cause there are no monsters or other people to hurt or attack you, but I assume that will come soon to the game. Game has a day/night cycle and a little watch in upper side of the screen. In the end if you followed and read this review/instructions, you should already have a nice, wealthy, big castle. Nah, just kidding 😉 I suck in this game, don’t listen me.

For now you will only do this two commands: build and gather. Game is not fast-paced, it doesn’t have option to forward tim or slow it down. Can’t wait to see how this game is develop, cause it has a big potential and I hope that developer will be on right track. When more content comes to the game, it will be much better than now.

When I first time saw, watched and read about game, I thought this should be good game and the game met my expectations, of course nothing is perfect in this world neither is this game. I like the graphics, animations, sounds, music very much. The whole concept is fantastic. Game lacks content, no save option so every time you need to start from beginning, no pause option which I find very important for this type of the game. Also remember that this game is in early access and as development continues, more and more content and options will come to the game.

If you don’t have the problem with games that are in early access mode and have money to buy it, than you should try this game. Relaxing game that can occupy you from 30-60 minutes or more if you have time per play!

Check out our gallery of screenshots:

//imgur.com/a/JFkUr/embed

Check our gameplay of the game:

Written by
Lost Child
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