Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Jul 5, 2021

  Like many other people who have reviewed this game, I am also saddened by the fact that this game didn't receive further updates after the original developers, Radiant Entertainment, were bought by Riot Games in 2018. Some of the reviews that don't recommend this game mention the fact that the game feels unfinished; that's because it is when compared to what the developers said they wanted to do with the game. I bought the game when it was in beta and the amount of communication via their weekly Desktop Tuesday YouTube videos was always something I looked forward to. It was easy to see that the developers loved the game and had so many ideas and features planned. However, that was 2018. And despite many planned features and goals being cut, I would say that the base game is serviceable as a standalone title. The art style is extraordinarily cute and the mechanics are cool albeit buggy at times. It's not the most exciting, especially after the first or second runs through the game, This is where the ACE (Authorized Community Expansion) Mod saves the day. The community basically took over the rest of the development on this game after Radiant Entertainment released the source code. It not only brings an amazing amount of content but also stability and bug fixes. It's everything Radiant Entertainment wanted the game to be. It's also why I am still recommending this game on the condition that the ACE Mod is used. Many other mods also add content, but the ACE Mod "fixes" the base game itself. Overall, I still love this game to bits and pieces.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 30, 2023

  RIOT GAMES BOUGHT THE DEVS OUT, AND HAD THEM STOP WORKING ON THE GAME The ace community mod is where you can find some updates, but the game isn't very optimized. tysvfm riot games for taking this unfinished gem from us IMO game is still worth it if you can get it on a sale
• gamedeal user

  Feb 25, 2021

  There are several very important things you must know if you play this. 1) The mod "ACE" is pretty much vital. The vanilla game gets stale in single digit hours, ACE extends that significantly by adding more mechanics, and vastly improving existing ones. I'd also heavily recommend downloading building templates from the workshop, as designing your own can be very tiresome due to the way building works. 2) For me, and many others, launching this game results in nothing but a black screen. THIS CAN BE FIXED BY PRESSING F5. This reloads the Main Menu UI which fixes the issue after waiting 10-15 seconds. I always see threads asking about this popping up on the discussions. 3) Go into the options, tweak the game. In particular make sure that 64-bit mode is enabled (assuming you have a 64 bit OS), this improves performance to a ridiculous degree. Also ensure that you enable autosaving in the save menu as I experience CTDs at least once every couple of hours. There are some options to increase villager limit and increase maximum game speed - I don't recommend messing with these; running the game at 3x speed for me causes villagers to refuse to do any task at all and just idle forever, same if I increase the villager limit by more than a few. 4) The game is abandoned by the devs. If you look this up, they say that the game was completed so they stopped development. This isn't true, on a stream they said they are "leaving the game to the modders". Going through the Kickstarter page makes for sad reading as so many stretch goals were left untouched despite the funding being met. Should you buy this? If you don't want to support Radiant's shitty business practice of abandoning a game with the intent of leaving modders to clean up your mess, while still marking the game as complete, then do not. But I do believe this game is somewhat of a gem, done so by the team behind ACE.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 31, 2016

  I have played Stonehearth for 341 hours and have enjoyed playing through the developing stages. The game is becoming more polished and seems to be headed in a positive direction. I would recommend this to someone who enjoys a sandbox building and crafting games where they can design towns and villages with a little bit of hostile goblins thrown in to the mix. I do not recommend this yet for someone that is expecting a finished polished product or get upset when an error message pops up. The Good - I find the game extremely fun to play with the ability to design your own houses and structures. - The pace of the game is relaxing and the music is very soothing. - The Heathing are amusing as they try to carry out your commands - There are more creatures to worry about now as Giant Zombie, Stone Golems, Eants, and what looks like a mutant alligator roam the land. Undead Villages complete with crazed necromancers pop up and flood the night with undead critters. - The ability to create Mods will mean continued content. I hope that this also continues to develop end game content. - Weekly twitch feed keep you updated on developments and lets you give feed back to the developers. The Bad - There are still errors when trying to build structures, and it takes a while to learn what works and what does not. It seems the building logic really wants you to lay down your design in a certain way. I watched a twitch feed were the designer was working on this to allow the engine to be more flexible. - The Hearthling become idler as your town, village, Kingdom expands. I am unsure if this is caused by distance, memory issues or pathing (although sometime it’s because I ran out of wood). The developers have work hard and these issues have improved greatly since I started playing it. (I still have to chop my own wood of course) - The end game is not there yet. There is a basic scenario evolving Blood thirsty goblins which ends after 4 or 5 encounters. Following that you only have to fend off random creatures once or twice a day. I will continue to play and follow this game as it develops.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 11, 2020

  This game would be made infinitely better if the developers just handed the source code over in it's entirety. The premise, world-building and style would only benefit by allowing the community that mods the game to continue on it's legacy. I don't want to say I recommend it completely, but I don't have a neutral option and this game isn't bad enough to thumbs down. Buy it on sale only.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 4, 2022

  I Love this game. This is alongside very few games in my steam library that I keep coming back to after months of not playing. I will play the game until I get to about 30-40+ hearthlings then the game starts to get choppy and laggy. At which point I start to lose interest overall and then start to move on to other things. Back when I first found this game I saw it had really active developers with weekly dev logs and an active twitch channel that they hosted dev streams on of them working on the game. I loved it. It felt so fresh and no other game since has been able to scratch the itch that this game gets when I play it. Then all of a sudden development went silent, The devs sent out one final community post saying that the game was being released as 1.0 and that no further work was being done on it. I was heart broken. Since this happened I started to notice more and more bugs that I was putting up with, with the thoughts "it will be patched out later" in the back of my mind but now knowing that they wont. It really hurts to see the game i loved playing like this. I'm glad that ACE is a thing on the steam workshop, but it doesnt do much to "fix" what is already broken. That being the engine the game runs on. The engine is old. It wasn't made for the amount of AI commands that can occur at once in a late game situation and it shows. If you get to late in a game cycle and have 40+ hearthlings things can get very very choppy as the game starts to need frequent restarts in order to keep up with itself and not dump its load on "idle" processes that slow it way down. I really want to give this game a good review because I love it to bits. But, I just can't. It hurts me to finally admit after so long that its not a good game. I know the devs sold themselves to RIOT so they could keep working on a larger scale on larger projects and make more of an impact but you could seriously tell that this game was a Passion of the developers when they were working on this. They have videos on YouTube from 9 years ago when they first started working on this and they worked on this so hard over the years only to abandon it so far into development. I started playing this game when it was in alpha 9 before multi story buildings were consistent to build and the building AI would fall over itself if you tried. And before even Rayya's Children were added. I still play the game to this day but I just cant recommend it in the state it is in at the price. If it was less than 10 I would say go for it but at nearly £16 its not worth it. While writing this I decided to watch the final desktop Tuesday they released simply titled "The End". And listening to the things that were being said about the game proved to me that the game was a passion for all the team from the beginning and that they loved making it. My only hope is that some day they will come back with a fresh passion and a larger team behind them to make the game I know this could have been.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 17, 2017

  UPDATE 3: No I don't recommend this anymore, the build system is completely borked. Tried to build a simple road with a few block columns and 5 hours of wasted time later I discover the engine has broken so bad not even instant build will build it. I tried to make it into a template to place it again but no, roads won't lower. Absolutely disgusted the game was left in this condition. UPDATE 2: I would switch this to recommend but since it's one of the most helpful negative reviews I thought maybe leave it so people worried could see this update. The most important thing I want to say is: The devs have REALLY stepped it up, they are fixing bugs, updating often, and even responding on Steam which is hugely important to me. It feels like there's been a major shift in priorities, and to be frank it's making me very excited! :D Their new build system is fantastic, it still needs some improvements but it's beautiful to work with and I have not yet had a building fail to completely build for the last handful of updates which has really really made this game so much more enjoyable. I've also not had many (it's rare now!) template errors or building errors in general while designing or placing templates for the last few updates. Templates can be awkward to place but not too much trouble and that will improve over time also. Things are also improving all over the game in many little and big ways and I'm genuinely excited to see what comes next. Now with the big issues that were upsetting gameplay fixed I can enjoy it more while being excited for silly things like the new colored walls and columns they just added :D. If you're worried about buying please feel free to ask me any questions here on this review and I'll respond as best I can....but if you're just a little worried jump on it and give it a go. Honestly I really do recommend this game at this time. I am super happy with it and it's well worth it! ________________________________________________________________________ ORIGINAL REVIEW: I really love this game, it's a lot of fun, but I am getting sick to death of the devs worrying about aesthetics and not the actual gameplay. We've been waiting YEARS for them to fix the building system, instead they add conversations between hearthlings and give them pretty furniture to react to and "personalities". That is useless when we can't build them houses without massive errors or delete walls once they're placed!! I spent an hour building a church only to have the game throw an error and delete the top half of the blueprint. I don't even know why. NONE of my buildings are built to completion, I have to use console commands to get anywhere even with their pre-built templates. You have to build to progress, and there's a stupid 50 hearthling limit which is just annoying. This is ridiculous, this is a town building survival game, get your priorities right devs!!! UPDATE FOR NEW BUILD SYSTEM: The new build system is out, and it's AWESOME but it's also not 100% user friendly/intuitive. I would have updated this review to recommend at this point, except, every time I get started building the engine breaks (the thing that runs the game, which prevents you from playing properly). I still cannot build OR play. In my last game I built two bridges, started to build a house, and built 2 roads. I was outlining a walled area I was hoping archers could shoot from when I started getting errors. Lots of them. The template had broken, I couldn't delete it I couldn't move it. I had to reload. Unfortunately for me reloading never helped even when I fully exited the program. These sorts of things were happening before as well...and they absolutely mean I can't make a great city or become attatched to my hearthlings because it breaks so much I have to restart the whole application and go into a new game every time I get into it. Starting from scratch like this is not the greatest....and kills the fun.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 17, 2023

  F u c k you RIOT GAMES
• gamedeal user

  Dec 22, 2016

  This is my very first review for any game, I just feel compelled to do it! My first impression of Stonehearth after watching their video wasn't good. This is my very first uh I don't know what to call it, 2D-pixel voxel game? Anyway, I was a bit turned off by it. I've always avoided minecraft for that reason. Also, the price of $24.99 for this type of game seemed a bit too much for me. Anyway, I spent a couple of weeks thinking about it, watched their intro video at least 4 times and finally caved and bought the game the other night. Stonehearth has been such a delight to play. I thoroughly enjoy the job/class and advancement systems. I love the cuteness that is the game, even the boxy critters and animals are adorable. Building your own homes can be quite a challenge, which adds to the fun for me. I also love being able to use a building template the game provides and customize it to my own preference if I'm too lazy to create my own. I love renaming my citizens! I love that I can assign them to their own beds! I love that the cook helps my farmer harvest the fields :D As you can see, I enjoy a lot of the little features in Stonehearth which is why I felt compelled to make this review and share my experience with others. If you enjoy survival/strategy city-builders with cute pets and citizens + job/class advancements, then I highly suggest this game to you. Imo, this is one of those games that's worth the price tag. I love what the developers have done with the game so far and I'm happy to support this early access title.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 28, 2018

  It's with some trepidation that I leave a negative review. I've certainly put a lot of hours into this game, and I wouldn't have done that if I didnt enjoy it. However it is frustrating beyond believe that the developers haven't put more work into the game's core systems, pathfinding, decision trees, performance etc. Currently the game is most fun in the early stages when you're getting your village started and you have only a few people to manage. As you progress everything starts to bog down, jobs dont get finished, stuff is left lying all over the map and your people just stand about idle, or having 'conversations'. If you look at the devs roadmap they seem to be blind to this. The upcoming work is about missions, character 'moods', interactions etc ... no real mention of the elephant in the room that is game performance. So.. what is there to like? A lot I guess. It's pretty cute. You can design your own structures and build them (eventually). It can be a addictive, a real, one more minute game. But... It can be buggy (fair enough it IS EA), and performance is awful as your village grows. There isn't really an end game as such. My suggestion... this is for wasting time on a day when you really dont want to think about anything and just want to watch grass grow. It is enjoyable to start a game, but you'll probably start more games than you 'finish' (if there is such a thing) Wait until the devs speed up development progress or make some big improvements to the underlying engine. I dont see this ever leaving Early Access.