Laysara: Summit Kingdom
A game by our friends!
the GameLaysara: Summit Kingdom is a challenging city builder which tasks you with creating a new home for your people forced out of the lowlands. During a campaign or sandbox playthrough, you will establish multiple towns, each on a unique mountain with its own traits. All your towns co-exist in symbiosis, creating a trading network, which you can then adjust to your needs by revisiting already developed settlements. The Kingdom of Laysara has to be rebuilt!
BUILD ON A MOUNTAIN
Each mountain comes with a new set of challenges. Mounts differ in shapes, vegetation zone layouts, resource availability and weather conditions. Sometimes you will have plenty of room for farming in green lowlands, sometimes you will need to rely on breeding and extracting valuable minerals from regions dangerously close to peak glaciers. If you find yourself in dire need of a certain resource, you can always try to establish a trading route with another town.
DEAL WITH AVALANCHES
One of the ever-present dangers you will have to deal with are mighty avalanches. You can’t stop them, but you can take precautions and be prepared. Afforest the key areas to create natural barriers, build artificial ones to redirect rushing masses of snow, or trigger the avalanche early, while it’s still manageable. Create a deliberate and reliable strategy and you might even be able to use the power of snow to your advantage; fail to do so and find your city buried and devastated!
CRAFT A TRANSPORT NETWORK
So, transporting goods is easy, right? Well, not if your destination lies on the other side of the mountain, a few hundred meters higher, behind cliffs, ridges, canyons and rivers. You will need to create a vast, complex transport network consisting of roads, bridges and shafts to ensure reliable delivery chains. As demand for resources will grow alongside the town’s population, always look for opportunities to optimise your transportation network, be it by building paved roads, using more advanced lifting constructions, or aiding your carriers with glamorous yaks.
RAISE A SUMMIT TEMPLE
If you manage to endure all mountain dangers, build a network of efficient production chains and satisfy all needs of your people, there is only one more thing to be done: conquering the mountain peak! To succeed in this great endeavour you’ll need to reach the summit and establish safe routes for your carriers to bring in enormous amounts of building resources, but beware! Weather at this height is as deadly as ever. The final effect is well worth the effort though, as raising the summit temple is an act of total triumph of human courage (and your logistics skills!) over the elements.
Final note: the game is a pure city building experience solely focused on the economy, resource management and surviving despite the inhospitable environment. Therefore, the game doesn’t feature combat or any other military aspect.
Game Discussion
Steam User 12
this game introduces you to its mechanics very well. you manage space and supply chains while feasting on the visuals. moving buildings is free and i think that's good and part of the cycle as more buildings, resources, and more challenges are introduced over the course of a scenario. i also like how resources do not have travel time but longer distances induce higher pop costs. i'm on the second scenario and the only thing that has annoyed me is that the warehouses, which carry resources over distances for further processing can only hold one resource, which, to me, only artificially raises difficulty by just adding needless clutter. nevertheless, great game, will play more, am very excited for 1.0.
Steam User 10
I love how building different buildings or lots are dependent on the elevation on the mountain. I adore this game, and it's worth a ton of play, but just keep in mind that you should pause while you build and keep an eye on your treasury to ensure you don't end up ending the game too quick with a bad build decision.
Steam User 8
Pros:
- Absolutely beautiful. The art in this game knocked my socks off.
- Super fun. The city building mechanics are genuinely perfect. It's got a puzzle focus rather then a management focus but both elements are definitely there and on display. There are some things the game needs to develop but the base mechanics are not one of them.
- Really re-playable. There are a bunch of starts to choose from and each mountain has different quirks and challenges that make them all feel distinct. I've played 36 hours at time of writing and I haven't played every mountain, let alone finished them.
Cons:
- Unfinished. The game is in early access, and that means you're always taking a gamble on whether the devs keep up with the game. Laysara is so beautiful and so fun that I personally still consider this game worth it, even if they dropped it tomorrow, but your mileage may vary.
- Not amazingly optimised. For such a small game it absolutely WRECKS my cpu, especially when the particle effects from the mist are going wild. If you have a crappy old laptop you can turn the graphics down, but then you miss out on the gorgeous assets so that's gonna depend on you.
- A city builder with no planning tools. Hopefully this is something they plan to add, but having a semi-transparent planner would really enhance the gameplay (in my opinion). Even just a button to toggle the grid on and off would go a long way to making the planning feel more accessible.
TLDR; Laysara is a gorgeous, fun, re-playable city builder with great bones that's still missing some features in early access. If this is all we get, I'd still feel like I got my money's worth.
Steam User 14
There are three type of city builders:
1. Simcity, Cities Skylines
2. Pharaoh, Emperor, Caesar & Zeus, Anno series, Nebuchadnezzar
3. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Stardeus, Songs of Syx
The third is more about colony management and usually survival. Heavy emphasis on characters! The people matter and the details of what happens to them are quite deep.
The other two are more about the city itself. The first group focuses on zoning and the big picture.
It's games like Pharaoh and Anno that focus on logistics, road networks, supplies and manufacturing, and "teching up" or unlocking new stuff to build through research or housing levels.
Proximity, location, road access, terrain features. Those are all hugely important in these types of city builder.
In Cities Skylines, you paint the city into existance with a brush. Roads and connections do matter but they're not the main focus.
If you don't know this game type (you have never played an Anno game), then you might not understand what you're in for. Also, you should play Anno 1503 at least, possibly Anno 2070 as well. Mind the stupid Ubisoft launcher, it's total garbage.
I won't bore you with a review, not this time.
If you know what this game is then all you need to know is:
- It's every bit as good as an Anno or Pharaoh/Emperor game, with slightly different supply chains. Some easier, some harder.
- It's unfinished. Early Access and all. The campaign doesn't exist. Yet. There's 6-7 mountains to play
- The annoying road network from Pharaoh is finally put to rest.
- ...sometimes this new system, though it doesn't rely on walkers, is more annoying. Certainly it's evil.
EDIT - I'd like to add a little bit to the review.
Laysara is a challenging game. Scenarios do have goals you can follow that make it a little bit easier, but do not expect to immediately build the cities the right way. There is a lot to learn, and there are limitations that make it harder to maximize population areas. At least in the beginning.
Not all areas of the mountain have the same fertility, and this will affect the production of food and goods.
Furthermore, some special features like ore deposits or rivers will only be available in one zone.
If you want to build a basic housing area you may have to choose between lower, more lush area that is larger and has better food production, OR you may choose to build it higher up, where you have access to a river. Rivers mean baths and fish.
Or you can build two "cities", in two places.
Lastly, the game runs a bit slow on integrated graphics. It's beautiful and fast on a RTX 4060, but it will chugg very badly on Intel UHD 730, even if you reduce resolution and visual quality.
Maybe performance improves as development progresses.
Now, go play.
Games like this are few and far between and much to my surprise Laysara is both very good and challenging!
Steam User 7
For early access this game is playable with no bugs or glitches (that I experienced). This game is as much a puzzle game as it is a city builder or resource management game. I look forward to more content being released.
Steam User 7
Absolutely beautiful and cozy yet demanding! Very interesting mechanics that rekindled my old love for this type of city-building strategy games. So far it's downright addictive, although it still has some work to do, but you can see the huge commitment of the devs. I really like the various character inserts and interesting facts, too. Fab game, 💯 recommend.
Steam User 5
Gorgeous game, especially considering it's still in early access. I've not encountered any bugs so far, and there's plenty of loving detail in the design, gameplay and writing. The elevation adds an interesting spin on the usual Anno-style city simulator, and there's slight elements of Frostpunk in dealing with the weather and working around cliffs, but it's far less punishing - at least on the easier difficulty settings. Can't wait to see how it develops, but it's already a joy to play!