Folklands Review — Frontier Education

Stepping into the independent city-builder and colony sim Folklands, it is easy to get hit with a nostalgic vibe immediately.

This is due in no small part to the game’s visual style. Pixelated graphics are presented from a fixed camera angle, giving you an intentionally designed view that harkens back to the original Age of Empires titles. Grid-based building connects your entire colony together in a classic, albeit somewhat dated, approach that would be familiar to anyone who played a city builder or RTS game from the early 2000s.

That nostalgic vibe persists throughout the game, as it mixes some very familiar core gameplay loops from the aforementioned era of RTS games with some innovative takes. The most familiar system, and perhaps the game’s most daunting to control, would be the worker-based resource delivery system. Again, if you’ve played a city-building game, this should be fairly familiar: your economy is entirely based around the ability your workers have to physically deliver goods throughout the colony. I’ll admit that, in Folklands, I was left a bit confused by exactly how this system works, as often I was told that the logistical workload of my colony was low, yet in practice many buildings and construction sites were late with their deliveries. I’ll chalk this up to my own incompetence as a logistical player, because I never really considered myself all that good at these systems in similar games.

Education is one incredibly interesting mechanic in Folklands. In most city-building games that feature education, the actual process of educating your population is something of a hands-off experience: You build a school, and your population passively becomes smarter, unlocking an employment tier or special status over time. In Folklands, education is depicted more realistically through intent and investment: educating each population member costs a lump sum of gold, as any modern teacher would tell you. Doing so makes them better workers, but it’s also a per-person decision, one that takes them away from work, instead of something that just sort of passively spreads through your population. I think this is an incredibly unique way to do an education system, and makes the process of increasing the knowledge of your population more of a strategic choice than it would be in other games.

I also found the exploration system, used to expand your town’s buildable area, pretty interesting. Particularly in how your explorers must discover minerals in the ground by exploring rocky soil, sometimes that which is already in your own territory. It’s a far cry from the usual approach, which is for these mineral nodes to just be noticeable resources from above ground, and it adds a bit to the gameplay loop that I appreciated.

Unfortunately, many experienced city-builder or colony-sim players will find that the mechanics in Folklands are pretty light. There simply aren’t many production chains to build, nor are there a lot of meaningful uses for the resources. The game feels pretty bare-bones, and after about two or three hours of play you’ll see your village grow to the peak of its potential, and your ambition will begin to outgrow the requirements of your city.

I concluded after beating the tutorial (twice, don’t ask me why) and growing my first city that Folklands emulates the oldest city-building games a little too closely: Meaningful survival, economic, or warfare mechanics simply aren’t present in a way that challenges your city-building skills beyond simply fulfilling the most basic of supply and demand quotas.

For the price of the game, I can’t say this is too much of a problem. I imagine most players will get about six to eight hours of enjoyment out of the game before the novelty begins to wear off, which for about $15 isn’t a terrible ask. I do hope to see the game receive further updates in the future, however, expanding upon its core gameplay loop and giving more content to justify its price.

The biggest hiccup the game has, in my opinion, is performance, and this is an area I seriously think the title needs to devote itself to improving in the near future. With each citizen simulated, the game starts to chug and gets progressively worse as you continue to play and grow, until your FPS drops significantly low. Even on a modern machine built for reviewing the latest games, I noticed noticeable frame-rate chugging at just 100 villagers. Whatever causes this issue, it’s not one I see in other, more graphically intense city-building games, so I can only imagine it is some sort of coding problem.

If you’re looking for a simple, nostalgic indie city builder, I don’t think Folklands is a terrible entry, especially for its price. It certainly has some interesting mechanics, especially when it comes to how the game approaches education and exploration. However, it is hard to say the title holds up against other indie city-building games, such as Farthest Frontier or Manor Lords, both of which take a similar approach to Folklands‘ mechanics but offer much more depth. However, if you’re feeling nostalgic, Folklands just might scratch that old-timey itch for you, and transport you back to an era of simpler city builders with beautiful pixelated graphics.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Folklands. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Folklands is available on Steam.