Pioneers of Pagonia Early Access review – solid foundations

If Early Access is a statement of intent, then Pioneers of Pagonia means business. It’s a colony sim inspired by The Settlers and led by Volker Wertich, the original creator of Ubisoft’s storied city builder. With such esteemed alums comes expectation, notably after the lacklustre The Settlers: New Allies released earlier this year. After spending some time piecing together several thriving settlements, I’m happy to report that Pioneers of Pagonia is more than a worthy homage. It does more than enough to stand confidently alongside its inspiration, especially with the promise of further development to flesh out its very few shortcomings. At the risk of spouting platitudes, it’s The Settlers game fans have been patiently awaiting for years.

The starting formula is your typical city builder fare: a starter pack of workers and resources housed on a docked ship and a small patch of resource-rich land to lay down the foundations of your colony. Down go woodcutters and quarries before you graduate to producing tools, fabrics, and refined ores – 40 different buildings and 70 types of goods, to be precise. Your settlement swells into a city as survival turns to prosperity, ever-expanding your reach as scurrying guards lay down border stones further and further into unclaimed territory. It’s hard to ignore the idyllic and rural charm of Pioneers of Pagonia’s gently angled rooftops, verdant plains, and errant wildlife.

One of Pioneers of Pagonia’s best features is the weaving and interlocked branching production chains. At first, deciphering the glut of information thrust at you is daunting; numerical resource counters crowd the top of the screen, you can build every building from the start of each map, and production blockages can feel like unsolvable puzzles. But, there’s a genuine pleasure in taking the time to comprehend the workings of a successful colony and harnessing production to meet settler needs while producing increasingly valuable goods, trading with villages, and recruiting an army. Its rewards stack up the more you play, revealing depth to its systems that, for a game that eschews the moment-to-moment unit movement of an RTS, offers heaps of control and micromanagement. It lies in assigning gathering points, choosing what tools to produce, went to send patrolling guards, and what specific resources to gather, all so you can grow and expand your territory at your own pace.

Pioneers of Pagonia’s focus is very much on economic simulation and steady territorial expansion, which instils a cosy, almost sluggish feel with little in the way of imminent threats, at least in most of the maps on offer in the current Early Access build. But, despite its slower pace, Pioneers of Pagonia is by no means dull. Settlements come to life as they expand and settlers go about their business, scuttling to and fro, soundtracked by pounding hammers, busy chatter, and the crunch of felled trees. It all taps into what developer Envision calls ‘Wuselfaktor’, a German term typically used to describe the city-builder genre that alludes to the palpable pleasure of witnessing the hustle and bustle of interdependent components flowing through a sophisticated network. Think queues of villagers ferrying resources between production buildings, builders rushing to the next construction site, and a growing city that heaves and breathes despite the player’s role as an omniscient city planner.

While its cosy appeal is enough to draw the player in, Pioneers of Pagonia introduces a range of hostile foes and tilts towards fantasy on its tougher maps. Thieves and bandits will regularly raid your stocks and cause a nuisance as you try to expand, so ignoring them isn’t advised. On the Early Access’ final map, werewolves join the fray, which are virtually immune to standard soldiers. Any troops that die at the hands of werewolves turn into souped-up canines themselves. Attack with a small force, and your soldiers will all die, bolstering the werewolves’ numbers and making your next attempt to take them out even tougher. And, you’ll need to take them out sooner or later as their camps are usually near resources indispensable to your expansion. This is a welcome ramping up of the difficulty as you pivot to feeding and equipping a large army with limited access to resources in the relative safety of the starting area. The steady, unhindered growth of early maps is replaced by a sense of urgency and the need for tactical economic growth to not waste scarce resources, which adds a new problem-solving dimension to your colonial efforts.

As an Early Access release, Pioneers of Pagonia does come with its share of excusable annoyances. The building placement grid’s accuracy is temperamental, leaving gaping holes in your carefully planned city that you’d reserved for this or that quarry, forester, or armorsmith, which now won’t fit. During particularly long sessions on a single map, there appeared to be a point where carriers would stop working, causing an economic standstill as resource requests weren’t fulfilled. These are all minor issues, though, that, given the otherwise excellent state of the game, are almost guaranteed to be fixed before a 1.0 release.

There’s always a bit of a gamble with Early Access, not helped by the recent wild mess surrounding The Day Before. But, thankfully, Pioneers of Pagonia in its current form is a robust city builder that could almost pass as a full-fledged, complete game. Upcoming new systems, buildings, and improvements like subsurface mining, fishing huts, and enhanced building placement, coupled with a general lick of polish laid out in Envision’s roadmap, will only make the game more delightful to play. If you’re a disgruntled Settlers fan or even partial to city builders in general, Pioneers of Pagonia isn’t just one to keep an eye on, but one that’s worth buying right now.