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This game is like RimWorld but for Mobile | Full Review - Dream Land

8K View2023-03-23

Dream Land is a free-to-play construction and management simulation that puts players in charge of a group of travelers stranded on an alien planet.

🟩Pros

+Fun base building mechanics

+Engaging exploration elements

+Clean 2D visuals

🟥Cons

-Minor UI and camera controls woes

-Sluggish performance

📝Notable points:

Live service online game, not playable offline

Dream Land is a casual simulation game currently in the testing phase. It deals with four major gameplay elements. Base building, Resource Farming, Exploration, and Combat. All of these four aspects are all done by your team of survivors who in turn have basic necessities that you need to manage like sleep, food, and hygiene, highly reminiscent of popular games like The Sims and RimWorld.

The graphics are cartoonish with some non-anime chibi character designs, and the overall aesthetic feels like a 2D high quality indie game with clean detailed visuals and vibrant colors.

Dream Land features a base building element that is anchored by the main structure: The Base Management Center, a “Town Hall” of sorts that determines the settlement's base level. Upgrading it will result in more benefits and unlock more construction opportunities for buildings. Players can build walls, doorways, flooring, and many different objects such as workbenches, beds, and other furniture.

The whole system seems complex, but the hours-long tutorial section integrated in a main quest campaign system takes its time into really teaching the mechanics to the players. It is simple to follow, and overall the Base Building mechanics are very engaging and immersive. There is a high level of personalization and customization when it comes to building where players have complete control over every tile in your territory.

Aside from the required resources, buildings and upgrades will have prerequisite building and level requirements that you need to meet first before you can proceed, and it is a well crafted cycle that ensures all buildings are appropriately within a few levels of one another. There is always an attainable upgrade just around the corner, which makes it very enticing for players to keep coming back for more upgrades.

Of course, in order to build structures and upgrade them, players will need resources. This is where the resource gathering comes in. Players can issue commands to the team to take down trees for wood, mine for ores, and pick out fruits and plants. Players are also required to take part in farming or hunting to provide food for the settlement.

Farming, gathering, and even building structures can take time. For example, the crop I use takes 1 hour of real-time to grow, and you cannot skip this or fast forward the time.

Exploration in Dream Land comes in two flavors. Exploration around the settlement, where players can hunt, battle marauders, look for resources, and farm, and there is also the “World” exploration that allows players to travel beyond their settlement in an overworld that reminds me of Civilization’s hex tiles, participate in various activities such as enemy raids, looting, and defending important assets in a tower wave defense format.

The combat, while automated, is nicely presented with potent sound effects and satisfying enemy kills. The combat boils down to the team’s stats, level, and gear, versus the enemies’, plus strategic positioning and tactical placement of units and towers.

Exploration is often rewarded with various resources, items, and upgrades, providing players with a sense of accomplishment and progress. Players may also encounter challenging raids and defense missions that require both good gear and strategy to overcome.

Despite the casual look, the whole game is fully simulated, with each of the player’s commands requiring a survivor to physically execute, running around the settlement every so often. Crafting using the workbench, gathering wood, or building structures will occupy a survivor’s time.

Even as simple as moving furniture is done by the survivor. The queuing system works really well and players won’t have to worry about any pathing or queueing issues that may arise from constantly issuing back and forth random commands for the survivors to do.

Since Dream Land is free to play, there is a main currency called gold that you can use to speed things up, unlock more slots in crafting, or to add more moves to the World exploration. However, in-app purchases aren’t implemented yet in my knowledge, so the game is 100% free to play as of the moment.

As far as the technical experience goes, I found Dream Land not very well optimized for in general, considering it has 2D indie graphics, the performance felt sluggish overall. In addition, I get disconnected too easily when moving in and out of the app while playing. For a mostly single player experience, it is heavily reliant on online connectivity. The hard to use camera panning controls could use a bit of refining too, as well as minor gripes with how the build menu doesn’t have names of the structures unless you hold select them.

Conclusion:

Dream Land is a promising game with already fun base building and social simulation elements. Its exploration and progression system are already compelling enough to keep players coming back. The closest thing I can compare it to is the PC game RimWorld, so If you love that game, then checking this game out is a no brainer. The monetization model is still not finalized, but expect to have some sort of in-app purchases down the line.

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