Doloc Town Review: Farming the Wasteland, One Platform Up

This Doloc Town review almost didn't need the extra week I gave it. The pitch, a scavenger building a farm skyward out of scrap while acid rain tries to kill the crops, sounded like a lot of promises stacked on top of each other. Two weeks past its August 5 launch, with more than 3,000 Steam reviews and a 20% launch discount still running, most of those promises turned out to be true. Not all of them.

RedSaw Games Studio's first release comes with real backing: Logoi Games and Pathea Games, the studio behind My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock, share the publisher credit. That pedigree matters less than the numbers actually posted since launch, so here's what those look like.

Doloc Town Review: Key Takeaways

• $19.99 base price on Steam, currently $15.99 during a 20% launch discount that RedSaw confirmed runs for two weeks from release
• Steam rating: Very Positive, 3,122 of 3,299 reviews positive (94.6%) as of this review, with a Metacritic score of 78
• Developer RedSaw Games Studio's debut title, published by Logoi Games and Pathea Games; over 150,000 copies sold within four days of launch
• 30+ hours of core story content, 100+ hours total across farming, fishing, ranching, exploration, and the gene system
• Windows and Steam only; no Mac, Linux, GOG, or console version confirmed

Overview: A Cozy Farm Sim Built on a Trash Heap

You play a young scavenger (default name Proti, changeable at the start) who falls into the ruins near Doloc Town and stays to rebuild it. The framing device, a wasteland worth saving rather than escaping, isn't new to the genre, but Doloc Town commits to it harder than most: acid rain corrodes crops if you're not shielding them, and the environment itself is something you visibly claw back over dozens of hours rather than a fixed backdrop.

It's also not launching alone. Fields of Mistria hit its own 1.0 on the exact same day, August 5, 2026, which makes for an unusually direct comparison point if you're deciding between farming sims this month. Where Mistria leans into pixel-perfect pastoral comfort, Doloc Town spends its energy on verticality and survival tension instead, closer in spirit to a scrappier cousin of Starsand Island than to a Stardew clone. It's also not the only farm sim willing to bend the genre's usual comfort setting this year; Grave Seasons took the opposite swing by hiding a serial killer under its cozy surface, and Doloc Town's post-apocalypse premise sits in that same "farming sim, but" lineage.

The town itself is where the game earns its warmth back. RedSaw's own 1.0 announcement confirms 13 residents with individual relationship storylines, each with a personal thread to uncover as trust builds. Seasonal festivals bring the whole map to life with decorations and crafting events, and a dockside gathering under koi-shaped banner flags was one of the first moments Doloc Town stopped feeling like a survival game and started feeling like the cozy sim its Steam tags promise.

A seasonal festival gathering at the docks, one of several events RedSaw has built around the game's 13 townsfolk relationships.

Gameplay: Farming, Fishing, and Bullet-Hell Combat

The core loop is gather, build, plant, repeat, but the building half is what separates Doloc Town from its genre neighbors. Platforms stack directly on top of each other rather than sprawling outward, so a cramped starting plot becomes a three- or four-story structure by the midgame, with planters, watering systems, and drone stations layered on separate levels. It's not a cosmetic flourish. Once ground-floor space runs out, going up is the only way to keep expanding, and the game's own screenshots and store description back that framing up directly rather than leaving it as flavor text.

A mid-game planter stack. Once ground floor space runs out, this vertical layout stops being optional and becomes the actual strategy.

The resource list backing that loop is deep: over 40 kinds of minerals, plants, and scrap pulled from five distinct map areas (the outskirts, river valley, wetlands, caves, and the Old City Ruins), feeding into 80+ crafting recipes. Farming automation arrives mid-run through solar and wind power feeding drone stations, letting you shift from hand-watering every plot to a genuinely hands-off harvest loop, which lines up with the store page's promise of evolving "from a scrap-gathering survivor into an easygoing farming tycoon." A gene system lets you modify 30+ crop types for hardier strains or new traits, though RedSaw's own materials stop short of detailing the exact breeding math, so budget some trial and error there rather than expecting a spreadsheet-clean system.

Combat is the part most farming-sim veterans won't see coming. Each of the five map areas has its own enemy set, and fights run as genuine bullet-hell encounters, dodging rings of projectiles fired by hostile machines while your upgradable combat drone (fitted with weapon and lighting modules) returns fire. It's a bigger tonal swing than the pastel screenshots suggest, and it works specifically because it's contained to exploration runs rather than bleeding into the farm itself.

A nighttime encounter in the wilderness. Combat stays separate from the farm, which keeps the tonal shift from feeling like a bait and switch.

Fishing and ranching round out the loop with less friction: different ponds and weather conditions change what's biting, and barns need feeding, cleaning, and collecting on a schedule familiar to anyone who's played a life sim before. None of it reinvents those systems. What it does is give you a reason to keep circling back to ground level between building trips upward.

How Doloc Town's Weather and Climate System Actually Works

The store page's boldest promise, transforming the climate and remaking the wasteland into "your personal Eden," is also the vaguest one in RedSaw's own materials. What's confirmed: acid rain, scorching heat, and thunderstorms all hit your crops directly if they're unshielded, and the game lets you turn some of that against itself, harnessing lightning to power your farm and letting rainfall irrigate fields instead of just damaging them. What isn't spelled out anywhere official is a specific meter or score tracking climate restoration zone by zone. RedSaw frames it as something you "restore piece by piece" as you progress and drive back extreme weather, which reads more like a narrative throughline tied to unlocking new areas than a quantified system with numbers to chase. If you're expecting a climate dashboard, you won't find one. If you're expecting weather that actually punishes bad planning, that part checks out.

Doloc Town Review: Verdict

The short version of this Doloc Town review: buy it, especially if you already like farming sims and want one that asks something different of you than watering schedules and gift-giving calendars. The vertical build system holds up under real strategic weight, the content scope (30+ crops, 40+ fish, 80+ recipes, 80 achievements) is enormous for a first-time studio, and 150,000 copies sold in four days plus a Very Positive rating aren't a fluke.

Two things keep this from a higher score. The save-corruption bug tied to Early Access tent planters is the kind of issue that can cost someone real hours, and RedSaw hadn't shipped a fix as of the last patch notes checked for this review. And the platform story is genuinely narrow: Windows and Steam only, with the developer confirming directly that console and GOG support aren't currently in the cards. If you're on PC and you don't mind waiting out a bug fix or two, this is an easy recommendation. If you needed a Switch or PS5 version, you'll be waiting with no promised date.

Rating: 8.2/10

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Doloc Town worth buying? Yes. It backs up its Very Positive Steam rating (3,299 reviews, 94.6% positive) with a vertical farm system that genuinely changes how you build, plus 30+ hours of story content. Skip it only if you need day-one console or Mac support.

How long is Doloc Town? RedSaw's own 1.0 launch post lists 30+ hours for the core story and over 100 hours of additional content across farming, fishing, ranching, and the gene system. That tracks with the game's scope: five explorable map areas plus a full town.

Is Doloc Town still in Early Access? No. Doloc Town left Early Access and launched as a full 1.0 release on August 5, 2026, confirmed on its live Steam store page and in RedSaw's own announcement post.

Does Doloc Town have controller support? Yes, partially. Steam lists DualShock and DualSense controller support along with Partial Controller Support under its category tags, so most actions work with a gamepad even if a few menus still expect a mouse.

Is Doloc Town coming to console or GOG? Not currently. It's Steam and Windows only. When a fan asked about GOG on Reddit, RedSaw replied it was only able to launch on Steam due to team size, with no console or GOG timeline mentioned.

Does Doloc Town have combat? Yes. Each of the game's five map areas has its own enemies, and players fight them in bullet-hell style encounters using an upgradable combat drone fitted with weapon and lighting modules.

How many townsfolk can you befriend in Doloc Town? RedSaw's own 1.0 announcement confirms 13 residents with individual relationship storylines. The studio hasn't published names beyond what's discoverable in-game, so treat any longer roster list you find elsewhere as unverified.

References

• Doloc Town on Steam: official store page, live price, and current review score
• Doloc Town Official 1.0 Launch Trailer (YouTube, Logoi Games)
• RedSaw Games on X/Twitter: official developer account
• Doloc Town on Metacritic: aggregated critic score
• r/DolocTown: official subreddit, dev-monitored bug reports and patch discussion