BULWARK - Open World Apocalyptic Fortress Colony Survival

What's up guys? The girls are welcome back to the nerdy Castle today in the

world

of indie games. We'll take a look at a title called Baluarte. This is a bit strange. This is from the developer who created the Falconer and this is a strange and strange city building Colony

survival

Logistics like it has many hats, but it takes place as a water

world

where there is a very limited space that you can build and the entire game it's about figuring out how you can obtain certain resources. to certain areas to make certain upgrades so that when pirates attack or when you're under assault by various factions or like wars or anything else, you have the best industry flow possible to give you an advantage and this is a strange game.

I've been playing it for about an hour and have some thoughts on it, but let's dive in for about 30 minutes. Take a look at this demo to see if it's something you like and if it's something you want to achieve. You can play this demo yourself right now if you want. I have the link for you below in the description and you can also check out my Discord and my Twitch stream in case you want to hang out. live, this is a limited demo. I don't know if we're going to get a full 30 minutes out of it because we can only build 50 things as we go, but 50 lasted 30 minutes when I was playing with the game, no. problem, so hopefully everything will be fine, let's dive into this is the campaign mode, here you can try the

open

world building sandbox, it has a basic tutorial, a resource system based only on distance instead of in the amount you can produce and an ever-growing set of encounters, world events and unlockables, the developer took the time to animate itself and not just animate itself, animate a conceptualized version of itself in the game and then also act as a tutorial for the purposes of this demo, that's what will do it right. that's multi-level talent because the guy's not a bad voice actor he actually saw a suitable landmass up ahead looks like we've found our new home we need a place for our people to rebuild find us our decent place in the shallows or on Atop A Mighty Cliff, so this is our airship.

There are a couple of different facets to this game. This game is essentially about building towers that connect them with walkways and you do it in a UI-less environment, so this game doesn't have a building menu. The little icons of the building you want to build are implemented contextually based on where you hover over, so if you want to build next to this stone courtyard right here, the game will rightly assume that you want to build a quarry right there. for lumberjacks, same for iron mining, etc., for now we need to find a place to support our first tower and I like the idea of ​​our first tower being on the top of this cliff right here, so here we go.

We'll right click on it and as you can see our people will settle whatever you built, it will require wood to do so, so use your surveyor to find some sea trees, the giant mushrooms that grow in these parts, there's our first Tower, if we press. Space bar will take us to construction mode and we can take a better look at this little building we just built. The buildings have a couple of levels at the moment, they start with basic stone and iron effectively, so I think we actually need to get it. Making a lumberjack right here will probably work best, so put the lumberjack in the water because you can make buildings that are in the water on pontoons and float and work perfectly fine, but you can't build them. in the depths, so the deep water is a darker blue and if you build there, it is automatically a port and ports are used to establish trade routes to get resources from far away places back to the Central Kingdom, sure enough, now it What we need to do is have a wood mill that will feed our basic construction needs connected to our outpost.

We should have enough wood to build towers and walkways between them. What we want to do now is connect them with walkways so that the wood returns to our central tower. Get resources to where they are needed and bring settlers. Start by building our first walkway. Now it's great, we have our first resource, but there is more time to find a suitable quarry for the rock and we can upgrade our buildings and walkways, just like our outposts did. Did you build it correctly right there? He says it seems you didn't connect. In fact, it connected. In fact, you can press tab at any time to check which resources are going to areas, so orange is always wood and green is always labor and workers.

I think blue is stone and I think purple is iron, so what we need to do now is exit construction mode and while he repeats, we're going to build a quarry right here, so there's what we left . a lot of supplies and the quarry has been built, this should produce stone, now we need to go to construction mode, make sure it is connected and you will be able to upgrade the wooden towers and walkways to stone towers and walkways, which the game does not make. What I'm saying here is that upgrading your gateways specifically allows your resources to travel further, towards the periphery of your kingdom as it gets bigger and bigger, that's the context of why you want to build those gateways, so the tutorial does a good job of getting the basic mechanics down but it kind of doesn't give you context as to why you should do things, basically I was going to say that it should be built like Stone and as you can see your people flow on their own and your population is your labor will increase right here, that was a three a second ago, now it's a four because someone built a little cabin right there and someone built a little work yard right there, basically, so it's like interesting things were happening, so that's how it was.

Done, we'll be back here, look at all the little houses that have been built along the Bluffs right there. I don't know if they're using zip lines to get between these hallways or if they like what they're doing, but oh well. that's great, we need to upgrade this Tower, here we go, you can upgrade something by selecting it and simply right clicking on its base in various places, it will be more useful, it will also require us to build a Port connection set. So now that this is Stone, it's the key to the full potential of our settlement, oh, there you go, there's another little building down here, some kind of glass or grinder or something.

I don't know what it is, but they didn't build it. The last time I played, a lot of the things in this game I don't know exactly what they are because the game doesn't say that you will do some combination of building walkways and towers and that you will like a new building. I've never seen him appear next to one of his industrial buildings and wonder: what is this building here? What are you doing? You can't select it. It appears to be some kind of upgrade to the Quarry. I guess and then also because of our lumber mill, if you take a look, they built like a little Paddock right there that stores the lumber and they have like a little boat here.

I don't know what the little boat does, but I built a little boat, all kinds of weird things are happening, they want me to go look for an iron resource here. I think I'm going to do like a little spit over here actually we'll put it there and then have this guy go to this rock here and then maybe we'll do it oh yeah that would be cool oh it's ruined wait I got than kill him, here we go, I want him to climb to the top of that. rock right there, but I don't know if he'll let me do it, it's a little hard to tell from the camera angles, in all honesty, sometimes it worked, hey, it worked, we have like a little lighthouse tower over here, good friend, uh .

It doesn't look like the stone is traveling far enough to upgrade all of this, but it goes far enough to upgrade there and it goes far enough to upgrade here and then I think yeah, we can upgrade that to Stone from time to time. Unfortunately I can't upgrade that building, yeah unfortunately the wood is still kept there so it doesn't really matter, but what I can do is maybe have a cross plot that goes up there. Hey, there's our little stone walkway and you can see it. What did they build? Oh, it's like a little Mori mines, it's like a little Stone Gate that you enter to be able to get to that upper Tower and that has given us enough to be able to turn this into stone now because the transit network is more strong and then I can upgrade it to Stone.

Unfortunately, it had a bug there and it doesn't look very pretty. They're still like, usually the building works organically, but sometimes it gets a little weird. clips through things now I'm going to go back to my combine and we're going to go get the iron that's on this side and then we're going to have to update everything to make sure resource transit is working. Reasonably well, unfortunately we have a pretty nasty storm going on at the moment, so there's an iron mine around here that's doable. There is also another one on that other side. I don't know which iron mine will be the most effective. to play because it used buildings called Ports to travel those really long distances and if you get a limited amount of Ports then you have to be careful where you place them, you can really mess yourself up. putting the ports in bad places, let's come back here.

Luckily, you can tear them down and rebuild them if you don't like them, but let's still put the iron mine right there. The iron mine is now in place and then we have we have a port the port can be right here our port has been built and as you can see it is now producing iron we have to assign captains for this and the captains have specialties some captains specialize in moving wood some of them specialize in moving workers some of them specialize in moving stone this guy is good with iron so let's assign him.

Ports should always be built in pairs, as soon as you build two, a trade route will connect them, ships will appear to carry your resources over long distances, yes, and so on now. You're going to want to build a sort of sister pair for this trade route and once again we need to find a good place for it to be. I think that's the best place. It is a long time to achieve it. there, but if I put it on this side it will limit how I can build and sooner or later I will have to bring more Stone, so I would like to keep this Port free here so I can bring Stone. around that speaker over there maybe, so I know this seems a little redundant and it seems like I'm building that further than I should.

You should be able to focus on building the command tower. They can also be updated with additional faults. So many foundations and balconies are fine, so I don't like this, almost not at all, our metal is barely moving at the moment, which is kind of a bummer. I could get it to expand even more if I focus on these towers, a powerful command, so there's the metal and there's a metal tower right there and then if I connect them with a metal walkway, that helps me at all, unfortunately it doesn't help me, so what we might want to do is we can actually get rid of that and I'll come back and put it here like I prefer the shorter path.

I think it will help the iron spread faster. I was trying to play with my meta knowledge from the last time I played the game and there it is. Come on, we'll plug it in right there. I don't know if I can get any closer as I want it to connect to the central building because then it will transmit our iron further. We are having the same problem here that we had. in the other place, which is that the iron wobbles a little as it enters the Central Area because it passes by a building that can't be upgraded yet first, like I'm pretty sure I can't upgrade this building.

So here is my thought. I feel like we killed this wood right here to move it to the back of that mountain so we can build a command tower in place of this thing and then we have a direct shot. with our iron because I feel like this building is causing problems, that's what I feel, so let's try to rebuild this here and then once we've rebuilt it, it's not strong enough to build on, oh, we better you resolve. Boss, the slope is too steep to build on. I do not think it is. I believe we now have solid resources at our disposal.

You should be able to focus on building the command tower. They can be improved with additional glitches and lots of bases. and balconies, I mean, the wood is doing its best right now, that extra walking distance is causing a problem, we can update them so that every time you click on the base it makes it one step higher, so if you do did right there We are right to take this and go up as if you knew another. We could make a bridgesociety expands and then? You know things like this attack you, it's very interesting to me.

I would have, oh, there's another iron mine around here. I don't know if that's a bad thing. I'm just incorporating everyone into my world right now. Honestly, I feel like I should have left that standing because it would have increased the population next to this iron production site. Now I feel silly like maybe it was a smart decision to keep that there and then. I could have connected this since adding another Transit pilot didn't really affect anything there. I could reallocate it here to leave iron on this side, which would allow us to expand a little more in various directions, like on this ridge here, and make our society bigger, so I think maybe I made a mistake, it's about I'm leaning towards possibly making a mistake here, huh?

We'll leave it right here and then do the treeing. Right there, foreigner, I'm not going to assign a captain for a second, what's up with this Forge Master? Young remnant of the free house. I suppose the fires of red-mouthed Orthodoxy welcome you and wish to bring the glory of the Holy Ore to your settlement, I suppose since we do. built, oh man, look, it's got like a whale's mouth on it, so it's a specialized faction version of an iron mine, huh? I wonder what the pirate iron mine will look like. That's really interesting, as there are a lot of things here that come together. my brain and I'm saying: Oh, that's something unique, oh, that's something unique.

In fact, I'm at the end of my 30 minutes. I feel like I'm excited about this. I can't say that I completely understand it or that I like it. which is still because it seems like there are a lot of pieces and placeholders missing. I'm excited to see what the final version of this will look like with your buildings being attacked by outside enemies and like shit, your towers crumbling and falling into the ocean. Throwing splashes and waves like this feels like something that could become something really cool for now, it's still kind of theoretical but what I see here so I have a couple I guess I usually get my final thoughts right on a lot of this .

The game is still theoretical as to how everything will work because certain systems are not fully implemented yet. The way I see it, there are a couple things during these 30 minutes and the 30 minutes I played before recording this that seem potential to me. the things that need to be worked on, first of all, the camera is a little fiddly, the camera system works eighty percent of the time, but specifically when you're messing around with buildings and trying to get roads out of those buildings if there is a distance or high altitude differences. between where you want to go, sometimes it runs into strange places and places bad roads and then you have to bulldoze them and then you have to try to hit it from a different angle and it took me two or three tries, three or four tries to place a building on the place I want it to go and after an hour or two of playing you'll discover the quirks of how the perspective system works, but I can't help but feel that quality of life wise it should work a little better and this is kind of of useless feedback because I don't know, I think if you're going to give feedback you should provide a replacement system or a replacement idea to play with, but given how the game is

open

world and completely in three spaces, it's hard to say.

I mean, I don't know what the middle mouse button does in this game. One thing I think they could do is switch the camera to the middle mouse button when you hold it down, it seems like that just changes the orientation of my Harvester for now and I don't know what that's for but I think it would be able to pan and yaw like everything that kind of thing right next to the middle mouse. It's a good idea, so we basically have full x and z movement on the middle mouse button when we're moving and it's locked like this.

I think it would help a little bit because then that would eliminate the conflict that is with right clicking, but yeah. the camera the camera is the number one point where I feel like it will need to be done a little bit to make it feel a little better and unfortunately I'm not being very helpful with that suggestion because I don't know how the game works and how you need to build on each surface of each field and each angle. I don't know what could be done, yes, it's hard to say. I don't know, the camera is the main thing and then I think about the game.

He needs a little more context for the tutorial and like why he's doing certain things he's doing rather than just how to do them, but I think that context is missing right now because the systems haven't been finalized from what he he said in that blurb before starting the game and anyway this is Bolt's job, my name is splattercat. I sift through the stack to find what's worth it in the indie gaming world so you don't have to dampen The Chopping. Block, we have the next game called

bulwark

, created by the developer of the falconer, which takes place in the same universe.

If you're familiar with that game, I'll see you all later, thanks for sharing your time with me and that's it. about everything I have for you for now, for now this is a very compelling and interesting game, but until all the pieces are there, I'm very hesitant to give it my thumbs up. I guess that's kind of where I am. Right now we will check again when it is more contiguous. See you next time, thank you all.