Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt (PC) Review

Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt is a city building game that is solid all the way around, in that there is little to outright criticize, but it never arises to that great of heights that it is a must play. Ultimately plagued by issues of little variance in 'build orders,' a similarity lets a repetition grind on the game in a bad way. This has what appears to be a pretty steep learning curve, and it does a fairly good job of easing players into the business of growing a city. Taking place in an isometric point of view, you manage money, happiness and food among many other smaller items in a delicate balance of city management.

There is somewhere around 30 resources to manage, and these range from fish, meat, water, hops, wool, clothes, tools, iron, and so on. It can be initially overwhelming. Luckily the tutorial and the first couple of missions do a very well done job of weaving quests into slowly making the player learn these systems. Starting with a castle, and a few workers they decide how to start building up the town. Usually this means starting with a fishing hut for some food, and a lumber mill to get wood production going. Very quickly the player will run out of workers, so they will need to build more houses, but then these more people need more food, which needs to be supplied. Quickly the fishing huts are not enough so now time to start a farm, but now you need tools, iron, clothes for the expanding town.

Other than the learning curve part of knowing what building does what, it is a fairly logical system that almost every resource has a 'raw' component, such as hops for beer, and wool for clothes. The player has to build both the raw source of it, and then the processing building as well. Very soon one will have a bustling city of bakers baking bread, lumberjacks walking around, fire fighters carrying water, and fishermen hanging out on the water all day. This does some things very well - namely ordering workers is fairly easy that each building has a button that can put any idle worker to it immediately. Further, while it is buried, it is nice to see how many resources of each type are actually stored. Also simply seeing the people walk around and interact is a very nice touch.

Some problems that are simply unnecessary, for example, are the inability to pause (despite seeing a pause icon), and a very bad system of viewing building damage. Buildings decay, and there is supposed to be a visible damage aspect, but very rarely was this ever noticeable or consistent. This might not be too big of a problem, but later a large portion of the game is simply clicking through damaged buildings trying to repair them. This last part brings up the lack of an 'empire wide' screen that really could have saved a lot of time and effort if there was merely a screen that showed the status of all buildings. Almost all strategy games of similar type have it, and its exclusive feels noticed. Multiple times units simply freeze, usually at around 99% complete on a construction project, and merely stand there; which other than an annoyance is problematic when it is a key building.

Watching your city grow is fun, but it quickly becomes very, very formulaic. Almost every new building requires a bunch of new workers which means new housing, which means new food which means more wood which means more clothing needed and so on that the fun of putting a new building down gets lost in the grind of just trying to not run out of basic resources. By far, the largest problem of this is that for a few playthroughs on maps it will be fun seeing what there is to see, but regardless of the map, this same formula is so integral to the whole experience that it does not change. The repetition on a single map starts to get high, and after a few plays it rapidly eliminates any desire to want to play anymore.