Truer words have never been spoken: an easy-to-learn but hard-to-master game. Confession time! Myriads: Renaissance, by Sleeping Eight Studio, is my first time playing a specifically tagged 4X game. I have always been curious to play, but there’s always been something holding me back that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. So, with that in mind, when the game description mentions ‘strategy’, ‘turn-based’, and ‘city building’, the worry of my 4X (lack of) experience dissipated quickly. Take this review with a grain of salt, I am not an expert on this sliver of the game’s genre. So far, I have attempted 3 playthroughs of the demo, and have either run out of turns or been defeated – I will do my best to not allow this to happen again.
General Gameplay:
Firstly, thank you for having a launcher with graphics options so that I was able to launch the game on the correct monitor from the beginning #FirstWorldMultipleMonitorProblems. Now that I’ve gotten that initial excitement out of the way….
The menus are simple and minimalistic for audio, game controls, and other miscellaneous gameplay options – while this may not always appear or be an option during game demos, I always appreciate seeing this when it happens.
The Tutorial goes through the mechanics and instructions well. Not only is there an option to have the tutorial on/off, but they also do a good job explaining how to play along the way – however, I did still find some confusion while playing. Granted, this may be from my lack of experience with the genre, however questions I was asking, especially regarding when citizens arrive included how do they get there, and how is income made early in the game? Is there a way I can lure new citizens to my beautiful fortress isle?
I also really appreciate this demo having a 120-turn limit. Not only does it cut me off from running the risk of easily losing hours while playing, but also by turn 100, it’s also easy to gauge what more can be done to succeed in the remaining time – or also faff about with remaining turns to avoid seeing DEFEAT plastered across my screen. Being able to customize your Empire with colors, banners, sigils, and the name is great and creates a more personal experience of gameplay. Having the odds of risk/reward before attempting to engage treasure, technology, or Corsairs with the option to go ahead or flee is also very helpful. I appreciate part of the strategy involves your currency on hang, as running out of funds causes your Galleon to lose its men, therefore losing strength and adding to the overall challenge. Probably one of the best features I did find, was that quitting the game also creates a save file for when you quit, and this was such a delight to see.
Audio:
The background music is appropriate for this game style and relaxing to have in the background while trying to strategize. Having the subtle sounds of sword fighting occurring during battle was also a nice touch, to not have this be overpowering in scale with the rest of the game world.
Bugs:
I got a little ahead of myself recruiting Militiamen and did this before the tutorial prompted me to do so, which locked the game. I restarted the game and reloaded my most recent save, but the most recent autosave occurred after that point of no return, and had to start a new game. There is a silver lining in this happening: I was able to see that each Capital Island’s appearance/style is randomized, and I thought that was really cool!
I didn’t notice any other bugs encountered during any of my playthroughs.
Suggestions:
- A little more handholding for newbies to the genre would be helpful – Are the diamonds representing Action Points? Having the 3 diamonds on the Galleons, for example, didn’t make much sense to me where the ship would move as far as it could but only use 2 diamonds. If I wasn’t in my own Archipelago, I couldn’t use that remaining 1 diamond or move the ship further. This also made less sense to me moving the Settler ships that had 1 diamond remaining yet couldn’t go anywhere.
- Having the icons at the top for your objectives, technologies, completed productions, etc., could stand out a bit more if a task completed flashed up there instead of the left side of the screen since these also include the Corsair warnings and encouragement to increase defenses.
- The Faction customization menu for colors and banners could be tidied on screen – perhaps the two colors for the banners be above them, and the colors for the sigil be above those choices. It would be nice to be able to input a custom color, but this is a very minor and low-priority suggestion – I just like my Barbie pink where possible.
- Ensuring that wording is uniform throughout the game, for example with Capital Island both being capitalized in one frame, and only one in another.
- Changing up the colors of resource icons, for example, instead of a gold color for Production, use that for coins, and production could be gray instead.
- Being able to rename Galleons – as a viewer suggestion of Dennis’ Range Rover would have been perfect. This would also be a good option for streamers to allow their viewers to name ships for them, as an example.
- Option to move citizens into a different role/location – this could be an option for choosing the Easy difficulty, especially if the player hasn’t made it as far as obtaining a warehouse so that supplies aren’t lost at the end of the month.
- The icons in the bottom right corner of the screen did not present much information with them other than toggling filters from what I could gather – perhaps this could be better utilized in the Game Menu where other miscellaneous options are present.
- The timing of information presented for the lore at the initial beginning of the game went by quickly and I didn’t get to finish reading it all so I would probably recommend this not being timed and having a skip option available instead.
Overall:
Would I play Myriads: Renaissance again? Absolutely, and I have also since attempted two other playthroughs since my initial stream of the game – it has its hooks into me, and I will certainly be excited to play this game beyond the demo. I love the visual of the game and that each building looks like it should in a small tile so I can differentiate what it is I am looking at. Knowing there is a Corsair threat meter helps me know if I have some time on my side to act now, or risk further exploration a bit more and claim another piece of my own archipelago. I think about playing this game quite often and will likely be loading it up again for another playthrough once I have posted this review. I absolutely invite anyone to take me under their wing to help me learn 4X games a bit more, however with the lack of such experience in games, this was really enjoyable to play.
Wishlisted: ✅
My playthrough (Myriads v0.7.3 Demo on behalf of G.Round) was live-streamed on Twitch and the VOD can be found here. The playtesting period runs from Dec 28, 2022, through Jan 24, 2023.
***Disclaimer***
While all care is taken to ensure that my reviews are as accurate and informative as possible, I am playing while streaming and/or within a time restraint where I may miss or overlook a game function/cue/mechanic mentioned in the feedback I have provided at the time of writing. Any oversights may or may not be construed as feedback towards the ease of accessibility (or lack thereof) on a game currently in development.
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SPECS:
CPU: Intel i9-11900KF @ 3.50GHz
RAM: 16GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
OS: Windows 11