Laysara Summit Kingdom Switch Review

Laysara Summit Kingdom Switch Review
Version Reviewed: Nintendo Switch

I love playing my strategy games, and while Joshua is away from the keyboard, I have to say I think The Settlers: New Allies is a fantastic game. So much so that when being assigned reviews, I really wanted to play Lysara: Summit Kingdom. It looked like an interesting take on the city builder genre, forgetting about soldiers and war, and focusing on building an economy while expanding up the side of a mountain. This is Courtenay asking What’s it like? Get your climbing supplies, pay your workers, and build some bridges as we have a yak about Lysara: Summit Kingdom.

Lysara: Summit Kingdom puts you in the yak-fur-lined boots of the town planner and asks you to build up the kingdom of Lysara. To do this, you will manage three castes: Lowlanders, who are your farmers and workers; Artisans, who provide more skilled resources; and Monks, considered the highest of the castes. To manage their needs, you have to build and establish trade routes, manually selecting where to send goods for processing to start production chains, as well as manage roads, workers, and most importantly, coin. Each level will offer unique challenges, which may mean managing workers and setting up settlements close to rivers for Artisan baths, or building higher up to manage the needs of your Monks to be closer to enlightenment. Working out how to set up a salt, copper or crystal mine and then how and where to send those deposits to work in with your town’s requirements. Sometimes, while following the tasks set out by the game, you’d accidentally create the need for ad hoc workers, which cost a lot of money. You’d then find yourself going back into the housing set up for lowlanders, artisans or monks to get rid of the need for adhoc worker as quickly as possible. It’s up to you to decide what to prioritise in order to keep your bank reserves looking healthy. While there aren’t any military aspects to the game, you do have to battle natural disasters in the form of avalanches, which can be handled with careful building placement and special walls to keep your villagers safe. If that fails, you also have Mr Plow to save the day.

It is a delicate balancing act, almost too delicate at times, which can mean having to restart more frequently than one would hope. The main issue is that the game wants to hold your hand a lot of the time, and if you let go, things crumble rather quickly. This leaves you waiting for the game to let you proceed, but it never really lets you take the initiative in the campaign. There were so many times where I planned ahead and built accordingly for what my community needed, only to be punished by steep upkeep on roads and buildings, or ad hoc workers. This frustration is amplified when you have to manage multiple towns and trade networks across mountains.

While this may sound like a skill issue, it is simply that I feel Lysara: Summit Kingdom holds itself back by holding you back, forcing you to wait minutes on end for the game to tell you where you need to be. Even then, where you need to be sometimes means undoing previous work that you were explicitly instructed to do, leaving a frustrating back-and-forth of downgrading paths or removing buildings to maintain upkeep on the simplest things. You have a balance of 2k, but if you overspend and accidentally hit unpause while editing to get rid of your ad hoc workers or downgrade your path, the bank account quickly empties, leaving you with a lost game and feeling of annoyance. I feel that Lysara could benefit from budgetary management like in Cities: Skylines or a similar system.

It is not just the gameplay mechanics that stop me from scaling the mountains; technical hiccups also get in the way. Camera movement is fickle, and you never seem to get used to how it works. The user interface is unruly and difficult to navigate. Along with this, the game would frequently freeze up when I had the time paused trying to edit and the only way to get out of it was to reset back to the homescreen and close the software entirely. It is such a shame that all these little problems rolled up into a big issue that stopped me from playing in frustration. I love this genre of game, and I wanted to love Lysara, but unfortunately, it gets in its own way.

Despite being built for the Switch 1, with no Switch 2 upgrades, Lysara: Summit Kingdom looks really nice in both handheld and docked play. I really enjoyed noticing all the small touches, like workers sitting on a piece of wood while chatting to others, or villagers going about their daily routines. There were also amusing touches, like villagers clinging desperately to the side of their house because their ladder fell down. You’d scroll by then have to double back when you realised what was going on. It is almost like watching an ant farm. The mountain environments are well-designed and visually appealing, although the clouds have a speckled, dot-matrix look, which is most likely a choice for optimisation. Overall, the game does a great job of making the settlements feel alive and gives you plenty to look at while planning your kingdom.

Lysara: Summit Kingdom costs $37.50 on the Australian eShop and includes an extensive campaign as well as a free play mode, so there is a lot of gameplay here if the technical issues are something you do not mind putting up with. As these issues seem to affect multiple platforms, I feel the developers will patch the game and address some of the problems.

As I said, I wanted to love Lysara: Summit Kingdom. It had all the hallmarks for my type of game: trade and production routes, managing multiple settlements, and not having to worry about an enemy village laying waste to yours. On paper, it is all there. Unfortunately, in practice, it was a little too frustrating for my tastes. Like the avalanches in the game, a lot of smaller, annoying things kept gaining momentum, eventually washing away my enthusiasm for the game.

So, What’s it Like? Laysara Summit Kingdom is like The Settlers and Cities XL, precariously set on the side of a mountain.

In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this doesn’t influence my score.

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