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 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 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 10
I play this game on Veteran mode. So, sometimes it is a pain in the a** to figure out how to plan your city layout as you progress through the mission per mountain. But, once you get it, it is a satisfying feeling to have. Score: 6.5/10.
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 9
Colorful & relaxing village builder-lite strategy game soon to be 1.0 with a full campaign.
Recommended after 20+ hours play.
Steam User 7
Has to be one of the most beautiful city builders I've played. Functionally seamless with how all the resource management is simply fixing the money income to positive. All the buildings have vibrant colors to them. And Even though you don't need to sort them by district, the game rewards you with an aesthetic of each class building sorting together harmoniously.