Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown Review

RTS city-builders aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and that's a safe bet. The genre enjoys a good amount of releases each year, but most lack depth or have many underlying issues that prevent them from being good games. Nowadays, these games require some quirks to set them apart. 

Whether it is through the lens of a cult, like in the case of Worshippers of Cthulhu, or through the machinations of a dictator, like the popular Tropico series, almost every city-building game comes with twists, hoping to make them stand out in the crowd.

Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown is a city-building game that dabbles in the RTS genre because of its uniqueness. Set in a low fantasy world, it is in the same vein as Tropico and Anno, with its city-building based on grids. 

In contrast to games like Manor Lords, where the building is much more free-form and open-ended, in Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown, you get to be like an architect and commit some serious and meticulous urban planning.

Developed by Zugalu Entertainment as their first game, Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown is the newest entry into the city-building genre. It is produced by Playside, the fantastic folks behind KILL KNIGHT.  The game starts off not too far from other contemporary city-builders like Norland and Manor Lords, giving you a choice between a few provinces where you start with your first town. You can get to the rest later, but that's for another time.

These provinces aren't really different from each other, giving you relatively the same locations with the same resources. Selecting each province gives you the opportunity to customize your flag and see the resources. Again, the resources aren't different in other regions, so this is probably a feature for later updates.

After selecting your province, you get a pop-up where you need to choose between three' interests,' these are vague selections that don't tell anything right off the bat. Selecting in-between then feels almost irrelevant. As you enter your new region, you start with a caravan that can deploy to build your keep. The keep is your central government.

Deploying the caravan drops the people inside it and gives you the option to place your keep. The keep isn't actually a keep yet, but it is more of a town center with two wooden structures. Like many city-building games, your people start homeless, so you better connect some roads to the keep and start building some houses.

You'll also need to place other essential structures, like a stockpile and different resource-gathering buildings. The map is reasonably flat and open, so you don't have to worry about space. However, efficiency is always good in these games, so make sure you plan things out. You then place the other essential structures, like the Quarrier camp, to collect rough stones and a logging camp for good old wood.

You will also need to build up food stores and build apple orchards around them. You will also need to build a Wood Chopper. These two provide Apples and Firewood, respectively. These buildings naturally need workers, and the higher the number of workers, the more production they have. 

Each structure has a range under which they work; this is called the area of influence. These areas of influence basically determine the extent of the area where they function, and some of these can be increased or reduced, although it is not evident why you would need them reduced.

Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown has a neat but small water mechanic: You place wells to draw in groundwater. In addition to providing drinking water, the well is also used to draw water to fight fires, an issue that you will need to deal with often. 

Once all the necessities are given, you should start to look over their Happiness. A meter that counts how many amenities they have. Happiness is mostly measured by their needs, and these houses are required to provide at least 2 Needs in order to entice people to move in.

In Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown, People with houses pay taxes, and the more housed people you have, the higher your income is. Low Happiness will reduce their income. It will also decrease population growth, and people may even leave. 

Alongside other issues, you might even increase the spread of disease. It's safe to say you don't want that. Truly discontented citizens may incite a revolt, during which production is grounded to a near-halt, and it is an all-around bad time.

After all that, you want to move into the second tier of production buildings, such as Outfitters and Fermenters, both of whom require the Hemp Farm. The outfitter produces clothes, and the Fermenter produces Cider from apples.

Somewhere along the way, you will gain an event where you must again choose between three options. And again, the outcomes aren't obvious, and the options themselves are incredibly vague. After many decisions from picking between your three advisors, you will gain a reward or incur losses. It is a neat but rather long and winded way of creating an event with choices.

Edicts in Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown are laws and regulations that you can enact to give your town a bonus. These cost upkeep can also lead to drawbacks. This 'policy' mechanic is not too different from the ones found in other games, such as Frostpunk's 2 Laws. Just like in that game, you don't have them unlocked immediately, and there are a few different ways of getting them.

The Tome of Knowledge is Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown's technology system. These techs are split into a few tiers. You start in tier 1, and the only way to get to the next tier is by meeting some prerequisites. 

The game calls its technologies' Expertise,' these techs provide certain benefits and give you a choice between at least two options. Once you select one of these, you lose out on the other, and this is permanent. Expertises have certain downsides to them, so they're not just bonuses only.

Going up a tier unlocks newer buildings and building types and upgrades your town to match a new aesthetic—it's almost like aging up. Masteries act like super-techs that are only obtained via events. These techs don't have any negatives but are rare to obtain. You can have masteries selected at a time, and they are described as incredibly powerful.

You can eventually expand and build more settlements, connecting them with certain buildings. Doing so will eventually disturb 'the natural world,' as the game calls it. And unleash Waelgrim, a purplish fog that disrupts your game in many ways, primarily by disrupting resource collection.

Eventually, you can create various units. These systems are pretty much like most addictive RTS games, and you are required to train them individually. You can build walls, towers, and siege engines and have access to a wide variety of units.

You use them to either defend your cities or attack other ones. Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown's Combat is one of the fun aspects of the game, giving you the most fun, mainly because it can be pretty hands-off.

After a while, the real content of the game ends, and honestly, it's a bit of a disappointment. The game has the usuals built into it. You play as a ruler, build stockpiles, collect resources, and expand. There's the policy mechanic and the things with the Waelgrim, but that's about it. And even then, it's not really fleshed out yet. All the foundations are there, but no one has built anything on top, mostly at least.

The RTS elements are very niche and come way later into your game. Seriously, you need around 9-10 hours of gameplay before you get soldiers out unless you're a Factorio veteran who's optimizing every nook and cranny. Other than that, the combat and fighting are quite fun, although you don't have to think too much about having a good unit composition.

This is incredibly frustrating as you don't have many options presented to deal with the first enemy. This really extends to the whole purple fog and plague thing. In theory, it is a cool concept, but so far, its execution is lacking. 

The various mechanics basically force you into certain playstyles, and this is incredibly annoying. What's worse is that the game's tutorial doesn't really give an optimal start, so if you play it, you're already behind.

What's worse is that a lot of the tutorial is poorly made and confusing, with strange wording. It would've also been better if a lot of the prompts came together instead of a pop-up every few seconds.

Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown lacks much of the quality of life options that its competitors offer. For instance, there is no way to immediately switch between the settlements like there is in Frostpunk 2 or Worshippers of Cthulhu.

Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown's setting is nice enough, though. The world naturally feels intriguing even though none of the other storytelling elements, be it the art style, graphics, or music, do much to help. The game also does a poor job at the amount of work it gives you. You need to micromanage everything, from trade to the exact specific desires and needs of the people. 

Much of the game's other issues are the byproducts of being in Early Access. This ranges from a wide variety of bugs to the general lack of content depth. Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown needs a lot of work to even gaze at its competitors. It could use a lot of streamlining and automation. 

The graphics are also all over the place. While most of it feels straight out of a mobile game, a lot of it also looks nice. The general style isn't bad, either. It's also nice to see people moving around and doing things in the town, even though it's not a lot.

The UI, on the other hand, feels dull, not in the sense that it doesn't have much going for it [which it also does not], but rather, the colors make it feel like you're playing something sad and depressing.

The game's music also leaves much to be desired, being pretty generic and incredibly repetitive. However, the overall sound design should be commended. When you zoom in closer, the production buildings feel alive, almost like you're standing outside them.

Overall, Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown seems like a game that overemphasizes micro-management, doing very little to reign things in while offering very few rewarding mechanics. However, the game is still somehow extremely interesting and fun and has solid foundations. A lot of the fun comes from the mix of the RTS and city-building elements, as both of them seem thoroughly well-meshed. However, it has a long way to go.