This is a meaty demo, taking me a little over 2 hours.
As someone who adored the “City Building” series by Impressions (Caesar, Pharaoh, Emperor) and thought going in that Synergy had similar vibes, it’s about what I expected. It has a lot of similar systems with plenty of different resources, both physical and “well-being,” which is like Desirability. It does away with the really fussy stuff like city walkers and labor availability, and instead gives buildings a range of effect. Travel time for your populace still appears to be important (like Tropico).
It also has its fair share of jank. Building work orders are by far the biggest problem; you can only assign one task, and even when there are available resources for an alternative task, the building will just idle. This is especially bad in the gathering huts because you have to manually select the plants to collect from, and plants have multiple resources (but only one mode is available at a time). I could see this being a recipe for micromanagement hell. There are some other small issues I figure will be resolved for the full release, like missing ambient audio from the settlement itself and untranslated elements, although the translation itself was good (this was developed by a French studio and publisher in case you couldn’t tell; no native English speaker in their right mind would release a video game named Synergy).
Overall, I’m interested. I also got the impression it might be a continuous city campaign, unlike the chapters you’d get in the City Building or Tropico series, which could be a fun change of pace. I’ll be keeping an eye out for a release date.
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