An upcoming incremental strategy clicker is taking on the civilization-building theme in an interesting way: Knowing that you're going to collapse, eventually, before starting over. Indie developer Ondrej Homola's game Microcivilization has you ascending through tiers of difficulty by building progressively larger civilizations before you either choose to—or are forced to—ascend, gaining currency to spend on bonuses for future runs.
It sounds pretty standard for the incremental and/or idle genres birthed by the proliferation of clicker games last decade. What sets Microcivilization apart is that it's packed with some really very pretty pixel art and particle effects that help the whole thing look pretty dang good while you're tapping away.
A demo release during Steam Next Fest was pretty intriguing, allowing you a look at the Neolithic and Classical Age as shown off in Microcivilization. My favorite part, really, was that the goal was to build a tower of Babel. Each new layer of the tower built would kick off an disaster you had to survive. Presumably because, yeah, God doesn't like that.
The active disasters in the game are cool, requiring you to generate and spend military units to take down the disaster's overall health pool and walls or forts to avert its worst effects. Equipping different leaders lends itself to different strategies. You can stun the progress of disasters, enabling you to slowly whittle them down, or focus on big bursts of damage at the expense of defense.
The final game looks like it'll have a variety of periods. Screenshots and videos released by over the last year or so of development show periods ranging from classical and ancient to medieval, early modern, and industrial periods complete with power plants and enemy attacks like air raids. It's a lot of cool-looking gameplay, so this'll be one to keep an eye on if you like the genre.
Developer Ondrej Homola intends to release Microcivilization before the end of 2023. You can find Microcivilization on Steam.
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