PC Preview Code Provided by Ravenscourt
Developers Vile Monarch and publishers Ravenscourt are preparing to throw players into a world seized by Earth’s climate crisis. In Floodland, players play the role of a leader in a clan of survivors looking to build civilization back up from the limited ground that they have to work with. From managing storage and housing to collecting food, rubbish, and water - everything lands on your shoulders to guide correctly. Do you have what it takes to revive from a crisis?
Gameplay
The demo I was provided is going to be the same one that players can expect to play during October’s Steam Next Fest. This means you will have roughly 30 minutes to an hour to survive the best you can start building up your civilization. The gameplay video I provided was a second playthrough where I had learned the controls and general understanding of the game, so feel free to enjoy seeing the beginning of a thriving civilization there.
When you start out, you simply have a small camp. From here, you have to collect food around you, check out the nearby homes for supplies, and will be granted your first opportunity to invite new members to your clan to increase your numbers. With more numbers comes more needs to be met though. This will lead you to create shelter for your people, building a way for them to collect water, and building a way for them to gather food. There are a few options here, so take whatever route you think works best.
Most everything at the beginning is built with rubbish, so you will need to gather what you can and then build a sorting hut to collect from the larger piles you can find. It is best to try and place these buildings where they can reach at least two different piles so that productivity keeps up and the renewable resource piles don’t empty out. This same method and understanding should be used when making a forager hut to collect mushrooms and berries, as well as fishing docks that will be gathering fish. Don’t forget to make a kitchen or two as well, otherwise, everybody will be eating risky foods and mushrooms, which tend to lead to people being sick.
The more buildings you have in action, the more people you need to run everything. So while you are construction going on, remember to keep sending people out to check further into land areas and try to find more ground to cover. This is how you expand the world that you have access to, but keep in mind that once you get too far away, you will need a new work bay to keep the range of effective growth going. Workers are only willing to stray so far away from their base, rightly so, and thus you will need to expand your clan the further into the world you go.
A good thing about management here is that buildings that are meant to gather supplies, such as forager and sorting huts, can start to run low on material which means they need time to gather back up. You can simply remove a worker from the station, leaving only one there so there is some movement going still, and put them wherever else you want them. Whether you are moving people around or have gained a new group into your clan, you have full control over where to put them to work by simply clicking the building you want to add workers to and hitting the plus button.
Expectations
The more technology-level research you unlock leads you to have a wider range of building types and upgrades accessible. I look forward to seeing how far the technology really lets players go and how stable the clan will be able to be once so much technology is learned and understood.
When you first start up the game, you are first shown four different world and clan styles to choose from. I honestly thought this would also lead to completely different maps, but the two playthroughs I did on the demo loaded up the same map. I hope they do have some randomization when it comes to the map design because if it is one map style, then the replayability would solely rely on the difficulty and different world and clan styles, which honestly didn’t seem to differ very much in the short run.
Verdict
Floodland is a city-builder with a strong concept and enjoyable gameplay style! Truly giving players full control over where their workers are placed without it being a hassle, providing an easy-to-understand control system, and not having a HUD that takes over the entire screen definitely leads me to believe that this may be my favorite survival-based city-builder yet. The potential of this title being a hit is undeniable! I strongly recommend players try the demo while they can.
