Founders’ Fortune Test / Review

Founders’ Fortune Test – The Funny Construction, Survival Sims Mix Review

Zap zockt Founders’ Fortune Test. Founders’ Fortune is a building strategy settlers mix with some Sims and a bit of survival in blood. We build a colony on a strange island. We have to survive, gather resources, make a home out of it and build a new home with research, trade, diplomacy, and possibly even war against the locals.

Have fun with this Founders Fortune Test / Review. This post exists here as text and as a YouTube video (German Voice-over, with subtitles in many different languages). So you can choose how you like to enjoy it the most.

Founders’ Fortune Video:

(German VoiceOver, with subtitles in many different languages)

Founders Fortune Review – Test – Intro

Hi there, here’s the Zap. In this episode, I want to tell you some interesting things about the game Founders’ Fortune. I’ll show you what it’s about, what you can expect from the game, and how well it plays.

The game is developed and distributed by Dionic Software (former Oachkatzlschwoaf Interactive) from Bavaria in Germany, so it is a small indie developer team. It currently costs $18,99 or € at Steam and is in Early Access.

The developers have kindly provided me with a free test sample. As always, this has no influence on my rating. My viewers and readers deserve the highest priority and an honest rating.

Game Type – What kind of game is Founders’ Fortune?

Founders Fortune is a build strategy game with Survival and Sims elements. You create a colony on an island and have to take care of the survival and well-being of your settlers. You start with almost nothing and have to explore all the necessary things step by step, and produce and build a settlement from the resources that the inhabitants mine.

The main actors are the small residents of the settlement, who are not nameless creatures. They have, similar to The Sims, all their own names and personalities, desires, and needs. They can like or dislike things, make friends, learn professions and reach new levels.

And the cuddly people are not alone in their new home. Several indigenous tribes of the Tikis can get to know them, trade with them, build up friendships and enmities through diplomacy and then possibly wage war.

Early Access & Alpha

Founders Fortune is available at Steam in Early Access for currently €16. The developer studio Oachkatzlschwoaf calls the currently available version Alpha. So they see themselves in an early development phase, and new features and completely new directions for the game are possibly still in planning.

But there are bigger patches like the recent diplomacy update that brought the opposing Tiki villages into play as well as diplomacy and combat, and thus the decision whether to settle peacefully or militantly.

Founders Fortune Gameplay in general

When the game begins, we create two settlers according to our own wishes. They can have different likes and dislikes, for example, love summer or hate autumn. They may also be particularly good at certain professions or have disadvantages, such as limping or pessimism.

Having arrived at the island with a small starting supply of materials and food, we urgently need to organize sleeping places. Then we can start to consider the most basic needs.

First of all, their sleeping place is in a building, and a chair to rest on. A storage box to store the picked apples is also needed. And so the wishes and needs of our little inhabitants expand more and more.

Our settlers can mine resources such as wood, stones, and cotton, even if this is very difficult at first without tools.

So we also start to research and generate knowledge from the crystals on the island and create the first fields for food. We produce the first tools that make the work a little easier. And little by little our small society continues to develop.

New settlers will be added by ship when the previous ones are completely satisfied. So it is important for growth that we first make all existing residents happy.

Needs and Wishes

Similar to “The Sims” our inhabitants have certain wishes. The fulfillment of a wish like “Wants to sleep in a real bed” or “Wants a vase in his room” brings us satisfaction points.

And when we have accumulated enough satisfaction, the settler rises up the level and gets a reward point. These points can then be spent on either getting rid of bad traits or getting new positive ones. But if you like, you can also buy negative ones.

Professions in Founders Fortune

The game offers a total of 6 professions. This starts with the basic work for resource extraction, like the forester who cuts trees and provides wood. The miner can chop stones, iron ore, and crystals away. Then follow the farmers, who are not only responsible for the fields, in other words looking for seeds, watering, and harvesting, but also starting to pick wild cotton from bushes.

This is followed by the creative professions. Here there are craftsmen who produce tools, weapons, clothing, and armor on workbenches. Very important is also a scholar, who gains knowledge from crystals and later scrolls, which can then be invested in a complex research tree, so that the progress in our small settlement is moving in.

And since injuries and illnesses can make the lives of our settlers difficult and sometimes even life-threatening, we can treat fractures with a doctor, administer flu vaccinations and cure other diseases.

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Tech Tree and Research

The scholarly profession makes it possible to conduct research, and here a complex research tree awaits us.

Currently, 28 different types of research are included in the game. To do research, either the miner or the researcher must mine crystals.

This research gradually requires not only more and more crystals and time but also scrolls after a certain point. Scrolls cannot be mined or farmed, but have to be exchanged with the traders.

Base Building in Founders Fortune

The settlers quickly get the need for more comfort in their new home. So a sleeping bag is enough at the beginning, but soon they want a bed. In the beginning, it is okay if everyone sleeps in the same room, but after a while, they want their own room and later even their own house.

And then, little by little, there are more and more wishes and needs that the settlers would like to have fulfilled. A flower pot in the room or a clothes rack and matching clothes. This specialized clothing is available for every profession and offers advantages when working. This is followed by tools that also work and need a tool cabinet. These clothes and tools not only make our people happier but also speed up their work.

Trade and Currency

There are not only a lot of goods in the game which can be mined and cultivated, refined and produced, but also the possibility to trade with them.

There are various merchant factions whose ships occasionally anchor on the coast. There you can sell goods for coins and buy things you can’t make yourself, such as urgently needed scrolls for research.

However, the settlement also urgently needs coins, as the inhabitants have the need after some time to get paid for their work. If the wage is not high enough, they become unhappy. And as their professional level rises, so too do their income expectations.

The social life

The settlers have not only wishes and needs, but also a mood. If this mood falls below a certain level, they start to get depressed. And at a certain level of a bad mood, they get a nervous breakdown, which keeps them away from work for some time.

There are a lot of things that affect the mood of the settlers. For example, there is the disadvantage of xenophobia, which makes settlers uncomfortable with strangers, and they get in a bad mood when a merchant docks on the island. Or they have nightmares at night. Conversations can influence mood both positively and negatively. The settlers can embrace, relax comfortably on the meadow, enjoy the warmth of a campfire or a fireplace, and many other things.

Here Founders Fortune shows an approach to a social structure that is very similar to Sims. And that’s how our inhabitants quickly become little personalities who do much more than just work, eat and sleep.

Dangers in Founders Fortune

Of course, not everything is always full of sunshine on our small island. The settlement has to survive various dangers.

This starts with injuries and illnesses that can affect our inhabitants or even endanger their lives. Broken legs, influenza, and other illnesses and injuries hinder or even make it impossible to work and, in the worst case, can lead to death.

One of the greatest dangers, of course, is hunger. Lack of food can quickly lead to death. Since there are seasons in the game and no food is growing in winter, we have to build up supplies in time so that our cuddly people do not starve miserably in winter.

And since all this is not enough, there are several Tiki villages with boreholes on the island, with which we should be good otherwise there may be some tile-roasting.

Diplomacy

There are several other villages on the island. These neighboring tribes often contact us with demands and each tribe has a diplomatic relationship with our settlement.

This diplomatic rating improves when we meet their demands, but also generally decreases over time. And if we reject the demands, we can also make them our enemies.

And then there’s the threat of a quick attack on our settlement.

Defense and Combat

The indigenous villages are a danger. We can, of course, try to counter this danger with extensive diplomacy. Then we must give away many goods and also train people in diplomacy, who can then improve relations through talks.

But if that doesn’t work, we’ll have to prepare for another path. There are also fighting talents that have to be built up. For example, we can have our inhabitants improve their fighting skills with a training dummy.

And with melee and ranged weapons, armor and associated storage furniture, and healing potions for injuries, we have a lot to produce to prepare for battle.

In addition, it is possible to build thicker and thicker walls to enclose your settlement, and later there are also watchtowers. And the equipment for battle begins with simple wooden swords and simple gambesons, and with a lot of research, it becomes better weapons, first made of stone and then of metal.

Besides diplomacy, there is also the possibility to expel the other villages from the island and plundering their supplies. Here you can go your way as a player, depending on how you like it, or just get it economically better.

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Technology, Graphics, Engine, Sound

The game uses the Unity Engine, which excludes the worst common teething troubles. It uses rather minimalistic graphics but still has its own charm.

You can recognize easily, however, that at the moment the visual appearance is not the top priority for the developers, but rather the depth of the simulation. Most textures currently consist of monochrome areas or simple color gradients. But this serves its purpose surprisingly well.

Because nevertheless Founders Fortune offers diversified graphics. The world doesn’t seem boring due to the many different construction elements and objects, the weather effects, and also the lighting and shadows. Everything about optical things is kept simple, but still fulfills its purpose and overall everything looks quite harmonious.

The animations of the figures are so far okay. You can see what they do, but you can’t expect miracles here. There is still room for improvement, with better animations you could increase the bustel and cuddle factor even more. A nice approach is that the characters show funny facial animations and react to their environment.

The sound is not yet the highlight of this title. A few simple, but not annoying pieces of music, some practical noises here and there. None of this is really bad, but overall a bit too little sound.

Condition of the game:

In the more than 10 hours of testing I’ve spent in the game so far, Founders Fortune has never crashed, stalled, or shown me any other technical problems. Otherwise, I couldn’t find any real bugs, even when searching for them.

The game in its present form is already in absolutely flawless technical condition and absolutely playable. It is almost incomprehensible that this product is still officially called Alpha Version by its developers. Because it’s not that it’s unfinished in terms of quality, but rather that the Devs still have a lot of plans for this game.

Opinion & Conclusion

When I saw the first screenshots of the game, I was hesitating. On the one hand, the figures look pretty cute, on the other hand, the graphics were quite simple.

But when I had spent half an hour on the island with the bustling settlers, I was completely blown away. Founders Fortune offers a very interesting mix of building strategy, survival, and sims-like gameplay. A little bit of Banished mixed with Rimworld, some Sims, and some unique ideas, the result was Founders Fortune.

The simulation depth already present in the game, the scope of the features, and the many small details surprised me very positively. Actually, almost everything already makes sense in this game. And the prospect of many more features and planned mod support let us expect longevity that many other games can’t offer.

I’m really very enthusiastic about Founders Fortune and can only recommend this game to every construction fan and Simslover. A real pearl is growing here that you shouldn’t miss.

Founders’ Fortune Rating

The following evaluation is to be considered under reservation. Since the game is currently in early access and in a self-titled alpha version, one can assume that it is far from finished and the developers intend to take care of this project for a long time to come.

But since it is being sold, it will also be evaluated. I think the current price of $18,99 or € is more than reasonable. It is part of the developers’ plan to increase the price with upcoming features. So an early entry might be especially worthwhile.

If you consider the technically high quality, the complexity of the simulation, and the many nice ideas that are already in the game, if you pay attention to the already existing game fun and bring this into relation to the low price, then Founders Fortune is worth an absolute recommendation. I would like to start here with a base rating of 88 %.

Smaller deductions must then be made for the highly improvable graphics, the so far only functional animations, and the still quite weak sound. And here I subtract 8 % again.

So in the end the result for the game of such a small team is a magnificent 80 % rating. Founders’ Fortune is a good game for a fair price. I’m really excited to see where the journey with Founders Fortune is headed. In any case, it is a clear recommendation already now for me. Whatever the developers are up to in the future, this great start can’t become a bad game anymore.

Outro

How do you like the game so far? Would you like to settle down right away, or isn’t that enough for you? Write your opinion in the comments, I’m looking forward to it.

Then I wish you a great day, let it be well with you, ciao ciao, your Zap.

Sources and links:

Founders’ Fortune Website

Founders’ Fortune Steam Page

Founders’ Fortune Twitter

Dev’s Forum

Founders’ Fortune Discord Server