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 11
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
As you can tell, I played a little over 22 hours of this and I had to stop for my own wellbeing.
That is because, and I might be a bit off since it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure those 22 hours were divided up into no more than 4 sessions. This game scratches my brain so much, I could only bring myself to stop playing it because my body was screaming at me to please take care of myself.
So yeah, if you enjoy optimal planning and have a strategic, puzzle pattern-focused brain like me, you will absolutely love this. BUT BE CAREFUL AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF! Do as I say, not as I do lol.
I will probably open this game again one day and get lost in the sauce once more, as I have no self-control.
Godspeed.
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.
Steam User 6
Loving this game, have sunk multiple hours into and don't plan on stopping anytime soon - if you're looking to break away from your standard resource manager / city builder style game. This is a great fix for that
Steam User 5
A very nice spin on the city building genera, like previous reviews i'll reiterate that its more of a puzzle/strategy game then a typical city builder ! With great art style and pretty aesthetics the games looks and feels well polished even tho being its still in EA. Also a very bold and greatly unexplored setting being a sort or Tibetan vibe mountain.
Steam User 3
This is a really fun city building game.
The maps are really pretty and really well designed mechanically - the level designers have clearly put in a lot of effort. Different maps are quite different and lead to different challenges. I really like how much thought they seem to have put in to both the visuals (to make pretty mountains) and the mechanics - to lead different maps to play very differently.
City builders often suffer from the problem that once you work out how to build one city, all subsequent cities end up looking very similar. Laysara mitigates this in a couple of clever ways. Firstly, the requirements to evolve houses varies a lot between maps. City designs that work well for one set of requirements doesn't work on a different map. Also, maps are split over 3 biomes and are space constrained in different ways. Sometimes you have a lot of one biome but not so much of another. Sometimes rivers are plentiful, others not so much. It helps to keep things fresh.
I also enjoy that the game is quite difficult. I put it on the 3rd (out of 4) difficulty settings and had to think pretty hard to make a good city. Sometimes in these kinds of games everything is trivial once you get over the initial hump. A couple of things lead to the difficulty: firstly, because all the maps are space constrained, its not possible to plonk down a bunch of buildings inefficiently. Secondly, and more importantly, the game imposes significant transport costs between buildings, particularly for long distant transport. It's important to build the city keeping in mind what production chains need to send what to where.
I've been playing mostly on the 'Sandbox' mode. I usually avoid the Sandbox mode in these kinds of games, but I really enjoy it here. You're tasked with founding lots of separate mountain cities on one big shared world map. The different cities can trade with each other for resources not available on the local map. Some of the maps are full sized for building huge cities, but it also has tiny little maps intended for making little towns to supply resources to the big cities. I enjoyed making the little towns as its a change of pace.
I highly recommend this game if you enjoy city building games. I'm looking forward to the release of the campaign next month.