Of Life and Land Review - More Environment Sim Than Colony Sim
After a year in early access, Of Life and Land has been fully released and packed with new features. This colony sim follows a familiar pattern—you place buildings and assign workers, gradually progressing from cutting wood to producing luxury goods. However, Of Life and Land also has several key differences that make it a unique experience, and it executes its unique approach with style.
Of Life and Land often feels like an environment management sim more than a city builder. For the most part, villagers manage themselves; the bigger challenge is managing the natural spaces they inhabit. You must replant forests, or else you run out of wood. You have to keep track of how much you’re hunting, or else the trout disappear from the rivers and the deer vanish from the woods.
Even as you learn to manage the resources in one location, you have to figure it out all over again if you start a new save game. Of Life and Land features several scenarios, including a new one released with version 1.0, which is based on medieval Switzerland. Each scenario offers different settings, which come with a variety of resources and difficulty levels. Many of the scenarios also allow you to build several cities at once across different parts of the expansive map, complicating the resource management mechanics as you have to provide supplies to your new settlements via marketplaces. The full release of Of Life and Land has made this trade system even more robust, allowing your production choices to further impact other settlements, both the ones you control and the ones led by NPCs.
If the existing scenarios don’t strike your fancy, the game also features a detailed scenario builder. I find it reminiscent of the one in the original Age of Empires, which I used to use to design sadistically difficult maps for my dad. It allows an almost overwhelming amount of control, and I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible with it yet.
Despite spending many hours with Of Life and Land, I still feel like that about most of the game, to be honest. It took many restarts and retries for me to figure out how to get through my first winter without letting most of my population die from starvation or cold. This feels like an issue with me and not an issue with the game; the systems themselves are easy to understand, with the challenge coming from balancing resources and building on the lessons you’ve learned each time you play.
There are a few UI elements or shortcut keys that could be clearer. For example, there’s an amazing variety of decorative items now that allow you to make your cities feel more alive, but it took me ages to figure out that you can use ‘tab’ to cycle through the different designs, which also works for items like houses and lamp posts. Actually, I didn’t figure it out on my own; I posted in the Steam discussion boards and was answered by the developer. I had similar confusion about little things like how to demolish paths or how to change which animals the hunters were targeting, but considering how many detailed systems Of Life and Land is balancing, it’s unsurprising there are a few confusing elements to the systems.
From Steam reviews, it seems like some of these confusing elements have been game-breaking for some players. Thankfully, I didn’t experience that, but it seems like some players have noticed the same systems can behave in vastly different ways across different save files, despite settlements otherwise being built similarly. The developer—Kerzoven—is extremely responsive to player questions and feedback, and has offered plenty of advice to players. It’s part of why the game improved so much during the early access period, and will hopefully continue to have updates and growth despite now having a full release.
Overall, I think Of Life and Land is a good colony sim for people who are even tangentially interested in the genre. It has minimal bugs, a beautiful art style, and is a great way to spend an afternoon. Its approach builds on a familiar foundation and adds interesting new systems that I enjoyed experimenting with. For an expert on the genre, it may lack the nuance required to pull them away from their favourite title, but it’s well worth a try.
Of Life and Land was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
