One excellent bite-sized constructor is Settlement Survival mobile.
As the name implies, colony Survival is a survival city-builder in which you establish a little colony in the woods and then try to grow and develop it while attending to the needs and wants of your devoted residents. Since its release on Steam in October 2022, the game developed and released by Gleamer Studio has had tremendous popularity. However, the settlers are now relocating to mobile devices. How does this little sim compare to its PC predecessor, then? Spoiler alert: It works pretty damned well.
The goal of Settlement Survival mobile is to provide all the enjoyment of the full game at a much lower price, and it succeeds in doing so. To provide a cleaner, less crowded structure, several functions and the user interface have been pared down. For example, the initial settlement modifiers have been much simplified, and many details are concealed behind drop-down menus. Fortunately, the majority of information, statistics, and other data are still there, and when you get accustomed to the simpler style and know where everything is, there aren't many issues.
Let's begin with Settlement Survival's main gameplay. The first thing you do is choose certain map and game parameters, such the game difficulty, the size and name of the map, the gaming style (standard or sandbox), and a switch to turn on or off catastrophic occurrences. As previously said, these settings are more limited in comparison to the more sophisticated PC version, but they still provide you a good amount of choice over how you choose to play.
After choosing every modifier and selecting "start game," you are placed in a square area of desolate terrain. Rivers, mountains, forests, and resources make up the randomly assigned region, and many green bubbles display various icons. You can see a brief explanation of each of the green bubbles' meanings on the left side of your screen. For instance, the cow icon denotes a hunting bonus point where hunters have a 100% chance of capturing animal cubs for you to raise, and the grass icon denotes a grassland, which increases the output from pastures placed on this area by 50%.
You are able to position your first marketplace anywhere on the map by using your finger to drag it there and then clicking "Settle." The action begins when your settlers arrive at the location you have selected. From here, when you construct homes, farms and pastures, processing facilities, and other amenities, you may give your settlers instructions to collect, build, and work.
You may see your current temperature, the number of settlers, their tension, happiness, and health at the top of the screen, as well as the number of months before the next ship delivering products or immigrants comes. Along with the amount of money you have, the name of your town, the current year and month, and a button allowing you to stop or speed up time are also shown in a box.
The icons on the left side of the screen indicate the amount of stock you have in each category of item; the bottom-left side displays alerts and a history of all recent events in your settlement; the bottom-right side allows you to choose which buildings to build or instruct your settlers to collect particular items. Additionally, there is a menu in the upper-right corner that allows you to see your city's details, a map, a help menu that describes each of the many structures and symbols, and more.
While you may press on most icons to get additional information, the construction mode shows very little to no information—possibly to make the experience more efficient. Fortunately, Settlement Survival doesn't immediately bring this out to you, and it took me some time to figure out, but you can access the help menu to learn more about each building on the structures page.
Since you primarily utilize the mouse cursor in the PC version, it makes logical that the controls are solely dependent on the touchscreen, negating the need for a controller. The pan, zoom, and rotate controls were rather stiff at first, but I was able to much improve my experience by adjusting the sensitivity in the options menu.
Buildings and other structures must be dragged to the appropriate spot before being placed by clicking the green checkmark. Moreover, you may rotate them by tapping the orange arrow button, or you can cancel by using the x button. Although moving the buildings is generally quite simple, I sometimes find it difficult to align everything precisely when using the touchscreen controls, and the placement indication and camera may be a little picky when in constructing mode. But I quickly got used to it, so I think the problem is more with touchscreen controls in general than Settlement Survival specifically.
You have the option to stop, reprioritize, or end building at any point throughout the process. constructions cannot be moved after they have been placed, however you may use the demolish command to destroy the majority of completed constructions. I would agree that I often had to postpone development due to the previously described problems with aligning buildings, but because it's free, it's not a big deal.
However, I find it far more difficult to use the free-draw structures and instructions, such as the collect or field and orchard commands. To make a square for them, you have to tap and drag your finger; for terraforming and bridges, you have to drag your finger to draw a route.
Despite having rather tiny hands, I find this to be especially challenging and sometimes a touch imprecise since my fingertip covers more than one tile on the grid. Additionally, I sometimes had issues with the game evidently sensing the heat from my hand, which caused my free-drawn squares to occasionally slide or flick in an entirely incorrect direction.
Again, I think this has less to do with Settlement Survival itself and more to do with touchscreen controls in general and complex games in particular. Still, it would be easier to deal with if you could draw a square and then edit it later by adding or removing squares without having to start over if you make a mistake in placement.
You may manually save the game or have it save automatically at certain intervals (the game automatically saves every 30 minutes by default). One feature I particularly like is that you can have many save files for various towns, so there's no reason why you couldn't start anew without giving up on your previous game.
The world is your oyster from this point on. Your main objective is to maintain the health and happiness of your settlers while also increasing the size of your community. You do this by giving them access to all the amenities they need and want, as well as cozy homes, an abundance of food, and resources. You have access to a variety of structures at first, but you receive tech points as your people grows and becomes more skilled in various industries.
It soon becomes a balancing act since tech points are used to unlock additional structures, research, talents, and more. However, new facilities often demand refined resources. For instance, you must first unlock the soap factory and start making soap if you wish to unlock the bathhouse and hospital to improve the health of your settlers. In order to make soap, you must first open the fishing port and apiary in order to collect beeswax and blubber, among other materials.
This approach promotes strategic thinking and deliberate planning, which often results in a great deal of trial and error as you work to grow without sacrificing your settlers' fundamental requirements in the meantime. It's all too easy to concentrate all of your efforts on acquiring specific materials in order to construct a new facility, only to discover that your supplies of food or fuel have run out or that your settlers' level of happiness has fallen to an all-time low, which lowers the possibility of them reproducing and raises the possibility that they will commit crimes.
Even if becoming mostly self-sufficient is your aim, your initial environment often doesn't provide you with all the resources you need to develop fully. As a result, you may permit immigration via your town hall, establish trade lines with other factions via ports and itinerant merchants, and more. When I first started utilizing the dock menu to sell or purchase things, I thought it was quite perplexing because of the simplified user interface and dearth of clear explanations. But now that I've gotten the hang of it, I find it to be a really fascinating and practical mechanic, and I can't wait for the next trade ship to call at my port.
Even at five times the pace, developing your community and maintaining the well-being of your people is a laborious task, which is precisely what makes community Survival such a fantastic mobile game. You may begin work on many structures, assign settlers to certain industries or facilities, set duties, and then leave your community to continue carrying out your own activities in the real world. I've been playing a lot with my phone next to my computer, sometimes checking in to see how things are going or assigning my settlers new tasks to concentrate on.
Settlement Survival has a really nice aesthetic. The character and event illustrations are outstanding, the low-poly art style works amazingly well on a smaller screen, and the animations of settlers felling trees, ships docking, and animals grazing in their pasture are all fantastic, giving your settlement a constant sense of life and motion.
I'm using my aging P30 Pro to play Android games at medium visual resolution, and in over 15 hours of gameplay, I haven't had any performance problems at all. Aside from a little slowdown during autosaves, it definitely makes my phone feel a little warm after a long play session and uses a lot of juice. However, I haven't encountered any crashes, problems, or stuttering. Additionally, load speeds are excellent, so it's never too late to pop in and see how your settlers are doing.
It seems strange to me that Settlement Survival mobile doesn't seem to have any music or ambient noises at this point, even as the settings menu offers many volume choices. Now that the complete version is out, this could change, but I'm not sure whether it's because I'm using the pre-access beta.
In conclusion, Settlement Survival mobile is naturally more basic than its PC predecessor, but it still provides all the entertaining settlement simulation gameplay you've been used to in a bite-sized form. Although its controls may be a little tricky at first, they are generally easy to use and comfortable once you've had some time to get used to them.
Above all, Settlement Survival is an enjoyable game that's perfect to play in the background while you work on other tasks. It is very detailed, jam-packed with information, and can provide a terrific challenge for all genre fans—all for a very affordable price without any extra fees or microtransactions. I wholeheartedly suggest playing Settlement Survival mobile if you appreciate other genre heavyweights like Banished or are simply itching to get your teeth into a solid city-builder while on the road. It's well worth every cent.
Check out our top selections for the best survival games on mobile, the best Switch survival games, the best Switch simulation games, or the best games like Stardew Valley if you make it through the settlement and want more titles to test your mettle.