Info about These Doomed Isles: The First God:

Official game description:
Buy the main game!
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About the Game
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Take your first steps in the role of a deity with Cernunnos, the first god you will play as in the main game. Learn to raise land from the sea, build settlements for your followers, rain fire upon waves of invaders and answer your followers’ prayers ahead of the launch of the main game this Summer.  
Raise land from the sea, build a settlement for your followers and provide them with the means to gather the resources they need to prosper. Expand from humble beginnings to a sprawling island chain with farms, factories, fortifications and more, as you discover ever more advanced buildings and strategies.  
Harvest cards to craft the deck you want. Manage the cards in your deck to ensure you can survive until the next harvest. Find powerful synergies with a bunch of cards to play with and relics to overcome the challenges in your way.  
Will you survive these doomed isles? You'll face increasing challenges as waves of invaders and powerful bosses attempt to undo all of your hard work, turning your settlement to rubble and crushing any of your followers who dare to stand in their way. Learn from your failures and perfect your strategies to reign victorious.  
Discover the unique god powers that Cernunnos wields and carry your civilisation to victory. Rain meteors down on invaders or stir up a storm to sink them at sea; stack up powerful status effects on your enemies and make sure they think twice about invading again!  
The main game will have the following features available from the start of Early Access:  
*   3 Civilisations and Gods with different playstyles, aesthetics and abilities  
*   Over 250 unique cards  
*   Over 15 unique enemies and 9 bosses  
*   10 ascension levels  
*   Over 30 relics and curses to make sure every run feels different  
*   Friend leaderboards so you can compete with your friends for top scores

Release date: 5 May, 2023

Categories: City Builder, Roguelike, Deckbuilding, Resource Management, Tower Defense, God Simulation, Strategic Combat, Meta-Progression


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Highly enjoyable and addictive gameplay (weight 1): Players find the game highly enjoyable, addictive, and replayable, especially considering its early access/demo state. Many highlight its strong potential and unique blend of genres.
- High anticipation for full release (weight 0.21): There is significant anticipation for the full release, with players eager for more content, especially new gods, difficulty levels, and overall variety to enhance replayability.
- Appealing art style and visuals (weight 0.11): The game's art style, particularly its semi-pixel or simple yet effective aesthetic, is consistently praised for being appealing and charming.
- Innovative genre blend (weight 0.1): The game's innovative genre blend, combining deck-building, roguelite, city-building, and resource management elements, is a major draw and contributes to its addictive nature.
- Well-balanced and challenging difficulty (weight 0.08): The game's difficulty level is well-received, with players enjoying the challenge posed by enemies and invasions, finding it perfectly balanced.
- Multiple difficulty settings (weight 0.07): The presence of multiple difficulty settings is a positive, allowing players to choose the level of challenge and strategic thinking required.
- Desire for endless mode (weight 0.07): Players express a strong desire for an endless or infinite mode in the final version, which would significantly increase replayability and allow for unique, long-form runs.
- Engaging card progression system (weight 0.05): The card drawing mechanism and the progression system, including leveling up and unlocking new card types, are highlighted as cool and surprising features.
- Permanent progression system (weight 0.05): The game features a permanent progression system across multiple runs, allowing players to continuously farm points and unlock cards even after losing.
- Satisfying victories and skills (weight 0.05): Players find the moments of victory and the use of skills to be incredibly satisfying, enhancing the overall gameplay experience.
- Strategic depth in gameplay (weight 0.05): The game's strategic depth is appreciated, particularly the tactical considerations required due to the lack of building demolition cards.
- Developer's commitment appreciated (weight 0.05): The solo developer's commitment and personal touches are noted and appreciated, building confidence in the game's future development.
- Effective tower defense elements (weight 0.04): The game incorporates effective tower defense elements, adding another layer of strategic depth to the gameplay.
- Optimism for issue resolution (weight 0.04): Players are optimistic that any current issues will be resolved as the game progresses through development, especially with continued player feedback.
- Full mouse play support (weight 0.04): The full mouse play support, complemented by keyboard shortcuts, is a highly appreciated quality-of-life feature.

Common complaints:
- Repetitive and unengaging gameplay (weight 0.63): The core gameplay loop is perceived as repetitive and unengaging, leading to boredom quickly. Players feel the game lacks depth, continuous motivation, and sufficient content to maintain interest beyond the initial stages. The roguelike elements and card system do not add enough variety or strategic depth.
- Major technical and performance issues (weight 0.34): The game suffers from significant technical issues, including frequent crashes, poor optimization, and severe lag, especially in mid-to-late game with more buildings and population. Display issues like incorrect fullscreen behavior and mouse control problems further detract from the experience.
- Frustrating card draw mechanics (weight 0.27): The card drawing and shop refresh mechanics are highly frustrating. Players report having to spend excessive gold and perform numerous refreshes to obtain desired cards, which feels cumbersome and overly reliant on luck rather than strategy. The limited display slots in the shop exacerbate this issue.
- Clunky building placement (weight 0.13): Building placement and management are clunky and restrictive. Players are frustrated by the inability to rotate, move, or freely remove buildings, leading to messy layouts and forced placements. There's also a desire for more variety in building types.
- Inadequate tutorial (weight 0.1): The tutorial is insufficient, failing to adequately explain core mechanics and game options. This leaves players feeling unprepared and confused, hindering their initial understanding and enjoyment of the game.
- Early game resource imbalance (weight 0.09): Early game balance is problematic, with players often struggling to acquire essential resource generators like gold, leading to potential game overs due to bad luck. Resource scarcity can make placed buildings useless, impacting overall progression.
- Inconsistent difficulty scaling (weight 0.09): The game's difficulty scaling is inconsistent. While some players find the highest difficulty too easy due to exploitable mechanics, others report a significant spike in challenge at very high ascension levels, indicating a need for more refined balance.
- Uninteresting card variations (weight 0.08): Many new cards lack distinctiveness, offering only minor variations or similar functionalities. This contributes to the feeling of repetition and reduces the excitement of acquiring new cards, impacting replayability.
- Slow combat turns (weight 0.06): Combat turns, particularly enemy turns, are excessively slow, especially when many towers and enemies are present. This leads to a tedious and drawn-out combat experience that detracts from the overall pacing.
- Lack of post-game content (weight 0.06): After clearing all stage missions, enemies stop spawning, and threats cease, leading to a lack of post-game objectives and a bland experience. Players also report issues with enemies spawning outside the current view.
- Insufficient late-game land (weight 0.05): In later stages, there is a severe lack of available land, and insufficient land cards are provided. This restricts building expansion and contributes to frame rate drops as players try to manage limited space.
- Unbalanced happiness mechanic (weight 0.05): The happiness mechanic is poorly balanced, with certain sources like 'Nature Reserve' easily leading to an overflow of happiness, while other sources are inefficient. This makes managing happiness trivial or frustrating.
- Limited special buildings (weight 0.05): The limited availability of special buildings (only 3-4 per game) and issues with card accumulation preventing new ones from appearing can prolong gameplay unnecessarily and make progression feel unfair.

Gameplay feedback:
- Hybrid City-Builder Roguelike (weight 0.44): The game is a unique hybrid, primarily a city-builder with strong rogue-like and card-based mechanics. It blends elements of Tetris, tower defense, and resource management, where players expand an island, manage resources, and defend against monsters using a card-drawing system.
- Core Card-Based Mechanics (weight 0.37): Card mechanics are central to gameplay, used for building, attacking, and resource generation. Players unlock new cards over time, but some feel certain cards are impractical or useless, and there's a desire for more control over card availability and a larger card library.
- Strategic Island Expansion (weight 0.23): Island expansion is a key strategic element, with players needing to decide between expanding their current island or connecting to new ones. Monster spawns are fixed to eight directions, and expanding quickly can push these spawn points further away, influencing defensive strategy.
- Gradual Difficulty Progression (weight 0.21): The game features five distinct difficulty levels, which gradually increase the challenge and require strategic engagement. While the highest difficulty can be demanding, overall player sentiment suggests the game's difficulty is well-paced and not excessively high.
- Gold Management Priority (weight 0.14): Gold is paramount, especially in the early game, and should be maximized before harvest season. Panning huts are noted as a more efficient early-game gold source than gold mines, with gold cards becoming important in the mid-game.
- Easy Happiness Maximization (weight 0.13): Achieving maximum happiness is notably easy, primarily by strategically placing forest parks and utilizing specific spells. Forest parks are particularly effective due to their low cost, no worker requirement, and high happiness yield, especially when combined with rangers.
- Intuitive and Accessible Gameplay (weight 0.1): The game is described as intuitive and easy to pick up, with a basic concept and straightforward combat. This makes it accessible for new players, as it doesn't require extensive reading or complex understanding to get started.
- Optional Game Objectives (weight 0.1): The game includes clear objectives that players can strive to complete, though achieving them is often a bonus rather than a strict requirement for victory. Players can choose to prioritize or even forgo certain objectives based on risk assessment.
- Faith Generation and Trade-offs (weight 0.07): Faith points are crucial for manipulating the deck and casting miracles, generated by placing houses around shrines. However, this creates a strategic trade-off, as these areas then cannot be used for defensive structures like towers or palisades.
- Housing Importance and Synergy (weight 0.05): Housing is a critical component, as concentrating houses allows for efficient generation of gold and happiness later in the game, especially when combined with services like water or taverns.
- Efficient Food Production (weight 0.05): Windmills surrounded by farms are highly efficient for food production, yielding significantly more food with minimal worker input compared to other methods like fishing or gathering.
- Future Content and Features (weight 0.05): The full release of the game is anticipated to introduce multiple gods, each with unique perks and influences, adding more strategic depth. Additionally, quality-of-life features like a creative mode for peaceful building are planned.
- Late-Game Skill Card Efficiency (weight 0.05): Later in the game, obtaining stone and fighting monsters becomes more efficient through the use of skill cards, which consume faith rather than manpower. This shifts resource and combat strategies as the game progresses.
- Evolving Defensive Strategy (weight 0.05): Early in the game, defensive structures like soldiers and towers are not essential. As the game progresses, it becomes more effective to place numerous towers and adjust their configurations based on enemy positions for optimal defense.
- Boss Defeat Strategies (weight 0.05): Bosses, even on the highest difficulty, can be defeated effectively using specific magic spell combinations, such as earthquake near houses or bleed and tornado combos.
- Balanced Building Progression (weight 0.05): Building more structures generally increases numbers without leading to being overpowered, with the exception of 'wonders.' It is advised not to place wonders too early in the game due to their significant impact.
- Post-Victory Continued Play (weight 0.05): Players have the option to continue playing even after officially winning a run. Each turn involves selecting a few cards and then ending the turn, allowing for continued engagement post-victory.
- Pre-Release/Demo Version (weight 0.05): The current version of the game is a pre-release or prologue, with only the first chapter available for free. This indicates that the full game will offer more content.
- Basic Display Options (weight 0.04): The game offers basic display options, including full-screen and windowed modes, and supports keyboard shortcuts for improved usability.

Performance notes:
- Performance issues with large settlements (weight 0.05): Players are experiencing significant performance issues, specifically frame rate drops and lag, as their settlements grow and more structures are built. This indicates a need for optimization, especially in handling increased object counts.
- Good Steam Deck performance (weight 0.03): Despite being in early access, the game reportedly runs very well on the Steam Deck. This is positive feedback for portability and accessibility, suggesting good initial optimization for that platform.

Recommendations:
- Suggests quality-of-life improvements (weight 0.43): Players frequently suggest various quality-of-life improvements and optimizations, ranging from UI/UX enhancements like clearer tutorials and display of information (e.g., building ranges, card costs) to core gameplay mechanics like card drawing and monster pathing. These suggestions aim to make the game more intuitive and user-friendly.
- High anticipation for full release (weight 0.43): Many players express excitement and anticipation for the full release of the game, indicating a strong interest in its future development and content. They are hopeful that the full version will address current issues and expand on existing features.
- Generally recommended by players (weight 0.36): The game receives general recommendations from players, who find it interesting and promising, especially for fans of tower defense and card game genres. This indicates a positive initial impression and a solid core gameplay loop.
- Desire for more game modes (weight 0.32): Players are keen on seeing more diverse gameplay modes and features, such as a PvP element, an endless mode, or a story mode. There's also a desire for combat acceleration options and more depth to unit mechanics beyond simple walls.
- Wants more deity options (weight 0.05): Players specifically request more variety in the 'deities' or 'gods' available in the full version, suggesting an interest in expanding the strategic options and lore related to these elements.
- Concerns about price vs. content (weight 0.05): Some players feel the current demo's content length does not justify a high price point, suggesting a lower recommended purchase price unless the full release significantly expands content.
- Requests custom deck building (weight 0.03): A specific request is made for a feature allowing players to customize their deck of possible cards before a run, which would enhance strategic planning and replayability.
- Suggests stacking land blocks (weight 0.02): A suggestion is made to allow stacking of land blocks and walls, which would enable more precise and aesthetically pleasing placement of structures.
- Suggests waiting for updates (weight 0.02): One reviewer suggests that players might need to wait for future updates or challenge higher ranks to fully appreciate the game, implying that the current content might be limited or that the game's depth unfolds over time.

Other player notes:
- Game is a demo/prologue (weight 0.15): Many players noted that the game is a demo or prologue version, not a full release. This context influenced their expectations and feedback, with some explicitly stating they wouldn't give a negative review due to its free, test nature.
- Indie roguelike game (weight 0.05): Players identified the game as an indie title, specifically within the roguelike genre. This categorization helps set expectations for its scope and gameplay mechanics.
- Good content for demo (weight 0.03): Despite being a demo, some players were impressed by the amount of content already available. This suggests a promising start for a game in its early stages.
- Small file size (93MB) (weight 0.02): A specific technical detail mentioned was the game's small file size of 93MB. This could be relevant for players with limited storage or internet bandwidth.

Emotions:
- Satisfaction (weight 0.23): Players expressed satisfaction due to the game's enjoyable and strategic gameplay, well-integrated mechanics, and overall high quality, especially for a demo. The game's engaging nature, balanced difficulty, and replayability also contributed to positive experiences.
- Frustration (weight 0.22): Frustration stemmed primarily from technical issues such as frequent game crashes and performance problems. Players also experienced frustration with inefficient combat, repetitive building placement, and issues with card randomness and utility, which hindered progression and overall enjoyment.
- Disappointment (weight 0.14): Disappointment arose from monotonous game mechanics, limited content, and a lack of rewarding difficulty progression. Players felt the game became boring due to repetition, poor optimization, and an over-reliance on random elements, leading to a lack of replayability and engaging strategies.
- Excitement (weight 0.09): Excitement was driven by anticipation for the full release and future content updates, as well as the game's addictive and engaging gameplay. Players were also excited by the game's concept, satisfying victories, and the potential for future development.
- Hope (weight 0.08): Players expressed hope for future improvements, including optimization, bug fixes, and new content such as an endless mode. There was also a desire for quality-of-life improvements, UI enhancements, and additional language translations.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.05): Enjoyment was consistently linked to the game's overall quality, addictive gameplay, and appealing art style. Players found the initial gameplay experience and learning curve to be particularly enjoyable, leading to high playtime.
- Boredom (weight 0.04): Boredom was a result of repetitive gameplay, a lack of engaging core mechanics, and limited content, especially in the late game. Players found the experience became tedious once objectives were met or after combat sequences.
- Anticipation (weight 0.04): Anticipation was focused on the release of the full version of the game and the addition of more content. Players were eager to see the finished product and experience further development.
- Joy (weight 0.03): Joy was derived from the game's unique scope, genre blend, and charming aesthetics. Players found the resource management and strategic elements to be enjoyable, contributing to an overall positive and addictive experience.
- Annoyance (weight 0.02): Annoyance was caused by slow gameplay, restrictive building placement, and dull card mechanics. Players also found the design to be unfriendly for those who prefer perfection in their builds.
- Confusion (weight 0.01): Confusion stemmed from ambiguous monster attack locations and unexplained technical issues within the game. Players struggled to understand certain mechanics or the cause of performance problems.
- Suggestion (weight 0.01): Players made suggestions for new features, specifically expressing a desire for cooperative play and a card demolition feature to improve gameplay options.
- Surprise (weight 0.01): Surprise was experienced due to unexpectedly high playtime and positive aspects like the game being free and demo progress carrying over to future versions.
- Impatience (weight 0.01): Impatience was expressed by players eagerly awaiting the full release of the game.
- Eagerness (weight 0.01): Eagerness was a strong desire for the full game to be released.
- Optimism (weight 0.01): Optimism was based on the perceived potential of the game for future development and improvements.
- Engagement (weight 0.01): Players felt deep engagement with the game's mechanics, indicating a strong connection to the core gameplay loop.
- Interest (weight 0.01): Players found the game to be inherently interesting, suggesting its concept or execution captured their attention.
- Recommendation (weight 0.01): Players recommended the game to others, indicating a positive overall experience and belief that others would enjoy it.}