Songs of Syx

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted December 5, 2025 on Steam Songs of Syx is essentially a blend of colony sims like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld with city builders such as Cities: Skylines. This combination works remarkably well in practice, creating a highly engaging and addictive experience. Although it’s still in Early Access, the game already offers a massive amount of content. It’s incredibly easy to sink 100 hours into it as it stands today. In terms of scale and depth, Songs of Syx can legitimately be compared to titles like Hearts of Iron, Stellaris, or Victoria. That’s an impressive achievement—especially considering it’s being developed by just one person. My main concerns at the moment revolve around the state of the late-game and the direction the solo developer intends to take. Late-game balance is a significant issue: the supply demands for even a small army are astronomical, research and administration become constant sources of frustration, and managing happiness once expectations rise above roughly 32% feels downright punishing. Empire AI is another major problem. Friendly empires and even loyal puppets will randomly team up against you, peace treaties are often followed almost immediately by new declarations of war, and AI factions appear to cheat heavily when it comes to fielding enormous armies - sizes that are simply unattainable for a player. Based on the latest v70 developer log, it seems the dev aims to make the game even “wider,” but it already feels incredibly broad - easily comparable to the Paradox titles I mentioned earlier. At this stage, I don’t think Songs of Syx needs more features; what it really needs is refinement and polishing. With some focused balancing and refinement, Songs of Syx has the potential to evolve from an already remarkable experience into a truly outstanding masterpiece.
• Recommended Posted December 5, 2025 on Steam This singular mad man dev with his $2 dollarstore mic and 20 minute mono-tone rambling tangents he calls "patch notes videos" while simultaneous discovering bugs while showcasing the newest features IS..... The pinnacle apex of city builders developers. Give him your money, this game is great and more comprehensive than the 1000 page Terms & Conditions for the latest Iphone. 10/10 would experience colony collapse again due to racial infighting over who gets to walk on which side of the street.
• Recommended Posted January 11, 2026 on Steam Coming from Anno 1800, Rimworld, Imperator Rome, Crusader Kings 3, this game is digital crack. It scales from a population of 10 to 10,000 pretty seamlessly, in both city production and combat. It feels easier to interact with the world than Rimworld, although it's less personable. It's not as hard to get into as Dwarf Fortress, but I definitely wouldn't say it's easy. Entropy is the way of the world but it's functionally impossible to lose because of how things scale. It feels like an incredibly fluid city system if that means anything. I hit multiple points where I struggle to move forward, and suddenly something click and my food stores explode and my pops boom. It's quite satisfying. Armies are very tailored based on how you want to equip your troops and deploy your forces, but every soldier is a plebian you're taking away from their jobs and homes for the duration of your campaign. The research system is interesting if not a little annoying until you figure it out. There's also a nice roguelite system where you can achieve Titles in your playthrough and enable up to 5 strong passive bonuses on the next city you make. Other than some minor QoL or expanded systems, this is a perfect game and I cannot wait to continue seeing how development progresses.
• Recommended Posted March 21, 2026 on Steam This game is what happens if RimWorld, Civilization and Age of Empires had a child and then gave it a caffeine addiction. You start with ‘just one more building’ and suddenly it’s 3AM, your empire spans thousands of idiots, and you’re emotionally invested in grain production. Dangerously addictive. Highly (!) recommend.
• Recommended Posted April 30, 2026 on Steam It's like if Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, Caesar III & Zeus, and a bit of Total War had the most magnificent lovechild. If you want to try: THE DEMO IS THE ENTIRE GAME, albeit several updates old. The developer did this by design so players can truly demo the game before deciding to buy. So before even beginning, that's the kind of dev we have here. This colony & city-state sim is peak "streamlined complexity": a large skill ceiling for those who like to experiment or min/max, but still extremely accessible to people like me who are usually turned off by complexity when it's not rewarding or feels like a slog to push through. For every colony that fails I learn something new and am excited to start again. The scale is a lot larger than other colony sims, with colonies reaching upwards of 10K individual colonists running around your city. There are 8 races in the game. Each truly feels unique, has different needs and requires big deviations in playstyle. For example the Dondorians (dwarves) can't procreate but they live for hundreds of years, like cold climates, crafting, living inside mountains surrounded by awe-inspiring architecture, and they're crap at farming, education and research. Garthimi (humanoid ant xenomorph insect people) love humidity and warm climates, are great at cutting resources with their claws but terrible at holding tools and crafting, and they procreate very quickly. The Tilapi (all female cannibal woodelf supremacists) don't tolerate the other races, are prone to outbursts of violence if you don't sate their bloodlust in other ways, they suck ass at heavy physical labor like mining, and they're fantastic farmers, herders, woodcutters, and are the best archers in the game. Humans are pretty mid all-arounders, have a proclivity for violence and going insane (get ready for packed asylums), and are very solid farmers, herders and researchers. Most races dislike certain races (e.g. Tilapi hate Dondorians and really hate Garthimi). Races may like and dislike opposing things, forcing you to navigate that if you decide to have a colony of multiple races to capitalize on their various strengths (e.g. Dondorians + Humans are a great combo). Or you can go down the dark side and experiment with a workforce of slaves from the nation-states you've captured.... You pick your colony's location on a world map. The world map is procedurally generated and can be regenerated or edited before you start. Before placing your colony, you can use the map editor to change the climate, land fertility, add oceans/rivers/forests/mountains and more. Once you place your colony, the map you actually build your city on can also be regenerated infinite times if you don't like how the terrain generated the first time. The city building system will feel very familiar and akin to something like Rimworld. However in Songs of Syx the scale is such that there is really no focus on individual citizens. For instance the smallest possible home type in the game houses 3 people. But you can still follow every individual citizen around the city and each one has a short, sometimes funny procedurally generated description of who they are as a person. You can also promote citizens into nobles who give bonuses to different industries around your city. Logistics and the management of resource flow around, into and out of your city will be a big focus of your time. In addition to normal warehouses, you can build haulers to move smaller quantities of resources around the city, loading/unloading stations to move large quantities long distances, and import/export depots for specific resources. Using all of these in conjunction can feel like a very delicate dance to get right efficiently, otherwise a huge portion of your workforce ends up being needed to move items to crafting stations, market stalls, other warehouses, etc. As of writing (v.70) battles are like a pared-down Total War, with simple but effective formation and movement orders. Watching thousands of your armored, warhammer-wielding colonists run toward thousands of enemy soldiers is really thrilling. Battlefields get incredibly gory. There are tons of difficulty options allowing you to play exactly like you want, and a dev mode in your launch options if you want to just mess around (would be pretty neat if the in-game use of this was more user-friendly with things like better descriptions of the functions and stuff) It has a small but growing catalog of fun mods on the Workshop. Even some new races! The UI is the weakest element of the game. Menus, HUD and other interface elements often don't feel or look intuitive from a UX perspective. There are tons of menus and submenus (and sub sub menus), buttons & icons are sometimes hard to interpret, and it can be hard to remember where to find certain information. After 100 hours I still can never remember which button is which at the top of the screen because the icons are hard for my small stupid baby brain to differentiate. Because this game is so reliant on understanding logistics and movement of inputs/outputs around your city and the data in various menus, readability and ease of access is really important. Diplomacy, interacting with other kingdoms and using the realm map really all need proper tutorials. It's such an important part starting mid game and a lot in late game, but at this point in development you're pretty much on your own to figure out how everything works. Maybe that's intentional as there is an encyclopedia you can always refer to to understand what certain functions mean, but there already is a [unfinished??] tutorial... hopefully they plan on adding to it leading up to full release. Tooltips and descriptions need to also be greatly expanded, both added where absent and more fleshed out in many cases. Some feel like placeholders, others aren't descriptive enough. This is such a crucial element of complex city builders. I'm still resorting to the wiki, guides and the Discord to understand things. Hope to see a major overhaul before 1.0. Research could be a lot more intuitive for new players (and a bit more forgiving if you ask me). You don't just spend research points - you have to maintain what you spend by making Laboratories and filling them with scientists. The more tech points you spend, the more labs/libraries/scientists you need. I think having to work to maintain researched tech is a really fun idea, it just took awhile to understand; I was LOSING tech points at one point (literally started going negative) - apparently after accumulating a bunch of tech points and spending most of them at once, I didn't have enough invested in Labs to maintain what I'd bought, and I started losing tech points instead of generating them. Luckily you can divest any points you've invested to counter this and stop losing tech points. But this system really needs to feel more intuitive and be explained more thoroughly. Stupid pet peeve: placing anything on a path instantly deletes the path beneath the object, even if the path hasn't been constructed yet and is waiting to be built. Pretty annoying if you're placing things like decorations (torches, trees, flowers, benches, statutes) quickly & often and might need to reposition things frequently. Despite the cons above I highly recommend you give the game a shot. Get the demo. Try to get your first colony to 1000 population. Fix your labor issues and solve racial inequality at the same time by enslaving all races equally. Glory to the Fallen One.
• Recommended Posted March 23, 2026 on Steam [h2]Imagine you have a scientific interest in designing public toilets in the medieval era, but your autism is so far off the spectrum that you create a whole game around it. [/h2] recommended.