Pioneers of Pagonia is a city builder/colony sim developed by the original creators of the Settlers series. The new game is a spiritual reboot of that series with a more modern take. It puts you in charge of establishing a medieval fantasy colony from scratch after your people arrive on an uncharted island on a ship.
While I have never played any of the games from the Settlers series, I have spent significant time in resource management and city-building games like Cities Skylines, Tropico, and even Prison Architect. Managing resources and keeping a stable economy can be addictive when done right in such games, and Pioneers of Pagonia promises exactly that.
Laying Some Solid Foundations
One of the first things that impressed me about this game is how customizable the options for starting a new game are. Pioneers of Pagonia offers you multiple pre-defined scenarios ranging from easy to difficult situations. These aren’t exactly tailored scenarios but more like a specific set of chosen settings for the world you generate.
These settings can be changed and tweaked individually as well – things like how much flat land should be generated, the number and difficulty of hostile enemies on the map, how much of a certain landscape you want like mountains or lakes or forests, etc. These settings allow you to create a custom experience that caters to exactly how you like to play.
For my first playthrough, I decided to just go with the easiest pre-defined scenario that lets you understand the mechanics and economy of the game by turning off the selection of any enemies on the map or harsh terrain in its generation. It’s still just a selection of map generation settings, so you always get a unique map every time you start a new game.
The game started me off by the shore at one of the edges of the map where my colony ship, The Venture, was anchored with a bridge extending out to the land. The Venture stored all the essential resources I needed to get the colony going. Aboard the ship were all the original settlers who would help build this new colony and be its first residents.
I love that there are no annoying point-and-click tutorials that hold your hand, instead, the game gives you some basic objectives that point out the essential structures you need for laying the foundations of a prospering Pagonian Colony.
I started by laying down some roads and immediately noticed the lack of a buildable area. Compared to something like Cities Skylines where you get massive patches of land to build, in Pioneers of Pagonia you are limited to very small areas. Surprisingly, this works in favor of the game.
It becomes kind of a puzzle to try and be effective with space management, and it made me think about where I should be placing my roads and how I should build an efficient network rather than just placing down grids randomly. I had to take into account the elevation, the forests, the lakes, and the mountains and build my road network around these obstacles.
However, this exact thing left me wanting more options to tweak my roads, like editing and moving existing roads, making properly curved roads, and options to snap to certain angles. These features are missing, but I hope they are added in the full release of the game.
Economy Done Right
Once I started placing down some of the essential buildings for the foundation of my Pagonian colony, I quickly understood how the economy works. While selecting the building in the construction menu, there are clear descriptions of what items the staff of that building gathers or uses for production and then what it produces using those resources.
This made it easy to understand the chain of the economy. It starts with the buildings that gather the core resources like wood, stone, and ores, which then goes into several other buildings that need these resources to produce multiple different items and other materials. These produced items are then used by the Pagonian settlers of your colony to fulfill further construction orders, weapon and equipment orders, and to increase the population.
This is a classic formula that just works and is incredibly easy to piece together while still being challenging enough to manage.
The economy is largely automated. You just have to make sure the buildings are in the correct place with available resources to gather and that there is a road connecting from that building to wherever the resource needs to go.
I think that resource management here overall isn’t as stressful and challenging as other games in this genre. Rather, it’s more casual and on the relaxing end, unless you choose to go with difficult map generation settings where resources are sparse. If you dislike the more challenging resource management games, this one will be right up your alley.
Pioneers Of The Ultimate Simulation
One of the most impressive things about Pioneers of Pagonia is the incredible simulation of its world and the intricate attention to detail. Games in this genre often fail at this part, which tends to make the world feel less real and less immersive. But Pioneers of Pagonia excels at this unlike anything I have seen before.
From the very start as I place construction orders for my first structures, I can see my Carriers come out of The Venture, take the resources required that are laid out on the ship’s deck, and carry them one by one to the construction site. Then the diggers arrive and use shovels to flatten the land which I can actually see happening in real time. After this, the builders arrive and use the resources brought by Carriers to build the structure.
It is an absolute joy to watch, and it makes everything feel that much more real despite the game having a cartoonish theme to it. The simulation feels alive and unlike any other game in this genre.
In other games, it is more like a rabbit hole where the materials or resources are carried and processed inside the building where I can’t see anything. In Pioneers of Pagonia, I can actually see things like a Hunter finding an animal to kill, then skinning it and bringing the meat back (physically visible in his hands). I saw a blacksmith using iron bars to melt and shape it into a sword, a farmer carrying water from a well to water the crops, and many such things.
I spent a lot of time just observing the animations. I am certainly going to crave for that in every other city simulation game that I play in the future.
The Commanders Of Pagonia Were Left Behind
After understanding the economy and resource management of the game, it was time for me to start a new playthrough, this time with the real threat of enemies. However, if you are looking for some strategic combat experiences with epic battles and such, this game is going to disappoint you.
While I can make military structures and have various types of units like soldiers, rangers, guards, etc., there is no direct control of any of these units. I can’t select these units and tell them exactly where to go or give them orders to initiate combat with any enemy.
Instead, it is automated in nature like many other things in this game. The most I can do is set a general area where my guards will stand around and protect, which is limited to the range of the buildings these units are stationed at, like Guard Towers or Garrisons. These buildings are also responsible for extending your colony’s borders.
Because I cannot issue direct orders to my units, there will often be an enemy camp (like a thief camp) not far from my colony. But I can’t really do anything about it until my guards reach that location while slowly extending the borders, and only then do they start attacking the enemies there and taking down the camp.
Disguised thieves are very annoying. I can identify them by hovering my cursor over them (it says “Thief”). I also get notifications saying that a disguised thief is stealing things, and when I click on it, the camera goes back to the exact person. Despite all of this, none of my guards will attack them nor can I give orders to do so. The only way is to get rid of the Thief Camp itself, which, as explained earlier, is also not easy.
They also do absolutely nothing with the items they steal besides just hoarding them for no good reason. Once when my colony borders actually reached the Thief Camp, I saw the countless items they had stolen from me just scattered on the ground everywhere.
The worst part was when some of these items started showing up inside my border as it extended, but the thief camp itself was not in there yet. This made it so that my carriers started to go and collect these items only to be killed by the thieves who were yet to be dealt with by the guards, and there was no way to stop that.
Other enemies are fantasy creatures like the Spectre and Werewolves that have more involved gameplay mechanics. The Spectre will scare whoever encounters them, which makes them drop their current equipment or weapon. The Werewolves on the other hand convert my units into zombies that now fight on their side. This creates a fun challenge of requiring powerful units to go against it or get punished for having weaker units.
At the end of the day though, this game is more focused on managing an economy and building a colony rather than asserting your military dominance and waging epic wars. The final release of the game can certainly improve upon the combat aspects of the game to make it more fun.
Waving Some Red Flags
In the current version of the game, there is no actual story or campaign of any sort. While such sandbox games don’t exactly need a plot, some gamers still prefer an overarching story. You can easily excuse a hardcore simulation game not to have any story, but Pioneers of Pagonia feels like it could easily do with some lore.
I can imagine a tailored scenario where it asks you to defend your colony as long as possible until it gets overrun and some of the residents leave on a ship. This could set some narrative about the past of the people that you start with. Maybe there can be voiced characters that are part of the colony or wander into your colony from far out lands to teach you more about this new island you are settling on. There is a lot of potential that was missed when it comes to narrative and storytelling.
Pioneers of Pagonia also needs to improve its sound design. The audio is pretty decent when it comes to the ambient sound effects of the residents moving around and doing their tasks. But the effects and background music left me wanting something more iconic and catchier rather than the generic sounds.
Verdict
Pioneers of Pagonia is a city builder that excels at attention to detail in its simulation. The resource management and colony economy mechanics feel amazing and are incredibly easy to grasp even for those who are new to this genre.
The combat and the strategy lack a lot but show potential to be improved as the game progresses towards its release. It also runs smoothly with great performance and almost has no bugs and glitches.
If you ever wanted to build a small medieval fantasy colony from scratch and manage its economy kind of like a medieval Cities Skylines, this title does that very well. But if you are looking for something like Age of Empires or even something like the older Settlers games where combat was more prominent, then you would not like this game.
However, for a city builder fan like me, I would definitely recommend this game as there are still many hours’ worth of fun you can have in this game as you become a Pioneer of Pagonia.
| The Good | The Bad |
|---|---|
| Absolutely incredible attention to detail with highly realistic world simulation. | Disappointing combat mechanics. |
| Easy yet challenging resource management and economic structure. | Confusing late-game management. |
| Puzzle-like elements that make planning out your colony even more fun. | Lacks any narrative and story elements. |
| Highly customizable gameplay experience based on how you want to play. | Few annoying gameplay mechanics. |
| Amazing performance, almost no bugs and glitches, not very demanding so it’s able to run on a lower-end PC. |
Rating: 7.5/10
GamesHorizon received a review Steam key for this game.
