Buy Castle Story? No, but why not? A 2 year summary

I'm watching the development since almost two years and played over 160 hours. Only survival mode because there are no other challanges. Sandbox mode didn't really interested me after all, you know minecraft?

Following Bugs and missing game options bother me since the first time i played. There has been changes and improvments but nothing got really fixed to a point im happy with. I guess a lot of other people feel the same after reading reddit and other sources, pointing out there's no progress would be wrong, but the prioritisation is amiss. I understand the process of prototyping, alphas and early access. But there shut be a noticable progress in all directions after two years of development.

- building menu - Castle Story uses some kind of nice circular menu, it has a nice appeal in the first place. But really nerves after using it, because its inconvenient. You need to do the following steps to choose one of your main building materials; 1x1 stone bricks: hold down the right mousebutton, the main menu appears, move the mouse to submenu button, release the right mouse button, the main menu disapperas. Press the right mouse button again, the submenu apperas, move to the 1x1 stone, release right the mouse button, now you can place your bricks. You know what!? Let me use the left mouse button to select the submenu and the 1x1 brick, this would make the following steps redundant and the selection would be; hold right mouse button, left click submenu, left click desired option, DONE!?

- blue Crystals - the Ore you need to gather for spawning new npcs is now stuck on stockpiles by default (version 0.3.3). This would be one of the very few added game mechanics in two years that made me happy, if turned off by default OMG. Now you have to manually order your broken Worker AI to carry the blue crystals to the main crystal or deaktivate the option on every stockpile you build... really?

- demolishing - you can't demolish stockpiles, lamps, barrels,... If it does work and i didn't realise how, why doesn't it work the same way it does with stones and wood. By the way, if it works with stones and wood, does it take why more than 2 years to implement this feature?

- zooming - nice to be able to zoom with the mousewheel, but only to a certain and low point. If users complain about that, they are told to use the old method, the caps key and mousewheel, now the can zoom infinite. What every sence restricting the "mousewheel only zoom" and having two ways to zoom after all may have. Only one way to zoom, problem fixed.

- Workers - still get stuck in many different tasks. I know theres a new AI and it's not implemented in survival mode yet. Currently (version 0.3.3) the AI is a killjoy.

- Swordsmen - useless as long as not standing in front of a gate. Because Enemys are past over before the realize there existence. Currently (version 0.3.3) the AI is a killjoy.

- Archers - commit suicide by shoting there bows and killed other player npcs, this didn't happen anymore since version 0.3.0 and i played to wave 25. Thats a plus!

i'm ♥♥♥♥ed, somebody else complete the list... Don't buy the game until it's released! Die Entwickler bewegen sich seit zwei Jahren im Kreis, mit einer Effizienz, die sich schön in ihrem Menü wiederspiegelt.

A great concept, but unfortunately the team making this is in way over their heads. They refuse to discuss any details, and in two years more has been removed from the game than put into it. This has all the markings of a cash grab, and is not worth the money in it's current (most likely permanant) form.

I bought the game to play Multiplayer with a friend. Unfortunately after 3 years of development this game is still completely broken.

Why can't an i7 system with 12gb of ram, a gtx760 and an ssd run a basic small map past 20 blocks before it lags out completely?

Maybe in 2016 there will be a playable release.

THE AI IS SOOOOOO STUPID, im sorry but this game screams dont buy.

Exclent concept poor delivery.

No progress for months.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.

Great concept, poor execution. The game in clunky, and very CPU intensive. Updates are sparse and the Sauropod handles PR like a monkey with a shotgun.

Currently it is not playable due to a horrible AI. Bricktons get stuck every minute and stop working until you assign new tasks via trial and error.
A new AI is in the making (regarding the developer posts) but until this proves sufficient don't buy it except you believe in the devs very strongly

The concept of the game is great, however, the game it self is buggy, very unoptimized and lacks support. Plus, the AI in the game (those little yellow blobs) are very stupid and lack intelligence. Controls are down right atrocious as you only use your mouse to move around and select different tasks for your yellow blobs. Untill the game gets more support form the devs and is ACTUALLY coded and patched right don't spend $15 on this game.

I've had this game for about a year and the biggest update ive seen happened a few days ago. The update changed almost nothing about the game. Still has the same bugs it had a year ago and i dont see this game going anywhere. DONT WASTE YOUR MONEY.

Recently, the devs have been providing the customers with dev blogs. They are planning on making a huge update in the future. Apparently, this whole time they've been working on the game but just went ghost for a while. Till now, we had no idea that they were still working on the game and it appeared as if they had abandoned the process. By observing the dev blogs, I can say that I am somewhat excited to see the new updates they have coming our way. For now, I do not recommend this game as the update "before the holidays", could have a delay.

After playing the latest patch (The one claiming to fix the unit pathfinding issues) I can honestly say I am giving up on this game. It is a great concept and I truely hope the developers see it through but after their boasts that they fixed the pathfinding issues I can honestly say that it is clear they did not test this patch for more than 15 minutes because after about this long playing you will spend more time trying to fix anything that causes your units to get hung up. Which is just about anything. If the developers actually fix this pathing issues add new gameplay content to this game (something they have not really done in at least a year.... ( well excluding the halloween unit skins -__- )) I will gladly change and rewrite this review.

I bought this game when first came out on early access and since it was one of the first games on early access that was almost 3 years ago. There are updates once in a while but it seems like nothing is getting done. I would expect this game to be playable in 10 years.

as much as i love the idea of this game, the Dev's obviously don't love it enough to update any new features in but instead release patch notes of 1 or 2 bugs fixed once a year it seems. i have waited so long for a decent patch and i have given up hope. do not waste money on this game, don't make the mistake thousands of us have made.

The A.I in this game are EXTREMELY stupid. Add that to the cumbersome mechanics of the game to get your little yellow people to do anything makes for a VERY frustrating play. Getting anything done, especially diggin for recources, takes a LOT of finagling. This game is not worth anywhere close to $20. $5, maybe.

Surely it can't be hard to make multiplayer usable. Pathetic

Do not buy! It may be a good in the future but right now it is completely unplayable. It is very hard to control the workers and give them tasks. It is not very user friendly and I was unable to even complete the tutorial. Maybe in the future it will play better?

Good ideas... But don't worth the money spent for.
It's Steam sales for Christmas, and guess what... Developpers haven't made so much updates since few days than during all past year. Don't believe there is any regular developpment to improve the game.
My advice: wait some years and maybe this game, when finished, will worth the money... Which is not the case currently.

Bonnes idées... Mais ne vaut clairement pas le prix demandé.
Ce sont les soldes Steam de noël et devinez quoi... Les développeurs n'ont jamais fait autant de mises à jours depuis quelques jours que durant toute l'année qui s'est écoulée. Ne pensez pas que le développement pour améliorer le jeu soit régulier.
Mon conseil: attendez encore quelques années et peut-être que le jeu, une fois terminé, en vaudra la peine... Ce qui n'est pas le cas actuellement.

I wanted to like this game. It was like building in minecraft only you have a small army of AI units to tell what to build. On paper it sounded great but I have massive doubts about the developers ability to refine this game to a playable degree. The .3 patch reverted about a years worth of bug fixes and has nearly broke the game to an "unplayable" state. This game is plagued with bugs that will waste hours of your time trying to figure out how to work around it just for the sake of stacking blocks. Their video blogs are just annoying to watch as all they do is talk about what they would like to accomplish while never really hitting these goals. It sounds all great but little to none of it ever gets ironed out. I bought this game over a year ago and have seen little forward advance. The last big patch cranked down the texture quality in order to increase the map size but failed to fix the major problems that these smaller development teams seem to struggle the most with. Mainly the AI's pathing issues. They constantly hang up and get "confused". In the end I could spend the same amount of time on minecraft survival solo and build more then 20 bricktons could accomplish even after hours of fine tuning how to work around the many bugs castle story has. The grand goal of this game seems to be able to mass an army of AI builders to construct an elaborate fort to defend against the corrupted but in the end if you could seize control of just one of the bricktons and manually control them you would do much much better to achieving this goal. At that point I have to say just stick with minecraft. Until you see a tidal wave of reviews saying they have finally made the AS (artificial stupidity) actually resemble AI, then steer clear of this struggling under developed game. Good idea but an extreme failure to polish into a playable game.

I'll review this again when it "releases" but until then I advise you stay away from the game.

I bought this game , tryed it , it was really really BORING