Review Map › Games › Foundation
Review Map · mapped 1 October
87%Very Positive
of all 24,298 reviews on Steam79%▼ 8
recommend it, last 7 days29▲ 21%
new reviews, last 7 daysPart of Review Explorer, $29 a month
Praise first, then complaints.
Example reviewLooks great
Recommended231 hours playedEnglish15 out of 10! The Ultimate Antidote to City-Building Grid Spam. In a genre often dominated by rigid grid systems and hyper-optimized block layouts, Foundation stands out as a breath of fresh, medieval air. It is a city builder that trades strict geometric confinement for beautiful, organic growth. After spending over 250 hours in game, the core loop remains so much fun. The only desire is to immediately start yet another settlement. At first glance, Foundation captivates with its gorgeous graphic aesthetics and a remarkably chill, atmospheric soundtrack that sets a perfectly relaxed tone. However, beneath its charming, stylized exterior lies an economy of incredible depth. The game is deceptively simple to pick up, yet mastering its resource management and trade systems provides a deeply satisfying mechanical challenge. Tinkering with production chains and managing the intricacies of the global trading system feels rewarding without ever becoming tedious. The defining triumph of Foundation is its gridless architecture. There is no rigid grid-spam crap here. Instead, housing and pathways develop dynamically based on your villagers' actual movements and needs. The game makes it incredibly easy to design a settlement that looks profoundly beautiful while simultaneously running like a finely-tuned economic machine. This organic beauty is elevated by superb map generation. The varied terrain of each map gives every city a distinct architectural personality, allowing you to adapt your layouts to hills, rivers, and cliffsides in a way that feels natural. More impressively, the simulation runs flawlessly. Across hundreds of hours of gameplay, the performance remains pristine, entirely free of the immersion-breaking bugs or sudden crashes that plague so many modern simulation titles. Further enriching the gameplay is the estate system. Splitting your focus between the Church, the Kingdom, and the People provides distinct mechanical pathways that keep the late-game engaging. Each estate feels uniquely interesting, offering varied progression trees that change how you approach your town's ultimate identity. Foundation is a masterpiece! By marrying profound economic depth with an organic, visually stunning building system, it offers a rare, peaceful addictive quality. For anyone tired of rigid urban planning and looking for a deep, flawlessly optimized, and endlessly replayable simulation, Foundation is an absolute must-play.
Bars compare each theme with the one mentioned most. We don’t print counts: 200 recent reviews are a sample, not a measure of the game.
The last 7 days against the 7 before. Point at a day for its counts.
Recommended, last 7 days23Not recommended, last 7 days6
Steam’s top-ranked review for and against it in these 7 days, in English. Votes as they stood when this map was made.
Really fun and wholesome city builder with great attention to detail. The UI could use some work as there is a lot of numbers that are unexplained, and I had to bash my head against the wall to figure out why certain things weren't functioning, but that is pretty standard for these types of games.
A very comfy, casual little city builder with massive, glaring issues that will likely never be fixed. I've been playing since the game entered early access and I can confidently say that it still needs some serious TLC. It doesn't run very good, despite the simple graphics, and it makes my computer sound like a jet turbine at medium settings. The ui is better than it was, but it still feels weird. All the custom building are very cool, and I wish more of these games had this level of freedom, I only wish this game did more of that. Not having direct control of where homes are built is weird and the system feels like it belongs in a different game. There are weird little issues with some production buildings not producing a consistent amount of a given resource, leading at an entire supply chain breaking down. Certain buildings, like windmills, have a strangely high number of employees, leading to a weird spiral where you're letting in more people to do jobs, requiring more food to satisfy needs, just to satisfy the need for a single resource. It often feels like you never have enough of any one thing, and the game is constantly yelling at you to make more, but you need more buildings, which requires more gold for upkeep, which requires more trade, which requires more production, which requires more people, needing more resources, etc. It just isn't very relaxing. I don't want to say anything about the art or assets as that is very subjective. It is clear that a lot of work has gone into the game since 2018, and it has been a long journey for these devs over the nearly ten years. The game itself is definitely worth checking out if you can get it on sale, and I'm praying the additions of the dlc will ease some of the problems I have with the game.
Each language’s share of its reviews, and how many in that language recommend it.
| Language | Reviews | Share | Recommend itthe tick is every language, 87%; the chip is the gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | 11,835 | 49% | 86%−1 |
| German | 3,078 | 13% | 89%+2 |
| French | 2,254 | 9% | 91%+4 |
| Simplified Chinese | 1,617 | 7% | 77%−10 |
| Russian | 751 | 3% | 83%−4 |
| Spanish | 712 | 3% | 92%+5 |
| Portuguese - Brazil | 598 | 2% | 91%+4 |
| Korean | 427 | 2% | 75%−12 |
| 21 other languages | 3,026 | 12% |
All reviews ever, as Steam counts them, with each language’s own Steam score.
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1Great with friends2Atmosphere3Looks great4Bad solo5Funny momentsGold: a theme two or more of them share. Point at one to find it in the others. In Review Explorer this is the start: each day’s reviews, every theme with the reviews behind it, and who reviews them in every language. Open it ↗︎