Combolands delivers strategic depth in 30 minutes or less
Citybuilder fans are feasting right now. After what felt like an endless drought after the demise of 2013’s SimCity, these past few years we are seeing a lot of interesting indie takes that bring the sauce. Timberborn is a take where you are tiny Beavers building the best water-powered city you can muster. Against the Storm is the answer to “what if it was a Roguelike Citybuilder that kinda looked a lot like Warcraft”, bringing a lot of interesting choices to the table. Dorf Romantik is a beautiful relaxing tile placement game that feels like a long Sunday morning under the covers. What I am getting at here is that sure, you could go play Cities: Skyline if you want to see what SimCity could have been, but there are a lot of interesting takes on the genre with a lot of different variables out there for the more curious gamer.
Combolands is another new entry into this new-wave Citybuilder niche, delivering a promise of tight and layered strategy in just 30 minutes or less. The good news here is that Crux Games delivers on that promise, and does so with a deftness that has you clicking New Run immediately with glee.
The loop of Combolands is simple. Players start on a small island that will have a number of resources such as forests, berry bushes, sand etc. Each turn they will pick a building from their hand of cards to place on the map, exploiting those resources for precious population points. Each turn progresses the day count, and as you build out your tiny settlement, you need to hit the population goal for the current milestone before time runs out. If you hit the goal you get the chance to spend some gold to get persistent upgrades called Heirlooms, or unlock new blueprints. If you fail, the run is over.
Hitting those milestones is where the joy of Combolands shines. Each establishment runs on a cooldown, and will often have traits that combo with other buildings to up the population score every time they trigger. Learning how the different systems interact with one another, and more importantly, how you can use those bonuses to create truly broken combos that re-trigger each other is the whole point of the game.
The types of buildings you will have during the run is based on choosing two guilds when you begin. Each guild brings with it a different play style, and mashing the two guilds together creates some truly interesting combos. Putting the merchants with the agriculture guild sure did make a lot of sense. The merchants and the military guilds on an island FILLED with berries, that was a less than ideal choice. Each guild does work well together, but seeing the different guild combos working together as you… well, try to make big combos work on the map feels like the secret sauce that Combolands is bringing to the table.
Unfortunately however, I feel that the onboarding of Combolands is a little rough, particularly for newcomers to strategy games like myself. If you have played a lot of Civilization, or even tabletop games like Catan, it is more than likely second nature to how Husbandry traits might play into other Agriculture-type cards. For me however, I will often have to spend a little longer than I would like reading, and re-reading the building traits to make sure my combos will work. The wording can also at times be a little vague, and with the lack of an encyclopaedia or even an in-game one pager, it made the first few hours with the game a little rough.
Once I was in though, I was locked in. Booting up Combolands each night before bed to play one more cozy run was like a meditation. There’s a certain amount of pressure to try and hit those population goals to win the run, but the game also is totally fine for you to play it at your own speed, experiment, and have fun your way. Sometimes there are little happy accidents that spark a new way of thinking. For a half-dozen runs I was perplexed why you would place a sewer - an infrastructure card that places a sewer on the ground and destroys all buildings adjacent to it. When I placed on by accident I panicked, until I realised that a nearby building I had triggered huge bonuses every time a building adjacent to it was transformed. I just took out a city block, and I was rewarded with glory and riches.
Combolands is a fun and joyful take on a Citybuilder that feels like it has a lot of strategic depth, but isn’t actively asking you to live in the stats and minmax every decision. It feels like sitting at a table with a few of your mates, drinking a few beers, and having a yarn over a heated game of Carcassone. I like that, and there’s a strong chance that if you are at all strategy-game curious, you might too.
★★★★☆
Recommended
Developed by Crux Games
Platforms: PC
Steam page
