Floating above your small village of loyal subjects, you look to the north and see a rampaging group of Goblin Chiefs running towards your village. Your entire town is about to be slaughtered without your guidance, but your coffee kettle just went off so… best of luck to them!
If the above sounds like something you could be into then Towns could be the game for you. Towns is a city building/RPG style game where you are given a handful of villagers to start out with and from them must build up a town that is able to be self sufficient, defendable and eventually able to grow large enough to acquire heroes and push down into the dungeons that lie in wait for you below.
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The game is set on a layered style map, meaning on the top is your starting area with everything you'll need to get started out like trees for lumber, food to gather and a few low level creatures to kill, a second level for harvesting stone, coal and other minerals and finally all the levels below which house the dungeons full of creatures varying from Green slim to Dire Wolves which drop other types of resources to create weapons and armor with, they also drop better quality weapons and armor for your people to use.
The city building aspect of towns is kind of different in the fact that you do not just put down a fully built and fully functional building. Instead what they have done with towns is setup something called "Zones". These zones can be made into areas where you can build specific work stations and only certain types of work gets done in these areas making it possible to give your town a very customized look.
There are different types of zones available for different purposes, there is Bakery and Kitchen for your food preparation, Carpentry, Masonry and Forge for constructing additional things for your town (beds, walls, tables etc.) and then there are also zones focused around your people, Personal room, dining room and Hospital.
Your loyal subjects in towns are rather.. well stupid. They don't so anything apart from eat without your instruction. This can be circumvented however onces you start using the auto production tab, they can keep themselves busy indefinitely with creating weapons or producing food for themselves.
There is a problem with the AI in doing this though. If you are doing quite a lot of work at once and constantly giving your villagers orders they will just keep on with those orders and stay so busy they forget to make food for themselves and eventually you get yourself "Starvation Locked" which is where all your villages just stop doing anything since their starving and wait for more food to be produced, if no more food gets made they just stand there and die from starvation.
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There are quite a few little issues with Towns as it is still in the BETA stages of development. There is an army aspect to the game but currently its a bad idea to make your villagers into soilders, they don't do any work apart from attacking creatures and there is no way to actually group them together and as such they just run in like a bunch of solo Rambos' and get themselves massacred.
Its much easier and more reliable to just leave all your subjects as normal villagers and just do a mass order close to where you want them to attack (Mine this area or along those lines). When you give orders a lot of your villagers will run to the point you placed the order and fight anything they encounter on the way and since they are all running in at the same time to the same point they group up quite nicely.
Another problem is in early game you sometimes get Besieged by quite powerful enemies in large groups and you don't have the manpower to wipe them out, as a result your town gets massacred with no chance of recovery.
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Despite the small bugs Towns has, this game is very fun to play and rather easy to learn on the whole. I've spent quite a few hours getting my cities up to large numbers and even pushing down underground and expanding my village downwards and creating a Semi-Dwarven people.
I'd definitely recommend anyone that enjoys a fun, casual play game and that doesn't mind sacrificing top end graphics for fun and enjoyable gameplay.
Here is the link for the Towns official website http://www.townsgame.com/. You can download a free trial from here to see if the game is for you and if you enjoy it you're also able to pre-purchase the game and support the developers which gives you access to all the latest BETA bulds and the finished product.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the game :)
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Also please feel free to comment with any reccomendations for how I could improve my reviewing. This is my first review I've ever written down and as such would enjoy feedback for what I've done right and what could be improved upon.
Thanks :)