Patron vs Sphere - Flying Cities
Patron
Patron is a medieval-themed city-builder that is quite similar to Banished. In this game, you play as a pioneer sent by your King to colonize a new region. With a group of peasants to help, it is up to you to build a town from the ground up and develop it into one of the most prosperous colonies of the empire!The game is all about optimizing production chains and subsequently, pursuing advancements. So, at the beginning, it’s important to produce enough raw materials so you can have enough materials to “fuel” your other production facilities in order to craft more profitable items. As your town expands, you’ll need to make sure your production scales up accordingly, be it by upgrading existing structures or building new ones. This is where the challenge really comes in.
Of course, besides upgrades and expansions, you’ll want to invest in research so you could unlock better and, hence, more productive buildings, as well as new production facilities which will then allow you to produce items that are usually more luxurious and lucrative to trade. From time to time, you will receive various edicts from the King or news of certain events. You’ll then be expected to choose between the two decisions provided.
All in all, Patron is definitely a much better version of Banished in every way, and this saying something since I’ve enjoyed playing Banished. This game’s a solid medieval city-builder with a nice level of difficulty which matches what a midcore gamer like me can handle. The game is definitely worth the cost!
Sphere - Flying Cities
Sphere - Flying Cities is a city-building game that’s somewhat similar to Frostpunk except that it has a sci-fi theme, and allows for more exploration. Set in a world devastated by an asteroid, the remnants of humanity has managed to invent an anti-gravity machine which allows them to levitate a chunk of earth’s surface and move that piece of floating island around a world enveloped by debris and other dangers.Unfortunately, Sphere – Flying Cities falls short of what it aspires to be. The bugs and glitches aside, the gameplay here feels slow – very unlike the kind of urgency that Frostpunk offers, and the amount of player control over how many workers to assign to a facility is oddly restrictive for a city-builder. Personally, I would recommend keeping this game on your wishlist first and let the devs work on improving their game.