Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt

Review By Nicola Warren

Townsmen – A Kingdom rebuilt is a remaster of the 2016 game Townsmen which was developed and published by Handygames. The aim of the game is to develop a small run down town into your own grand empire while playing the king figure. You’ll need to send off your Townsmen to do your bidding, very much like Settlers and Tropico. Make sure that you work out a healthy balance between your money, resources and towns inhabitants though … yet it is not as easy as you think it will be.

You start Townsmen with a 6 part tutorial which teaches you pretty much everything you need to know about the game’s mechanics so there’s no need to worry if you did not play the original Townsmen game. It teaches you the basics of building, growing crops and collecting the resources you will need to make your town thrive through all of the different seasons and scenarios which you will soon encounter first hand. It won’t be long though until you begin to feel that the tutorial is a game within itself after having racked up over 6 hours of gameplay just from that.

Starting off you need to construct the most needed buildings to kick off your game, these consist of woodcutters, sawmills, a slaughterhouse and of course farms and houses which will then start encouraging people to come and inhabit your town and then it all blooms from there. If handled correctly your Townsmen will go about their daily routines themselves and you will only need to get involved if a problem arises or damage is done to their buildings. Depending on which scenario you are playing you will also need to build and create defences such as guard towers and barricades to stop bandits and soldiers from attacking your town, I found this out the hard way though.

Some of the missions become really hard to complete because out of the blue you will get attacked by a group of soldiers or bandits which if you fail defeat can bring on the demise of your town pretty fast. The soldiers aren’t so hard to defeat as you just send your own soldiers to fight them and make sure they are stocked with weapons and food to keep them going, but the bandits are a different story. Bandits will charge your town setting fire to a building or two, the fire then spreads quite fast and you end up with 80 per cent of your town burnt down. This makes it really hard to make a come back because having your buildings being burnt down causes your Townsmen to leave, so you use all of your money to rebuild the buildings and then still need to have extra to build more houses so people will come back, which by the time you reach this point you are completely tapped out of money.

A few other things that I found out to be an issue are that you tend to end up wasting a lot of time due to having completed all of your tasks and the amount of time it takes your current one to finish building or upgrading, So you end up having to wait a while before you can advance further. The map sizes are never really that big so things can end up a bit cramped If the map sizes were bigger I feel it would give a better feel to the game and more of a chance to succeed as you’d get more room to expand. Then finally the movement of the Townsmen and the build rate is quite slow making it a bit of a slug to get the resources you need in a fast time.

All in all, there is a 6 chapter tutorial (which roughly hits just over 6 hours of play time) 24 Sandbox maps along with 26 different scenarios which all hit around one hours worth of play time each. The cartoon-esque feel to the game is fun and the graphics are neat and tidy with some very recognizable medieval items and themes and a very nice and peaceful soundtrack to accompany it all. I feel that it is slightly let down by the underlying storyline being pretty much the same through each scenario causing it to be quite repetitive at times.

After playing Townsmen – A Kingdom Rebuilt I feel that it would be better off as a mobile game rather than have been bought to PC. It’s a good resource management game if you have the patience and time to play but can get quite boring and repetitive if played for longer than an hour at a time.

Overall I give Townsmen – A Kingdom Rebuilt 6/10

Badger

Life long gamer and Geek, Considered by most to be of doubtable sanity. never seen without my trusty Stetson

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