"While Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown is slightly different to the dozens of city-building survival games that have come before it, that alone is not enough to warrant a purchase of what is otherwise a very generic and ultimately uninteresting survival game. "
Time is a precious commodity worth a lot more than money, which can be acquired in multiple ways (legal and otherwise).
However, time can be wasted or cut short but never regained once lost, and no matter who you are, beggar or prince, you can do nothing to extend your earthly time beyond its limits.
While much can be said of eternal life found through Jesus Christ, we are not talking about eternal destiny here but earthly time constraints, and to subdivide it even further, time that people have free to allocate to hobbies, which, as adults (the target demographic for games like this), is often in short supply.
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown does not feel like a good investment of my time due to its generic nature, which is unfortunate, as completing Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown requires a great deal of it.
Players are expected to spend hours staring at a screen waiting, with only a few brief spurts of interactivity, such as chatting with advisors, handling an event, or building a few more structures.
I understand this is common for the genre to some extent, but that is another problem with Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown; beyond its event system (which is surprisingly good), it is almost identical to every other Banished-clone on the market, which makes it very difficult to be excited by gameplay mechanics that I have played in some capacity for the past decade.
If the developers had focused more on role-playing and combat mechanics and made resource gathering less time-consuming, Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown would have been a great competitor to more traditional strategy games.
However, as it stands, it feels like a slower and less interesting version of better games such as Dawn of Man and many other similar titles on the market that offer a similar experience, often for a much lower price.
For this reason, I cannot recommend Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown despite liking the concept and finding its interactive narrative and roleplaying elements intriguing.
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown is a simulation video game developed by ZUGALU ENTERTAINMENT and published by PlaySide, it was released on 6 November 2024 and retails for $27.99+.
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown is available exclusively on PC.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
{GAME_TITLE} is rated {PEGI_RATING} and contains no offensive content.
Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown is not a bad game, but it just does not excite me, someone who would be its target audience.
As a long-time fan of all things city-building and survival-related, I am the type of gamer that Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown needs to win over to succeed. Considering there are just three players online as I write this, it appears it failed in that task.