Survival crafting games have always been something that I have had a hard time getting into. There is something about managing all sorts of different resources and ensuring that the residents are taken care of. Managing meters and making the adjustments on the fly might be a task for some but for those who are fully engaged with these kinds of mechanics, HomeSeek will be a pleasant surprise for you.
HomeSeek will have us taking part in two different campaigns that span across nine different chapters. You can opt to take these chapters on in three different modes which include Survival, Endless, and Story mode. I personally enjoyed Story mode over the other two due to the fact I was able to work towards a set goal to see the end of the chapters. Survival will have your progress carrying over between chapters and this was a daunting experience due to the fact that I was concerned about messing up in the early game. By completing the first 5 chapters, you will be able to unlock the rest of the chapters that can be found in part two. With different playmodes to enjoy along with a selection of difficulty modes to sort through, there is bound to be something here for those who enjoy this genre.
Gameplay consists of an overhead view, similar to other games in the genre such as SimCities and Frostpunk. This will give you the ability to move the camera around to get a good idea of the landscape that is at your disposal. It will be important to lay out a plan when it comes to building structures since you will have to focus on both bringing in resources as well as ensuring the proper connections are made. Sending workers to pluck berries from bushes is pointless if you don’t have a food storage building located nearby. I ended up scrapping my first playthrough since I wasn’t satisfied with the layout I had set up. This would potentially be enough to put off players who are not fans of this genre or those who have a hard time sticking with something after making a major mistake.
As you go about setting up different buildings and collecting different resources, you will find a plethora of information awaiting you with all of the tabs on the screen. HomeSeek does a wonderful job of supplying you with all the information that you will need right away but this can be a little overwhelming in the beginning. One thing I really enjoyed was the ability to assign workers to a certain building and then check the details on the worker. You can see their names and where they are living if you have assigned them to one of the houses you can build. I ended up building a home for one of the workers well before the tutorial had asked me to and it was nice to see that I could take the next steps without the game having to hold my hand the entire time. This level of freedom was pleasant but did land me in a weird situation where I was unsure of what to do. Thankfully a quest log can be seen off to the left side of the screen that keeps track of your current progress on the quest you have.
Over the course of the game, you will have to ensure that you are taking care of the people that you have in your camp, otherwise you will see them pass away. One thing that you will have to keep in mind is the fact that people will pass away and sometimes you just have to let them go. Loading the save and trying again is a possibility but it is important to realize that this also means one less mouth to feed so others are able to survive for a little bit longer. This was interesting enough to help keep me engaged with some of the decisions to be made here but unfortunately, it was not enough to keep me interested during the slower parts of gameplay.
Daytime is where a lot of our gameplay will take place since nighttime will have us simply resting. This means that there will be no resources collected as well as no progress made on the work we had our people doing. I often found myself just watching time pass during these moments and while you are capable of speeding time up to make things progress faster, I felt like this was something that could have been handled on the back end by automatically speeding up.
While the game was quite enjoyable for the first few moments, by the time I made it to the part where I was able to send out people on expeditions, I was ready to close it out. There is a lot here for those who are fans of the genre and it definitely has the ability to capture the attention of those who enjoy when their actions have weight but the constant waiting around for things to be done can be quite off putting. I often found myself scrolling through my phone while waiting for resources to build up or for my workers to finish constructing some of my buildings. Things move extremely slow and while we have the ability to bump things up to three times the normal speed, there was nothing that really encouraged me to take those next steps. Homeseek is fun when you are locked into the gameplay loops but the moment you hit that first bump in the road in regards to waiting on something, the flaws start to come out. This is a major make or break moment for those who are on the fence here and nothing is really done to persuade you into continuing the game.
