Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown is an upcoming medieval fantasy city-builder from Zugalu Entertainment. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of its early-access playtest, and more.
Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown Early-Acess Playtest Review
Solid Foundations for a Solid Game
Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown, hereafter referred to as Thrive, is an RTS city-builder with medieval fantasy themes. Fresh from a mean city-builder streak, I already knew what I was looking for if this game was to score high by my standards. 2023 came out with a good line of RTS city-builders with Cities: Skylines 2, Dungeons 4, and Against The Storm - all tough acts to follow - but I can confidently say that Thrive manages to compete well…or at least it should once it’s finished.
As it is now, Thrive has nothing but a solid foundation. There isn’t much substance to this game quite yet, but a little bit of spit and polish is all that it needs to shine among the greats on release. It has solid gameplay, an intriguing story, and synergistic mechanics, but all of these are bogged down by a whole laundry list of missing features and unclear objectives. Let’s go through all of them while I discuss what the game has to offer.
Just to talk about the game's visuals and audio for a bit, it's a mixed bag of excellent and questionable decisions. I love the narration in the intro cutscene, but it's nowhere to be found in the gameplay proper. I love the oil painting style they use for some of the game's assets, but the 3D models for the structures and advisors look like they came from a microtransaction-heavy mobile game.
The audio design is amazing for the structures, as they sound like you're next to real-life processing plants, but the music is so-so and repetitive. I assume the game would look more polished on release, so this isn't too damning a critique. Let's move on to the meat of the game.
Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown wears its premise on its sleeve, basing its title on an age-old saying. In this game, you play as the mysterious scion of a failed ruler. It is through his crown that you are given command of his people and their future. It is through his advisors, a group of men called the "Curia", you are taught the ways of a ruler. You will gather, build, and manage a medieval settlement, all while running from a mysterious corruption that swallowed the kingdom of your predecessor.
You start off with a caravan in the middle of a verdant patch of green. Once you get your kingdom’s Keep set up, you’re free to go about your business setting up the standard fare structures for RTS city-builders. You have stockpiles, food storages, farms, houses, roads to build, and jobs to assign. None of these things particularly stand out, but let me cook, there’s more to this game than that.
Looking past the game’s unoptimized UI and tutorial, you continue to manage your budding kingdom, providing your people with the resources they need to continue living. More farms, more houses, more stockpiles—the works. It’s when you expand a little too much that you realize that things aren’t as simple or standard fare as initially thought.
Stockpiles need to be in range for building construction ton to start; buildings have differently-sized footprints that need to be taken into account when planning layouts; houses outside of a Food Storage’s range won’t get any food; farms and orchards have minimum and maximum sizes that affect their production; and so on. These are just some of the intricacies of Thrive that don’t present themselves outright; rather, they allow themselves to be discovered through emergent gameplay. This isn't even accounting for the tech tree that you can unlock along the way.
With every passing second, the game becomes truer to its name by making you earn the right to thrive and bear the full weight of a heavy crown.
It’s all just a foundation, though. The game is unfinisheds, and it is unashamed to declare as much. A lot of the UI elements are hard to make out (some are completely nonexistent), so a lot of guesswork is needed to plan ahead. The pathing of your kingdom’s citizens is pretty horrible at times, causing them to bug out and run into an unfinished building forever. This can choke up your logistics pretty badly if left unchecked.
Above all, this game’s biggest flaw is its poorly optimized tutorial. This is a city-builder, complexity isn’t just expected, it’s considered to be part of the fun. People play these games because watching an optimized city run gives a high similar to building a well-oiled machine. Thrive’s tutorial, while detailed, isn’t the best way to learn the game, as it explains much of the mechanics rather poorly and offers no way to revisit past tutorial points once you accomplish a goal. If you need a refresher to continue, you’re out of luck; there isn't one.
Oftentimes, I found more success in fiddling around with the mechanics than listening to what the tutorial had to say. This isn’t usually a bad thing, but the genre gates itself from newbies well enough as is; it doesn’t need poorly presented tutorials to isolate itself further. To round things off, this game takes forever to load and save, with load and save times taking minutes in some cases. It also freezes frequently, though it has never crashed on me, even on the highest graphical settings.
A solid foundation is good to have, but it does not define the entire structure. Thrive still has time to improve itself in many ways, most of which could be patched out with relative ease, while others will require a little bit more elbow grease. It'll take effort, but as they say, Rome wasn't built in a day, so don't expect your kingdom to flourish in an instant.
Everything We Know About Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown
Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown Story Plot
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown tells the story of a mysterious ruler who inherited the crown of a failed monarch. With their predecessor’s kingdom in ruins, it is now up to them to bring their people back to prosperity in a new land. A cadre of advisors will be at your side, feeding you news from the kingdom and guiding you in the ways of a ruler. All isn’t guaranteed in this new land, however, and the corruption that brought down the previous kingdom is well on its way to taking down another.
Brick by brick, stone by stone, plank by plank, you will rebuild this kingdom to its former glory. Such is the weight that lies on the head that bears the crown.
Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown Gameplay
Thrive’s gameplay is simplistic but not boring, and I think that’s what sets it apart from other city-builders. Similar to a martial artist mastering the basics of his discipline, this game excels in areas that count without getting too fancy or gimmicky.
It plays how you think a city-builder would play. Veterans to the genre could skip the tutorial entirely and could still likely play the game optimally through intuition alone. If you think this will solve the problem, it probably will.
To dive deeper into its mechanics, you have the standard goal of maintaining resources for a city and building the necessary infrastructure to do so. This involves resource gathering from camps, the construction of processing buildings and their requisite storage areas, connecting them via roads, trading with other settlements, and creating defenses.
Every now and then, your advisors will take you aside to discuss matters of state, which are dialogue events that could reward or punish you based on your choice. Through this, you can reach the peak of civilization a second time if you manage to outrun the corruption that is.
Thrive: Heavy Lies The Crown Release Date
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown will be released sometime in 2024, with no specific date currently announced.
Source:
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown Official Website
Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown on Steam
