Pioneers of Pagonia Review – Build, Build, Build, Build – Fight!

Pioneers of Pagonia is the recently released title of Envision Entertainment, a studio based in Germany. This builder game gets you around quite nicely in a mysteriously foggy environment where you have to gather materials, build everything to survive, and face numerous dangers. You will face the challenges of the terrains, bandits, and the hardest part of all building games: structuring and management. Let’s see what Pioneers of Pagonia has to offer.

TL;DR

Pioneers of Pagonia is a lovely building game for all the players who fancy a bit of structure, resource gathering, and light to heavy fighting with other enemies of the terrain. Its exploration mechanic and the visually easygoing appearance are what make it a well-designed world-building game, with a story mode of 30 hours and tons of replayability among friends.

Pioneers of Pagonia – What is it About?

The story unfolds with you being a brave navigator on a foggy map, trying to find your way to survive. Initially, the ship that you are sailing is landed broken in the first area, which clearly introduces the plot and the mechanics of the game.

The Story

Your pioneers must clear land, establish a foothold, and begin building a community from scratch. The narrative unfolds not through scripted cutscenes, but through situational discovery and the evolving relationship between your people and the land. As the settlement grows, so does the story of Pagonia itself. It is clear that the land plays a huge part in your building process, and everything is unfolded while discovering, which means improvise, adapt, overcome.

Your main focus initially is to fix your broken ship by gathering the materials that are needed, as described by your main characters, who help you throughout the whole situation. Keep discovering, changing locations, and building again and again. The mystery prevails, and you need to fight on your own against the various creatures and bosses of the maps.

Graphics and Visuals – Quite a Beauty

The graphics are quite simple yet really immersive. The whole design comes a bit cartoonish since the characters are simply designed with no fancy characteristics, but this is not bad. Vibrant colours on beautiful landscapes that perfectly merge together.

The characters and the animations are on point as well. Every movement of the bots that describes their action is clear and helps you understand the process that is happening at the moment, so you can focus on the world-building. The same goes for the buildings as well. It is really clear when the building is not producing, is out of order, or generally whenever something is going on.

Everything is tied together animation-wise, and the flow of the game is seamless in parts, transitions, shadows, and angles. The lighting is really great and gives you a good perspective, which is really important for these types of games.

The fog-ambient element is good as well, without hiding everything, leaving a few shadows blending in the background, so you can be curious about those hidden elements. Generally, all the visual parts of the game work flawlessly and are really well established.

Audio – A Fully Living City

The music is really smooth and creates a really nice ambience on the land, and the transitions that occur. Meaning that danger needs a specific background, which comes really handy whenever you have the notifications on you, saying that somebody stole from you or that you are under attack. Great compositions that give you this calming effect of creation.

The only thing I found a bit odd was the voices on the dialogue screen whenever your companions explained something or the story was unfolding. While the interactive voices of the bots were really good and on point, the voices of the main characters were not.

A few gasps and shouts, once just when the dialogues popped up on your screen, seemed a bit odd and awkward. Other than that, the mix and the position of the sounds were placed nicely and balanced. You could clearly feel that everything was populated by starting with a small settlement and reaching a big city-wide camp.

Mechanics and Gameplay

Basically, the gameplay of Pioneers of Pagonia is really easy to understand at the very beggining but it is really hard to master towards the endgame after the whole world is built. While the building and the connections between the roads you create seem easy to do, in the end, you really need to make severe changes to have proper resource management.

Production chains interlock in meaningful ways, encouraging careful allocation of workers, materials, and territory. I found that the hard way, since if you do it wrong, resources can get depleted. The roads are not a simple mechanic, it’s your way of structuring the buildings and a way of communication for your residents to build and transport. Be mindful of it. There are many titles that have different mechanics for these elements.

Terrain, distance, and environmental constraints actively shape how efficiently your settlement can grow. Having said that, this is the really nice part of those games, that you need to understand how things are connected.

You need to mine ore to create metal, but in order to process it, you need coal, and in order to do this, you need workers with this kind of knowledge and Carriers that will transport the aforesaid raw materials towards each building. But this is the magic of this game. By starting with a few gatherings of herbs and pieces of wood, new buildings and technologies unlock at a steady pace.

Bots and Building

What I really liked visually and mechanically is that settlers behave logically within the simulation, reacting believably to supply chains and pathing decisions. If a boar attacks you, the supply chain stops.

Or even simpler, if you place a specific building as a priority and all the carriers rush to this position, there will be a line formed behind the target, which naturally brings out the clog mechanism of anything that is rushed by everyone.

The hand-crafted environments are filled with visual detail, making each expansion feel like a genuine discovery rather than a routine task or just a copy of the previous map. Different regions demand distinct approaches, preventing strategies from becoming repetitive, and of course, not all the terrains are buildable.

There are multiple buildings to choose from, 60 different types, and each of those needs to be in the proper grounds, in a discovered area, within your border. Some of them need to be in specific distance from each other so they can function properly.

A good example is that you need to have a tavern at a proper distance from houses so the residents can eat, and at a good distance from the market so there can be food to be processed.

A Few Mechanics That Matter

Pioneers of Pagonia bot population is not strictly defined by you. You can’t simply create soldiers, or carriers, or any kind of human. The game makes you create houses and neighbourhoods, so there can be happy people who will reproduce and create more people, so those can be recruited to become professionals or soldiers of any type to sustain the society you are building at the moment. You have to keep expanding, building homes, to create a good living and gain more resources.

It is really good that you need to build towers and have explorers lift the fog, because that is the only way that you will reveal the map. That way, you get a view of the covered area before doing anything. Expand the borders of the setlement and there will be more space to build and use.

UI – Not an Easy Task

The user interface was not something that I clearly enjoyed. There could be many things, like the camera rotating and moving simultaneously, rather than doing one or the other.

Also, it was not easy to manage a large army by the garissons who were populating instead of being able to use them altogether. Another thing was the constant need to set the location of the troops by having them in different war-related buildings instead of having them as factions.

Pioneers of Pagonia – Verdict

I really enjoyed and struggled with the game simultaneously. While the design and the idea behind it are wonderful, a few core gameplay mechanics and the UI gave me a hard time understanding and process that made me lose a bit of the flow of it. Other than that, the game is really well designed and without flaws, and it really made me happy when I achieved the end of each map.

It is also extremely nice to have games with high replayability. Not only because there are four difficulties to choose from, but also because the game lets you create your maps, making you a builder of Pagonia, and letting you have a co-op of up to 4 friends.

Another note that I want to point out is that the development of Pioneers of Pagonia was financially supported by the German games fund grant by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, which is really nice to have funds that are applied for and create something enjoyable while supporting the gaming community of Indie developers.

At this moment, Pioneers of Pagonia costs 34,99€ which is really fair for the core game. There are DLCs for you to check out as well.

We would like to thank Loopr Marketing for the review unit and for making it possible for us to discover these foreign, magical lands.