This review was published when the game was in v0.4.0 (almost definitely the final update, but mentioning just in case).
Theme: Building a civilization. Executed well, with the layers and several things in them being realistic things that would appear in one, even if the upgrades don't have names.
Gameplay and core mechanics: At first, you reset for coins once you have enough points. The row 3 gameplay has you reset for workers who do work by workfinders in row 2 (it has some more layers show up later). Row 4 really expands gameplay with five layers that all stay relevant until the endgame. One I thing I have to highlight: The territory layer has some challenges and a massive world map where you can send an army to conquer other lands to make territories and soldiers cheaper, with managers being allocated to those lands later on.
Balancing and difficulty: Average difficulty and slow. A few early bits require a lot of resetting for their specific resource. If you get particularly bad RNG, the world map part you can access will have a lot of grasslands and the meager point multiplier will make things sluggish. The wait for a late buyable is extremely slow and you aren't really able to make it faster (you can at least do other stuff like buildings and land in the meantime), but once you have it, the rest of the game is mostly smooth sailing until the endgame.
Content on offer: Long, you can reach the endgame in about four days of playing. 11 layers that range from almost empty to huge. The last layer grinds all gameplay to a halt as soon as you unlock it, but you can export a save near the end and just do what's necessary to not reach that quota if you really want to keep building your civilization.
Polish and miscellaneous additions: The various options that are normally on the side can be a topbar instead, which I found a bit more appealing. Some bricks (discoveries you can't access) have jokey lines if you care to read them. The game is known to glitch out and make progress impossible for some players after a certain amount of time, so I recommend playing on Github and turning off offline progression to increase stability. Dragging the world map too far can also result in an error, but it doesn't seem to be serious. The queue for conquering doesn't round properly, going from x to x-2 in some cases, plus it sets the name of what you're conquering based on the tile you had selected while it started, rather than what you're actually going after. Since several in-game items are unimplemented and will likely stay that way, the game has some obvious placeholders. A few typos.
On the one hand, several aspects are rough and the game could definitely use more content, plus the few massive timewalls that show up can be a major turn-off. On the other hand, the unique mechanics (the world map in particular) and theme are very strong, and the slower gameplay may not be a detriment for some.
VideoGame Left me conflicted (v0.4.0)
This review was published when the game was in v0.4.0 (almost definitely the final update, but mentioning just in case).
On the one hand, several aspects are rough and the game could definitely use more content, plus the few massive timewalls that show up can be a major turn-off. On the other hand, the unique mechanics (the world map in particular) and theme are very strong, and the slower gameplay may not be a detriment for some.
Overall rank: C (Decent)