Out of food already? Dammit.
Every now and then, I like to break away from the games I typically gravitate to in the hopes of finding something new. Usually, I’ll find something where the visuals or narrative pulls me in or that it has an interesting gameplay mechanic that offers me up something original to dig into. While Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt isn’t wholly original in what it offers as a town building sim, it does have a certain air of charm to it, despite its apparent rough edges.
Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt offers up a few different modes of play right off the bat. There is a 6-part tutorial campaign complete with its own thinly pieced together narrative, to an arrangement of endless modes and additional scenarios. I will state right off the bat that I experienced a progress-blocking glitch during the campaign that halted my progress in the final moments of the last scenario, completely unsure exactly what went wrong but it failed to continue the story forward. Apart from that, the rest of my experience was mostly glitch-free.
Being an updated remaster of its original release on various platforms, A Kingdom Rebuilt brings with it some UI changes, higher resolution textures, and the overall structure of how you’ll browse your tasks, upgrades, and various construction chores. On the Xbox One, the menu’s are rather intuitive and complete with a series of helpful tutorials that will get you up to speed if you don’t at first figure something out. Given the game isn’t overly complex like the other sim-building games it shares the genre with, it’s doubtful you’ll find yourself stuck on what to do next. Many scenarios and tasks are clearly illustrated to you in your quests and constructions tabs, with icons indicating what needs to be built next.
The game has you managing an array of different towns of people as you build, upgrade, and expand your town, combatting bandits looking to pilfer your spoils or various weather storms that will keep merchants at bay. There are some nice ideas here and the game can often be fun, but if you spread your resources too thin, or not pay attention to the demands of your people, then you’re going to find a great deal of frustration trying to win them back, as it can take a while to battle back from debt. This forces you to check in on their needs, their desires, and if they are agreed with you on the level of taxes you’ve employed towards them less they go on strike. There isn’t a vast depth to their needs, but there is enough here to whet the appetite of those wanting to have systems like these in play.
One aspect of the game that does break free of some of its shallow design is in its trading. You can set up a marketplace and a merchant will visit your town and then depart with whatever you’ve chosen to purchase. You have a set limit to what you can buy and what you can sell, and there are ways to increase that as you look to fill up your warehouses in an effort for your people to survive. You also have a Trading Guild Hall that allows you to set certain resources to automatically sell or purchase when the merchant comes to town. You can even set when to stop selling should you reach a certain limit of that resource. It’s a very nice system, that along with others like having a carpenter go around and address any buildings in despair, that you can have the game manage several things at once while you attend to placing decorations or applying stone paths throughout your town.
During many of the scenarios, you’ll play in a fairly linear fashion, taking on tasks to build certain buildings or decorations as they are required as the seasons around you change. One such quest has you building a town towards the requests of a King who wishes for the town to relive his early days. He will send you letters one by one as you complete each task in unison. These scenarios can be a bit too linear for my tastes, but they do also serve as an extended tutorial as well, given they are not as time restrictive as some of the other missions where you’ll be tasked with having a certain building and some of its developed goods constructed when you simply don’t have the time or resources at the ready. Now, that said, the endless mode is where it’s just you building to your heart’s content and it’s here is where I really enjoyed my time the most. That’s not to say I didn’t have fun with the story typical modes, I just found more satisfaction with building the town to my own wants and needs at a pace that was more suited to what I wanted from my play session. You can also turn on or off disasters, which will involve the plague sweeping throughout your town, powerful lightning storms to wreak havoc, or disastrous blizzards to snow-in your town as well.
The town building aspects of the game have a very typical structure to what it wants from you. You’ll have resources to gather on the map such as setting up a mine for minerals or sending one of your villagers into the forests to gather wood or food for your townsfolk. You’ll also set up farms to harvest wheat, or lay down a fenced area of sheep for collecting wool. You’ll also have tailors or carpenters to employ, to setting up your own brewery, suppling the tavern of its ale. Many of these buildings and the services they provide, require that you have other buildings and processes going full steam, such as having wheat, hops, and water at the ready for the Monastery so that they can produce that ale I just mentioned. While the Monastery provides the hops to harvest, you’ll have to ensure that you have a Well for water, and a farm or two at the ready, harvesting the requested wheat. There is a nice level of connection between many of the buildings that relate to many of the other items you can make. There is a vast array of different buildings and structures, and should you want bandits to ransack your town, well, you can turn them on if you want, thus the need for creating a contingent of soldiers, ready to protect your town, if they are supplied with weapons and armor first, that is. The Seas Side Empire addition to the game adds some new content such as a Harbour to extend your trade reach, to some all-new story scenarios as well. It’s not a complete game-changer, but the added content is still worth trying out.
Given you can often have a lot of plates spinning at once as you tend to all aspects of your town, the early goings can often be fraught with money spending faster than you can access it. This is most noticeable with you’re attempting to repair a building, only for the funds to simply fade away faster than you can click the repair button. This can also happen when you’re buying and selling from the merchant as well. The game does allow you to speed up time to 5x speed, so make sure to slow it down when you’re wanting to spend some money on repairing or buying when you really need it. There is a convenient quick menu for repairing or accessing some parts of a building, and it really does speed things up as you hold A to bring up the quick wheel and then push the analog stick in the direction of the tool you need. For as complex as some sim-building games can get, they did an alright job mapping what you need here on a controller, so I have to give them props for that.
As you push through quests, collect taxes, or achieve other goals, you’ll earn experience that then, in turn, allows you to learn new skills as a leader. You can boost your soldier range so they can protect your town more efficiently, or decrease several costs that come with construction or repairing. These skills remain unlocked regardless of the mode you’re in as they are tied to your overall level, so their inclusion can certainly make some scenarios a cakewalk when you’re tasked with them. It’s a nice system that feels like a good fit here, rewarding all the things you do with a sense of progression.
While the game does allow you to enforce combat against the bandits looking to pounce on your wares, the combat is probably the most disappointing part of the game as you don’t directly control your soldiers into battle yourself. You’ll set up a barracks, a few guard towers, and various other means to protect your town, all which have a radius that they can scout from. Combat itself feels like a skirmish in a Looney Tunes cartoon as the soldier and bandit will fight in a dust cloud during their encounter. If the soldier wins, the bandit is killed, and if the bandit is victorious, then he leaves with some of your resources. I would have loved to have been able to select a group of guards and place them at the entrances to my town. Maybe it’s the RTS fan in me wanting more control of my “units”, but regardless, I still felt let down by its overly simplified combat.
While the visuals are well done with some beautifully hand-drawn digital artwork for its plethora of buildings, characters, and decorations, it can be rather tedious to select some buildings that you’ve placed very close to one another. While you can certainly space them out to make things easier for you, some maps really want you to maximize space, forcing your hands to make things get a little close for comfort. This is largely because the select tool can feel a tad too big and imprecise, not to mention rather laggy when you have a lot on screen. You can certainly zoom in to make it a little bit easier, but even the erase tool can often feel too large at any of its settings as well. The cursor, for some reason, also likes to wildly shoot to the corners of the screen if you’re moving it during the seasonal loading screens.
I also found it odd that you cannot create bridges as while your townsfolk can simply just walk through the shallow water between land masses, there are other bridges that are present in some maps that are just there, but don’t exist in the things we can construct ourselves. The shallow dip into the water also prevents consistent roads that affected my OCD for having a paved road to every notable point in town. The terrain can also feel created in ways where some chunks of the map simply cannot be used for construction. Had we had the ability to dig into the ground to level some elevated areas, then I feel the maps could have opened up a bit more. Lastly, as you complete tasks or quests, you’ll earn Crowns, which are needed to upgrade your buildings to make them more efficient, but if you play on endless mode without quests turned on, you cannot gain Crowns at all. Had Crowns been able to be purchased with very large sums of cash, then it could have made upgrading the buildings a bit more feasible. That said, this is a pretty mild nit-pick as many of the quests are super easy to complete, it’s just a shame you cannot earn Crowns any other way.
Overall, I had a fun time with Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt. I halfways knew what to expect researching the title before I requested a review copy and all things considered, I found myself pretty addicted to pushing through half of the game’s achievements, with wanting to keep pursuing more. I don’t think the game is for everyone as those looking for deep and complex systems may find this title to be way too oversimplified, but for those who are wanting to dip their toes into some basics of a town building sim, then you might just have a great time putting those townies to work and making some serious bank.
A review code of Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt was provided for the purpose of this review and played on an Xbox One S.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One S.