Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival

Open the game.. thinking how its gonna be..

-The physics are occasionally hilarious, NPCs will stare into your soul for a little too long, and I’m 90% sure I broke history by teaching a caveman how to floss dance.
-Never in my life made so many bridges in the sky instead of on the water...
-My house literally floating above ground seems like I made the houses before gravity was invented?!?!
-Started in the Stone Age, punched a tree, tamed a dinosaur, accidentally invented capitalism in medieval times, then got hunted by time cops in the future. 10/10.

After giving this one another go, I am changing my recommend from a no to a yes, but I will leave my original review below so you can see my initial reaction.
After playing more, some of the things I didn't like at first are now things I like about the game. I think I just had to separate my expectations from other similar games and see this one on its own terms.
Yes, it's easy. Almost too easy. But I think that's the point. It's VERY linear and each progression takes little effort. It's the perfect game for when you want to zone out a little and not have to think too much. Besides, you'll get so lost in the beauty of the game that you won't want to have to work too hard. I do still think the combat system is janky, and the sprint/dash thing is awkward. But overall, it's a very fun game that just took me some getting used to.
Final thoughts after finishing the game: well OK then, that was kind of a fever dream lol. The further I got into it, the weirder it got. Also, the buggier it got. Also, the simpler it got. I think the developer had some grand plans for this one and started out really strong, but kinda phoned it in at the end.
It was still a ton of fun, almost a descent into madness. It tried to be a lot of different things and mixed a lot of different genres. It didn't feel like it excelled at any of them, but the variety was interesting and had me as entertained as I was bewildered. It's a short game, only about 20 hours start to finish, but I'm glad I purchased it and finished it. Looking forward to the sequel!
Original review:
I feel bad for leaving a "not recommended" on this one because it has a LOT of fantastic things going for it. First of all, it's a beautiful game. It might be the most beautiful game I never wanted to play. The artwork alone that the developer put into this game is absolutely fantastic. It's also incredibly fast for what it is. I've played far less beautiful games with lots more lag than this. I think the developer is really good at what they do. You could put this art and this optimization on an AA title and people would pay $80 for it easy. The premise is also very unique and refreshing. In an over abundance of stale survival games that all do the same thing, this one offers a unique progression idea!
Where it completely falls apart is the mechanics, the combat system, and the tech tree. It's hard to explain, but it's just janky and muted. It's kinda like if you took ARK and gave it an "arcade mode". It's kinda like the Fisher Price of survival games.
It's a shame, I wanted to love this one. When i first fired it up I was simply in awe. And then I had to play it and I was like ugh. I probably will keep it installed and play it every so often. It doesn't seem like a terribly long or complicated game. Maybe picking off an age here and there. But knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn't have bought it. I encourage you to try the demo first before deciding.

Totally fun single player game. I love my survival games and this is something completely different but in a fantastic way. I cant wait to play the second one. thank you for the wonderful experience

i cannot vote average, it does have potential. i wish the color of the meter would be inverted, white full, black empty... i tried the 2 game demo and.. yeah... i wish dev polish the game before start new one :D its not bad but not great.

Very interesting game/story concept so far. graphics are amazing, there are some things i would like bettered but i believe they will come with time.

As I was playing Grand Emprise, I couldn't figure out if I liked or disliked it. I think I liked it, but I'm still not entirely sure. It is a strange game. It is, mostly, a survival crafting game. You gather materials to make various items to help you survive or thrive. As a bonus, you get a time manipulation device that let's you travel between different points in time at will.

You start off in the age of dinosaurs, collect some stuff to upgrade the time device and teleport away. Every once in a while, you get teleported to an arena of sorts where you fight a group of enemies or a single enemy that the game calls a boss. I found two slightly more difficult enemies than the average mob. I guess those were the boss fights.

The game seems similar to Ark, but only in the mixture of dinosaurs with advanced technology. If you liked Ark, you'd probably enjoy a bit of this game. It does not suffer from the constant grind and XP-chasing you get with Ark. That's both a good thing and bad. The game seems almost non-interactive as far as a story. Other than the specific location where you place items, I imagine most people will experience the game in an almost identical way.

The crafting feels pretty intuitive. You collect the items available to collect and then make higher tier items. The genre of the game shifts at points. At one point, you ride a dinosaur around and perform lunge attacks at other dinosaurs for their meat and hides. At another point you are building a village and your item crafting is now done by villagers. Then, you automate everything in another zone and begin collecting resources to create a hot air balloon. Then you use those resources to create a giant ship and drive it into a whirlpool that teleports you to the center of the ice age world where you can gather materials to your hearts content. You can fly an airplane around for some reason as well. A little later you are riding a mech and smashing up other mechs to collect an item in order to build a spaceship on the moon. You use what amounts to magic and siphon resources from the moon and energy from the sun and then you fly your spaceship to another planet, somehow find an AI and that AI somehow allows you to travel into a black hole. Then, the game ends.

I'm still conflicted about the entire game. I applaud the solo developer. It is fun and sort of tries to do everything. It doesn't do anything all that well, though. The game is poorly optimized. The combat is lackluster. There is a dodge mechanic that works really well against some enemies and not at all against others. You gain a set of leather armor and eventually that upgrades into a spacesuit. The resources in the world are spread throughout time periods so you spend more time traveling back and forth between eras than actually making progress. Still, considering it's a fairly short game by a single developer, it was fun enough.

Apparently I spent much more time completing this game than the average player. I treated the game as a survival game with action game mechanics on the side. I think if you treated the game as an action game with a survival game aesthetic, you might get through the game faster. Some of the items required a decent grind to get. It was never particularly difficult but it was a bit of a time sink. You are slowly introduced to automation mechanics but it seems like rushing through the game as fast as possible is the preferred method of playing.

Give it a shot. It's not great, but for a solo dev it is pretty impressive. As a note, this is the development equivalent of kitbashing for movie special effects. The dev saw all the toys in the asset store and smashed them together in order to make a somewhat coherent sequence of events. You travel to the age of the dinosaurs, prehistory with cavemen, a Roman colosseum, a desert area complete with sand worms, ancient Egypt, a natural history museum, an ancient temple, the ice age, an 1800's industrial desert landscape, a medieval castle, the polar ice caps, an underground diamond mine, the moon, some kind of asteroid or planet, you build a Dyson sphere around the sun, and eventually you enter a black hole. I'm sure there are others I've forgotten. It's a lot to take in.

There are a lot of animals. They prove more an annoyance than a gameplay element. There are not very many people though. And they are also more of an annoyance. There are a handful of violent cavemen in prehistory, friendly and enemy villagers in the ice age, angry knights in the medieval castle, angry gladiators in the colosseum, and a dozen or so angry mechs in post-apocalyptic future earth. Once you begin automating, the village you create in the ice age is irrelevant, along with any of the people.

If you are looking for a good story, look elsewhere. There's no real narrative except at the very beginning when you get the time travel device. After that you are on your own. The quests and narrative information are relayed on the technology screen. Occasionally you will get a yellow marker telling you where specific resources or points of interest are.

Even now, I'm still not sure if I liked the game. It's fine, I guess.

I played the sequel to this game first, "Grand Emprise - Portals Apart" (because it was on sale first) and let me just say that the original game is a huge improvement overall, so I am glad I started with the sequel as it felt more like a demo or introduction into the game. I enjoy the game, the mechanics are fun to me. And if the developer doesn't make these games then nobody will. So we need them to continue to make these games and improve upon them. Follow the footsteps of this first game, its so much better in my opinion. In this game the worlds feel much larger and the images seem more sharp. You feel like there is more to do in the game, more aspects of survival.