Dream Engines: The Ultimate Flying City Building Survival Game Review

What is Dream Engines? Imagine you’re the leader of a city that you need to protect from outside threats just like the ancient kings protecting their empires from enemy forces and dangerous creatures. You need to take care of your citizens, build your economy, and if the crisis strikes, you need to take the whole city in the sky just like a spell from a magical dream world.

Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

Dream Engines: Nomad Cities is an achievement-based city-building game where you can do just that. In this game, you have to survive in a nightmare-infested dangerous world by building a flying city and defending its citizens.

You will have to explore the world, find resources to survive, and fend off the enemies using technologies from the ancient empires.

In this article, we’ll talk about everything you need to know about Dream Engines, its features, gameplay, and more.

So, without further delay, let’s dive in…

What Is Dream Engines: Nomad Cities About?

Dream Engines is an achievement-based sandbox game where you need to build a flying city in order to progress and survive in a dangerous world. The main plot of the game begins several centuries later after a catastrophe that obliterates the ancient civilization by nightmares. And now, the remaining tribes are trying to survive from the infestation of those nightmares to live for one more day.

Your duty would be to lead and operate the Nomad city, the world’s first mobile flying city, in order to not only survive but prosper in this hostile world.

In this world, you will often find yourself surrounded and attacked by enemy swarms that would try their best to destroy you. You need to hold them off and defeat the swarms while protecting the city from their attacks.

And if the situation calls for it, you need to fly off the ground and go to another place to survive in this dark world, live a nomadic lifestyle, and make the most out of every opportunity.

The Gameplay: Dream Engines

The primary focus of the game would always be to collect the resources to build your nomad city and its economy. Since it’s a real-time strategy and city building game, you will spend most of your time on the ground expanding your city and building new structures to fend off the enemies.

You will have different units that you will gather resources, scout the surrounding area, and fight against your ultimate enemies, the creatures born off nightmares.

Moreover, you need to manage your city’s industries, create new tech, and take care of your citizen’s demands. And you have to do all these things while protecting your city from the sudden enemy attacks.

In this section, we’ll talk about every detail you got to know to survive in this game.

Survive In The Harsh World

It’s true that you need to stay on the ground in order to collect resources and build your city. But if you stay in one place for a long time, the enemy will eventually come banging at your doors.

And what’s more?

The longer you stay in one place, the stronger the enemy will get with every single wave until your defense can’t hold them off anymore. Moreover, the resources of any single place are not unlimited and they will eventually be depleted. After a certain time, when you will have no time but to flee in order to survive, you have to take your city off the ground and fly somewhere else.

But where will you go?

In the world of Dream Engines, you will face new challenges in this dark world no matter where you go. But there are also opportunities to find better resources, rare technology, and other mysterious items in a new land. Thanks to the world map, you can see your destination while you’re in the sky and select a favorable place for landing. And you need to keep the possible opportunities, risks, the distance of the selected land, and your current fuel into consideration while making the landing decisions.

As you land in a new place, you will get a detailed map of the place as well as what resources you can possibly find once you set your mech units to explore the area. Then you can scout the whole place to collect the resources, find raw items, and get your hands on ancient technologies. You can never be absolutely sure what you’re really going to find. And that’s what makes Nomad Cities even more realistic.

Resources And Automated Production

Once you land on someplace shown on the map, you have to quickly search around the place and gather as many resources as possible. As you gather those resources, they will go under a specific production chain so you can use them for finding ancient ruins, building your city, to search for new technologies.

So, how do we find the resources?

You will be able to find resources by sending the units to search the nearby areas, exploring ancient ruins, and storming enemy monster nests. You can manually gather those resources in small amounts as you explore more places. Moreover, you can also get the necessary resources by killing the enemies with your mech and gather the resource drops from them.

In order to gather resources in a larger amount, you have to build harvester buildings. But beware, these harvester buildings attract enemies so you need to protect them as it does its work.

But what’s next? What will you do after you gather those resources?

The resources you gather will be sent back to your city’s automated production line. Then those resources will be refined and processed to craft ammunition, create important supplies to fulfill the need of your citizens, crafting defense mechanisms, weapons, and other things you need to survive.

But you don’t have an unlimited amount of space in your flying nomad city and you need to manage the weight of the platform too. So, make sure you craft resources and construct city structures efficiently.

Beware Of The Enemy, Manage Your Fuel, And Get Ready To Fly

Yes, gathering resources and boosting the economy of your city is a top priority. But it doesn’t mean that you can underestimate the enemy attacks. Your city’s defense mechanism and weapons might fend off the enemies for a while, but you can’t stay in one place forever. Eventually, at one point, there will be so many enemies that you could no longer defend against it.

So, what are you going to do this situation? How will you defend your city from these seemingly unstoppable swarms of enemies?

The solution is to pack up and fly away with your whole city to a safer place.

But, you can’t lift off the ground whenever you want. In order to fly successfully in the moment of crisis, you need to manage your fuel as well as the weight of your city. Or in other words, the more structure you build inside your city, the heavier it will be. And the heavier your city is, the more fuel you would need.

That’s why you need to be careful when you build a structure inside your city. Every building and structure have their own weight which will add to the weight of your city. For example, turrets and walls tend to be on the heavier side. You can also build some of your structures outside your city to save space and avoid adding more weight. But if you do that, you might have to abandon them when you lift off.

Of course, you can always build an extra set of engines in order to lift off a heavier city. But extra engines will consume extra fuel to work. So, you have to be careful.

There are two ways to get fuel for your nomad city’s engines. You can either get fuel by collecting acid shards or you can get fuel by spending flux that is one of the most basic resources that you will find in any area. But getting more fuel by spending flux isn’t going to be cheap in Dream Engines. So, you can’t just fly away as you wish.

Take hold of the area, defend the city, collect resources, and then fly away only if you have no other options to protect your city.

Dream Engines Special Features

In this section, you will discover some of the unique features of Dream Engines that make the game unique from other sandbox games. So, let’s begin with its infrastructure upgrade.

Infrastructure Upgrade: Dream Engine’s Own Version Of Skill Tree

Famous RPG games have a feature, skill tree, that allows the players to customize the game in a way that suits their playing style. And the strategy games have an upgrade tree that works similarly to the skill tree. In Dream Engines, the developers have decided to combine the notions from the RPG and strategy games to create a new version of the skill tree.

This is what we call Infrastructure Upgrade.

So, instead of completing quests or killing enemy bosses, you level up by upgrading your city’s industry, crafting components, and leveling up your city’s infrastructure. In other words, you need to build more infrastructure and expand your city in order to go to the next level.

As you upgrade your existing infrastructure, you will get more points to spend. You can decide to spend the points to level up your resource gathering skills, combat skills, or upgrading your defenses. With each upgrade, you get to enjoy passive bonuses. And once you gather enough points, you can use them to unlock powerful features that will be advantageous for you.

City Inhabitants: Dream Engines

In this industrial infrastructure of the nomad city, the main thing that makes city life is the moving transport carts that move resources from one building to another. But you can’t claim it to be a city unless you have inhabitants living in it.

That’s why this city also has inhabitants that are walking around the city along with the mechs. The inclusion of the inhabitants makes the nomad city more lively and it gives off the feel of a real city that is worth protecting.

Mech Appearance, Active Abilities, And More

The mech is the main character of the Dream Engines that protects the city by killing enemies. The mech character looks like a simple robot with robotic arms that can hold weapons to deal with the enemies and moves in a waggish manner. You can replace the arm of the mech and equip them with the right kind of weapons.

The mech comes with active abilities that you can manually trigger which makes combat more interesting. They have repair kits and a special system that will help you add any kind of active abilities to help your main character takes action in the most efficient way.

You can gain different active abilities in two different ways. You can gain active abilities either by consuming crafted materials or by going to a new level through infrastructure upgrade.

Of course, every active ability has a certain cooldown time so you can’t use them any way you want without thoughts. To use the active abilities, your auto-rechargeable energy bar should have sufficient energy which the mech consumes with every use.

First Impression

The game has an impressive nomadic structure that was really appealing to me. Also, unlike any other normal sandbox games that would never end, this game has a viable set of goals that make it possible to become victorious like an RPG.

So, despite being a mainly city-building game, you can feel the tension that riles up with each passing moment as you can get attacked by the enemy at any moment. You have to gather resources, build your city, take care of your citizens, all while protecting the city from outside attack.

Would it be better to stick around to advance your city further or should you fly away? Everything depends on your choice.

Although the full version of the game is scheduled to release in March 2021, from my first experience of the world of Dream Engines, I’m surely pumped up for getting my hands on the complete version and build my own dream city.

For more information on Dream Engines and early access, visit the game’s site today!

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