Laysara: Summit Kingdom – A lofty city builder in the Himalayas

I love a great city builder, especially one that provides a unique location or mechanic. There are a lot of city builders out there, so if I’m going to invest dozens of hours into a new one, I am looking for a hook to keep me from looking for the next one or going back to something tried and true.

The Polish Studio, Quite Okay Games, released Laysara: Summit Kingdom in early access in April 2024. That’s right, almost 2 years ago. It’s recently launched fully and is now also available on consoles. I reviewed this on Xbox Series X. Now, I can almost hear the sigh, and I was a little skeptical too; a lot of times these games don’t translate well onto console. Spoiler: This was almost entirely a good console launch. I will dive into the good and bad experiences soon. Devoid of any military or political story, this is the type of city builder I enjoy the most, a nice, calm experience.

As mentioned above, the first thing I was looking for was a unique location and Laysara: Summit Kingdom gave me that. While other city builders might have a moon colony or an amusement park as a location, this gave me a beautiful mountainous location in the Himalayas. From the main menu, I was immediately met with a much larger variety of choices than anticipated: Campaign (including 2 tutorial missions), Scenario, Sandbox, Challenge and Free Build options.

The campaign guides you along your journey to summit the highest peak. It teaches you about each type of building, business, resource, etc. How and where to build for the best efficiency, and how to deal with the challenging topography and natural disasters like avalanches. It walks you through how to inlock everything and how to manage your resources, but it’s up to you if you want to listen or fail (by running out of money). This, and the other modes also allow you to choose from multiple difficulty settings as well, so there are a lot of options to find a play style that works for you. It was a great way to learn details like raising yaks, your main source of labour, is more profitable in lower areas, where honey production and beekeeping do better at the higher altitudes.

I loved building bridges and shafts to move people and resources to connect isolated areas, and the unique landscape was interesting to navigate.

There are also 3 castes in the game, and where you choose for them to reside matters as well. The lowland people are at the lowest altitude, then the artisans, then the monks. This is a game of city building, logistics and resource management. Each person/group have needs that need to be fulfilled to upgrade their homes. This will be things like proximity to food depots, certain types of food or even commodities. The menus are fairly intuitive and supply decent flow charts when looking at new business and resource options, so you know what buildings and paths you need to build to create things like copper utensils or even ale for your villagers. With the mountainous landscape, space is limited, and planning is essential.

While I loved how things were explained and laid out for you in the menus, it was not always easy to open the menu I needed, often having to back out of one menu to access the proper one. My biggest complaint, however, is how linear and fixed the building was. You couldn’t rotate any of the buildings, resulting in an often awkward looking village with a lot of wasted space. I also wish things like supply lines and fulfillment were better explained in the tutorial or in the menus. I had a tough time trying to decipher why materials weren’t always going to where I needed them to.

Tech-wise, I ran into a few problems over and over. Whether this was just my Xbox or the way the game is running on all Xbox consoles, I am unsure. I had multiple crashes (sending me to the dashboard) in quick succession, multiple times, multiple days, resulting in a lot of lost progress. I also had a lot of issues where I would open a building to send resources to their destination, and it just wouldn’t let me pick a destination, so I would have to back out, move off the building in question, then retry.

Besides the campaign mode, you have other modes, including:

“Scenario,” where you play on 8 different mountains, each with its own simple story and objectives to complete.
“Sandbox,” where you have no specific objectives and choose how to build your city.
“Challenge,” where you get unique scenarios with your objectives upfront. This mode requires some out-of-the-box thinking at times.
“Free Build” is the most open and creative mode, where there are no restrictions other than your imagination.

Currently, Laysara: Summit Kingdom is on sale for 50% off on Steam and for around $20USD is a steal for a city builder. If you like a calmer style of game, and the location appeals to you, it’s worth picking up and planning your settlements in the beautiful Himalayas.

Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.