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It’s hard to stand out in the world of city/colony builders these days, but Earth of Oryn immediately struck me with its unique visual style and the simple appearance of its UI, and I’m always a sucker for city builders. So, with early access starting today, we decided to check it out to see how the game is and how it performs on the Steam Deck.
Earth of Oryn – Gameplay Impressions
While Earth of Oryn makes a good first impression with its interesting, unique visual style, it quickly becomes apparent that the beauty is only skin-deep. The game, as of its Early Access launch, only consists of 3 missions, one being a tutorial, and an “experimental” creative mode.
Unfortunately, Earth of Oryn is about as barebones as it can get. I’m not sure I would even call it functional yet. There are 14 buildings you can build in the game, including the standard ones you’d expect, such as woodcutter, farm, stone miner, and some research buildings. It may sound like a decent selection, but you can build all of them within 5 minutes of starting the game, leaving no room or reason for progression.
Technologies are in the game but largely non-functional right now. My citizens were complaining of thirst, but there were no wells or water-related buildings I could build at all. After finding the “hydraulics” research in the Assembly building, which apparently “unlocks new hydraulic buildings”, and researching it, I was greeted with… nothing. Like most technologies, it doesn’t actually do anything right now, nor do the other 2 technologies, which say they unlock “New wooden buildings”.
The game does have combat, but right now it also seems largely broken. Soldiers that you hire in your barracks do not automatically defend your city; it’s up to you to find which of your citizens are soldiers and manually order them to attack enemy raiders by clicking on them one-by-one whilst holding CTRL. I have no idea why your soldiers don’t automatically defend, but they don’t. Enemies aren’t very clearly marked either, so it can be tough to tell who is a friend and who is a foe.
Earth of Oryn – Steam Deck Performance Tested
It’s quite apparent that Earth of Oryn isn’t designed to be played with a controller, at least not yet. The game does rely on you using a keyboard + mouse controller template to play.
It also has no graphical settings to choose from besides resolution, so we can’t make any adjustments there. On the plus side, it does support 1280×800 as a resolution, so no black borders.
Some text may also be a bit on the smaller side, and there is no UI scaling option right now.
As for performance, the game runs OK. Around 40-45 FPS once you have a settlement built up. Certain actions do make the frame rate tumble, though, such as dragging selection boxes and rapidly scrolling the map; these result in heavy stutters that can drop it down to around 10 FPS. So I would lock the game to 30 FPS for the most stable experience.
Final Thoughts
It’s very hard to recommend Earth of Oryn to anyone right now, even hardcore city-building fans. The building isn’t very satisfying, as there aren’t many types of buildings to place, and the gameplay aspect shouldn’t even be considered right now due to the fact that certain necessary gameplay mechanics aren’t yet functional, making the game punish you for things you cannot fix. The game has supposedly been in development for over 4 years, and it’s quite baffling to me that it has only progressed this far.
At least it’s playable on Steam Deck.
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