Polylithic
- November 9, 2023
- polyperfect
- 131h median play time
Get on Steam"Polylithic is a single-player adventure game set in the Paleolithic/Neolithic era with vibrant low-poly graphics and a sci-fi twist. Gather resources, craft items, and hunt animals to grow your tribe and build a settlement, with over 10 hours of playtime filled with grinding and resource management. Manage your tribe members, assign them tasks, and ensure their needs are met to strengthen your tribe and unlock new technologies."
PC
Windows
Reviews
- The game features beautiful graphics and a unique art style that enhances the overall experience.
- It offers interesting quest lines and a variety of mechanics, including tribe management and resource gathering, which provide depth to gameplay.
- The developers are responsive to feedback and regularly update the game, showing promise for future improvements.
- The controls and camera mechanics are clunky, making navigation and combat frustrating, especially for new players.
- Many players find the tutorial overly long and restrictive, limiting the ability to explore and play the game freely.
- There are numerous bugs and performance issues that detract from the overall experience, including problems with crafting and AI behavior.
- story17 mentions
- 12 % positive mentions
- 71 % neutral mentions
- 18 % negative mentions
The game's story is criticized for its convoluted quest structure and vague instructions, leading to frustrating trial-and-error gameplay. Players find the lengthy tutorial and forced "story mode" restrictive, with issues like broken tasks and poorly designed migration mechanics detracting from the overall experience. Additionally, the lack of clear quest markers and time constraints on certain tasks contribute to a sense of grind and confusion.
“This game has good graphics, interesting quest lines, and lots of things to build and research.”
“There is a common thing when you assign a villager to gather berries, and he will give you a quest to find him 5 berries.”
“In story mode, after each migration, I needed to reload because the tasks, food, and happiness meter (displayed NaN%) broke.”
“Some quests have very little instruction, and you have to just figure it out by trial and error.”
“The tutorial is painfully long - obviously intended to be over 2 hours, and the game is locked behind 'story mode,' which is literally a forced tutorial.”
- gameplay13 mentions
- 38 % positive mentions
- 38 % neutral mentions
- 23 % negative mentions
The gameplay is characterized by unique colony simulation mechanics and beautiful visuals, though some players find the mechanics clunky and the learning curve steep. While the game offers interesting challenges, particularly in hunting, it has been criticized for requiring excessive grinding and for making early gameplay frustrating. Overall, players appreciate the lack of microtransactions and the engaging nature of the mechanics once mastered.
“Beautiful game with unique colony sim mechanics unlike any other.”
“Learning curve is somehow steep but in a few hours, you'll get the hang of most mechanics and your tribe will start to flourish.”
“The graphics are beautiful and the gameplay is challenging enough to be interesting without being frustrating.”
“Game mechanics are clunky.”
“I'm so tired of developers not understanding what is fun and just doing stupid things to basically force you to 'understand' their game mechanics.”
“It should not be this difficult to kill a rabbit or a chicken in the first minutes of gameplay.”
- graphics12 mentions
- 50 % positive mentions
- 25 % neutral mentions
- 25 % negative mentions
The game's graphics are widely praised for their beauty and unique art style, featuring vibrant colors and a compelling low-poly design. However, some players have reported performance issues that detract from the overall experience, suggesting that the ambitious visuals may not be fully optimized. Despite these concerns, the graphics contribute significantly to the game's appeal and immersive atmosphere.
“Love the graphics, makes the game very unique.”
“The graphics are beautiful and the gameplay is challenging enough to be interesting without being frustrating.”
“Beautiful colors and graphics.”
“I was already going to hang it up just from the performance issues alone, which persist through all graphics settings. But when the dude told me 'twigs were everywhere' and it took me half an hour to find 10 twigs in the intro, that was about enough.”
“Visuals may be overly ambitious for what they can actually achieve.”
“I really like the art style, the overall scene, and the campaign it offers sounds so interesting, but for me, the game seems to try to hinder me from playing it, maybe because of lacking meaningful content?”
- grinding9 mentions
- 0 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 100 % negative mentions
Players find the grinding mechanics in the game tedious and frustrating, often feeling that the focus on resource gathering and quest completion detracts from the enjoyment of exploration and settlement building. Many express a desire for alternative gameplay options that reduce the emphasis on grinding, particularly in the context of survival and technology progression. Overall, the grinding aspect is seen as a barrier to fully enjoying the game's potential for creativity and exploration.
“I don't find endless grinding mechanics to be fun; this world is colored and beautiful, and I want to explore it, not always be on the run to bring enormous food quantities to my tribe.”
“I spent three quarters of an hour trying to find stalks for javelins and axes in this silly, grindy migration quest that comes with a blinding winter where you cannot save, and out of nowhere a bull massacres me and my tribesman, setting me back to a vast wilderness quest. Now I have to grind for another three quarters of an hour for these seldom found stalks.”
“The game forces you to play through and earn the technology to build 'bases' through solo achievement grinding.”
- optimization5 mentions
- 40 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 60 % negative mentions
The game's optimization is widely criticized, with players experiencing significant performance drops across all graphics settings, even on lower configurations. Issues such as lag and poor frame rates, particularly on high-end hardware like the GTX 1080, detract from the overall experience.
“Another negative aspect was the somewhat laggy performance of the game on max settings.”
“I was already going to hang it up just from the performance issues alone, which persist through all graphics settings.”
“It's pretty, but you pay the cost in massive performance drops.”
“I was already going to hang it up just from the performance issues alone, which persist through all graphics settings. But when the dude told me 'twigs were everywhere' and it took me half an hour to find 10 twigs in the intro, that was about enough.”
“Another negative aspect was the somehow laggy performance of the game on max settings.”
- stability2 mentions
- 0 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 100 % negative mentions
Users report experiencing semi-regular artifacting and visual glitches, which appear to be hardware dependent, indicating that while the setup is generally appealing, it still has some bugs that affect stability.
“Semi-regular artifacting and visual glitches (probably hardware dependent).”
“Pretty cool setup, but still a little buggy.”
- music1 mentions
- 200 % positive mentions
- -100 % neutral mentions
- 0 % negative mentions
The music and sound effects in the game are highly praised, with reviewers noting their quality and effectiveness, especially considering the game was developed by a small team. The overall audio experience enhances the game's appeal.
“The music and sound effects are really great, especially considering that this game was made by just a few people.”
“The low poly graphics are an interesting idea, and the colors are nice too, but the standout feature is definitely the music.”
