Foundation

"And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz!"

The Beatles - Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite

(though you gotta love Eddie Izzard hamming this one up)

I did play (and thoroughly enjoyed) SimCity 2000/3000 back in their heyday, but for the most part city sims ain't my thing. Gave SC4 a pass after hearing about some of its TheSims-inspired "features", never entirely got into Settlers&co(pycats), and only really got back into the genre with Banished, Surviving Mars and especially that nippy delight Frostpunk. Thanks to them I've gotten to really enjoy the lower-pop, more survival-focused village simulators, so three years ago I also snagged Dawn of Man and Foundation during a sale for about the same price. While Dawn of Man, despite its glaring flaws, engaged me more than enough to make me feel guilty for underpaying, Foundation should count as my karmically-balancing rip-off.

 

Apparently my complaint about French games' aesthetic focus and mechanic failure extends to French-Canadians. I was intrigued by Foundation's main selling point of freeform expansion, which turned out to mean drawing your grain fields and wood chopping areas using an MS Paint airbrush tooltip, and expanding buildings by modular rooms/doors/decorations by snapping them onto each other. Quaint... but also, ultimately, adding nothing to gameplay that traditional building upgrades or grid selection wouldn't, no further choices or decision-making.

The flip-side of such malleability is of course precision. Villagers lay down their own roads between destinations, which can end up cutting needless chunks out of grain fields as in the lower right in that image. Building expansion suffers from space and accessibility concerns, as it's often unclear how much room you'll need or waste. At the intersection of those two problems, the populace also plop down houses haphazardly within the residential areas you paintbrush for them. End result? "Villager path blocked" has been by far the most frequent message I see, and several buildings' construction stalls inexplicably when builders just stop bringing resources in, as seen in the tooltip above.

 

Bugs aside, while this may be meant to convey "the organic aspects of urbanism" in the words of Polymorph Games' sales pitch, it would take a great deal more interconnection to yield the sort of meaningful adaptation to needs and wants (heat, water, defensibility, pastures, neighbours, availability of construction materials, light, superstitions about lucky and unlucky orientations, etc.) dictating the concatenated, conjoining sheds, walls and annexes visible in medieval villages of yore. As it stands, you're paying for a shallow implementation of paintbrushing and equally shallow algorithmic residential automation, both merely perfunctory to your core resource management tasks.

To shift attention away from these basic flaws, Foundation seems in the process of tacking on lots of achievements or "collect 100 wood" miniquests, plus a mildly promising three-faction reputation grind between the traditional preindustrial three estates, which nonetheless boils down to "pick one" in terms of game mechanics as far as I can tell. Sure, the standard elements are all there, resources to be harvested and stored, constructions to be constructed, and you can watch your little chibified NPCs walking from home to market and work... but then, none of that's new, and others like Banished or Dawn of Man have done it better without tacking on superficial non-features that only an art major would want. Through it all, I just kept wanting to ask: why is your show on trampoline?

Another one for the Bozo tag.