Depraved

Depraved is a Wild West city-builder with survival layered on top, developed and published by Evil Bite. The core loop is familiar to anyone who has touched Anno or Banished: place buildings, manage supply chains, keep settlers alive through harsh seasons. The twist is the frontier setting, which means you are also contending with bandit raids and wildlife attacks while your food stockpiles drain through winter. That combination sounds compelling on paper, and in the early hours it genuinely is. Watching a small outpost grow into a functioning town - saloons, farms, trading posts, sheriff offices - gives real satisfaction to anyone who enjoys the slow burn of a survival sim. The supply chain design is where the game earns its strategy label. Food production requires farms, which require cleared land, which requires manpower, which requires housing and wells and enough warmth to keep settlers from freezing before spring. Outpost placement matters because raw materials like wood and ore are not infinite near your starting point, so you will eventually need satellite camps feeding your main settlement. Getting that logistics web right is legitimately engaging, and players who like drawing mental flow charts between production buildings will find a lot to tinker with in the mid-game. Here is where I have to be straight with you, though. The 61 percent Steam rating reflects real, persistent problems. AI pathfinding is sluggish and occasionally breaks in ways that stall your entire supply chain without obvious explanation. Bandit raids scale awkwardly, sometimes arriving with enough force to wipe a settlement before you have any real defensive tools, and sometimes barely registering as a threat. The tutorial gets you moving but leaves several mechanics unexplained, which means newcomers will hit opaque mid-game walls. Mod support is minimal, so there is no community patch equivalent to rescue you from the rougher edges the way a larger game ecosystem might. A 200-hour grand-strategy game with a rough tutorial can survive that because the depth rewards persistence. A city-builder with a 10 to 20 hour campaign does not have that same runway, and Depraved can feel thin once you have solved its core puzzles. For the right player, specifically someone who wants a low-cost, low-complexity survival builder with a distinct visual identity and does not mind working around jank, there is enjoyment here. The Wild West aesthetic is executed with enough personality that the world feels different from the usual medieval fantasy city-builders clogging the genre. If you are a city-builder veteran looking for serious late-game depth or tight AI behavior, Depraved will frustrate you before it satisfies you. Newcomers to the genre should probably look elsewhere for their first introduction, unless they are patient enough to accept a rougher learning experience.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Depraved.