LakeSide Review (Early Access)

We have had a glance at LakeSide, a city building/management sim. Developed by Massive Galaxy Studios and in Early Access but released on Steam.

The game starts you out on an empty island connected to land by a bridge. Where your goal is to turn this little island into a thriving metropolis and a Wonder to the World.

You start out with the bare minimum, a house and a farm. But after you solve some tasks and build more houses for more people to move in you get rewards in the form of cards that can be chosen. These cards represent buildings you can build in order to increase your max population, bigger houses to fit more people, special buildings giving you perks like gold income and much more. It’s all about expanding and growing your population as high as you can go, The Ultimate goal as of the time of writing is to reach 5 Wonders to win the game.

The game already has a ton of different buildings, enough to have you stop mid-way and think hard about what buildings you should replace. Oh yeah, your space is severely limited. You have to rethink your strategy all the time and when you get new better buildings you have to replace those hard-earned cute buildings you already built. You can even build water buildings after a while which helps out a ton.

The game seems very simple to begin with, but an hour into the game you start to feel pretty overwhelmed. There are so many options to choose from, and replayability even now is very good!

The game is still in active development and features quite frequent updates. According to the developers, the game will have its full release in between half a year to a year. This means a lot is still to be added to the game, which already has a lot of content. This is a big plus!
They will be adding amongst other things more buildings, diplomacy and more victory conditions.

The game has a very cute pixel art theme with nicely animated objects that shine through, although I personally would love the resolution to be a bit higher i.e. the pixel art be more detailed. I often find myself looking REALLY HARD to find the building on the top row to replace, that sometimes are hard to distinguish from each other. The GUI is also an improvement I am looking forward to. It’s glitching out sometimes. Maybe fit in one more row of buildings and or group them together to be more easily found. If you are far into the game finding the upgraded building you want is a scroll scroll effort. But I digress.

The game is well worth a playthrough or ten! If you like Pixel art in general this is a must, and if you like the Kingdom series games this might be for you as well! (my personal opinion) And if you love sandbox games, this should be your next try! We are looking forward to updates from the developers and awaiting the full release.