Game: Foundation
Genre: City Builder, Simulation
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Polymorph Games
Controller Support: None
Price: US $34.99 | UK £29.50 | EU € 33,99
Release Date: January 31st, 2025
A review code was used, with many thanks to Polymorph Games.
Foundation is a city builder focused around starting, and growing, a medieval village from the ground up. While you are building, you will have to deal with growing pains and problems that arise.
The Many Options for Foundation
As you start up a new game, you have the option to choose from several different difficulty levels, what kind of experience you want to have, and you can even customize each of these things. There are tons of settings so you can make sure your Foundation experience is as complex or simple as you like.
Since I’ve played several different kinds of city-building simulations in my time, like New Cycle and some others, but I’m not super familiar with the genre, I put it on easy mode and relaxed. And it is a good thing I did because Foundation throws a lot at you, and you need to be ready to catch it. You start pretty small with a little village of about 20 people and a handful of buildings you can make.
First, you need some builders in a builders’ hut; then, you need to give the woodworkers a lumber camp to work from. You need stones from a stone camp to build houses, gather food, vendor the food, and then… The tutorial is thankfully super helpful; I think if I had started this game on the hardest setting the first time, I would have been drowning in seconds.
Complex Gameplay that is Mostly Intuitive
Foundation has a whole lot of things to keep in mind, but it also allows you to edit your experience to tailor it to what you want to see and what you don’t. By default, you can have buildings warn you when they are full when there aren’t any workers assigned to a building, etc., but you can also turn these things off with the menu in the upper left corner. You can skip the tutorial or play through it, so starting a new village is even faster if you don’t like how things are going. For the most part, the buttons are pretty intuitive, and it’s pretty easy to tell at a glance how the village is.
However, there are a couple of things that don’t make much sense to me. For example, there is a mechanic who tells you that a building is missing something, but mousing over the icon doesn’t always tell you why it is not correct. The first time I built a manor home, for example, I forgot to show where the entrance was, and it had a little floating mallet with a red cross through it; in the menu, there was a little button that said, “this needs an entrance to work!” However, not everything has those. So I have a manor house in my current playthrough where all the buttons are checked off, and all the items needed to build it are there, but that icon is still floating over the building.
There were some other smaller things that I found less intuitive than I would like (like having to have a slot available for an item in order to have merchants trade with you) and some other items I didn’t love (there doesn’t seem to be a way to buy things right when you need them; instead you have to wait for a merchant to bring those supplies across the map; it makes sense in the context of the game, I just wish there was a little more of a market for me, I guess). Overall, I really enjoyed the complexity of Foundation.
Isn’t It So Cute?
While Foundation is a serious city-building simulator, it went out of its way to have adorable art and cute little villagers you could zoom in on. Look how close you can get to this little market I built:
The visuals are stunning, and I also loved the sound design for Foundation. Overall, the look and feel of this game is fun, colorful, exciting, and beautiful; I think the developers did a great job of giving this little village a lot of life in it.
How is Foundation to Play?
It’s fun! I usually don’t go out of my way to pick up city builders, but Foundation is HUGE, with a ton of content to explore. It feels real because there are so many things to take care of and so much to unlock. You start off with the ten or so buildings you might expect; then you have to build tax offices, a church, places for your people to hang out like a tavern, pave the streets, build nicer housing, and a lot more.
There is so much to do that I have put 15 hours in Foundation for this review, and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of what is in here to see. I have a sprawling town with wheat fields, a booming industry, and people upgrading their homes. We even have a few decorations to keep the village beautiful. And I haven’t even figured out how to get farm animals yet!
In spite of Foundation being a little overwhelming, I adore the gameplay. It’s fun, it’s fulfilling, and there’s so much to take care of and look at. I can play this one for hours at a time and not get bored. If you enjoy detail-oriented building sims, I can recommend this one without hesitation.
The Cons of Foundation
I didn’t have very many issues with Foundation. I did come across a couple of bugs or weird things; there was one time I was trying to pay someone 100 wood for something, and I told my people not to let anyone take wood, and I selected the “fill up the storage completely” option. Most of the villagers ignored that anyway and took a bunch of wood out, making me fail the quest. I had paused all the building to make sure I got enough wood, but it still somehow never got to be enough.
There is another issue; if you invite new people into your village, it automatically puts them into unemployed until you assign them a job. If you have the menu open for the building you want to assign these villagers to, it won’t update to show the new, unemployed people until you back out of the menu and open it up again. Sometimes I had to back out of the menu twice to get the right people to show up so I could assign them properly.
Finally Out of Early Access
But other than those things, which I found workarounds for, I didn’t have any major issues or anything with Foundation. It’s basically bug-free, as it has been in early access for a while. It’s also had a lot of other improvements since 2022; if you check out the post where Paula originally gave early impressions of Foundation, you can see how much the visuals have improved over the last few years. Overall, I think Foundation is proof-positive that early access is one of the best things to ever happen to indie games.
Conclusion
As I mentioned up top, I’m not usually a huge fan of building sims. The majority of the genre is focused around warring your neighbors and feel a lot more like RTS games than sims sometimes. However, Foundation is a cozier version of the genre, and I love everything about it.
It’s cute, it’s got a great tutorial, amazing atmosphere, colorful and beautiful graphics, good sound design, and a whole lot more. I can definitely recommend this to anyone, even if you’ve never played this kind of game before!
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.
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