Well, the NFL season has been as good as over for us Bears fans since November, which means my interest in this year's slate of football video games is waning. That means it's time once again to dive into my back catalog of Steam games. This time, I decided to boot up Depraved, a wild west city-builder that was sitting on my wishlist for years (back when it was still in early access), and which I bought during a sale earlier this summer.
Having really enjoyed Banished many years ago, I've had my eye on other historic city builders like Depraved, Foundation, Builders of Egypt, Atomic Society, and others. Depraved is probably the closest thing to Banished that I'm likely to find. It's basically just Banished with a wild west theme instead of a medieval theme.
Depraved shares a lot in common with Banished [RIGHT].
Depraved shares a lot in common with Banished. Both games are about small, relatively isolated communities of pioneers trying to get by in a harsh, unrelenting environment. Both require stocking up food, firewood, and warm clothing in time for cold winters. And both use depleting resource reserves to force players to expand out further into the map.
Where Depraved differs from Banished is that Depraved has a much greater focus on trade. Unlike in Banished (which has the player constructing one mega-settlement), Depraved keeps settlements relatively small, but allows the player to create additional satellite towns on the map, which can each be specialized for the exploitation of specific resources or the production of specific goods. Then all those small towns can trade raw resources and manufactured goods with each other. There's also small Native American tribes that the player can trade (or war) with, as well as the occasional bandit camp popping up to harass your population and rob your bank.
The other big difference is that Banished is a much better and more polished game.
How does any of this work?
My experience with Depraved suffered greatly from the lack of a robust and informative tutorial. If I recall correctly, Banished's tutorial takes the player through a guided scenario through creating a small settlement and surviving the first winter. There's still a lot of trial-and-error in Banished, but the tutorial does a good job of covering all the basics.
Depraved, on the other hand, gave me four pop up widgets explaining the basic mechanics in text, then just let me loose on the map. There's no playable tutorial at all, and additional tutorial pop-ups are few, far between, and less informative than I would like them to be. This lead to me just sort of winging-it for my first settlement, then restarting after I had self-taught myself the basics.
This is your idea of a tutorial?!
Don't get me wrong. Depraved isn't unplayably awful. It just isn't very good at explaining itself and requires a lot of tedious micro-management. If you're fine with that, then this game will be enjoyable enough. In fact, the first few hours are thoroughly enjoyable. Depraved starts off very small and simple, with just a single settlement, a dozen or so pioneers, and a few buildings. Getting the basics of hunting for food and chopping down trees for lumber is simple enough that the player can learn on the fly. It doesn't require extensive tutorials in these early hours.
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