I’ve seen Towns compared to Dwarf Fortress, and they have a lot in common. They both have you control a group of people by giving them tasks to perform. They both feature town building, resource management, and combat. They’re also both very hard to get into, but extremely rewarding if you can get past the learning curve.
Gameplay
When you start a new game of Towns, you’re given a handful of townies (apparently what your people are called) in the middle of a randomly generated world. From there you have to set about acquiring resources like wood and stone and building up a small town to support your handful of townies. If you’re lucky, they’ll survive long enough to get a good settlement going. If you’re me, one or two might manage to survive until immigrants arrive.
Most of the game consists of you building your town. You don’t directly command your townies; you simply choose what you want done, and your townies will make sure it gets done. For instance, you can pick where your townies should mine or build, and they’ll set about performing the task. Sometimes this works as expected, but more often than not, you’re left wondering why your townies are doing one thing instead of another. The townies tend to work as a group, but this results in odd behavior at times; I’ve seen a single townie running out to an area where I’ve marked stone for mining, they’ll mine a single block, then run back to town to do something else, while another townie has to travel out to the same spot to mine a different block. Also, the “haul” task is separate from everything else, so even once you have storage areas set up, your townies are more likely to drop materials on the ground randomly instead of carrying it to a nearby container. It’s also difficult to prioritize what they’re doing (beyond a basic priority list). However, when it works, it works well. If things are set up properly, your townies can maintain themselves fairly easily with little assistance; it’s just hard to get to that point.
The user interface is the biggest hindrance to Towns. There’s a lot of information that would be useful if it was presented more clearly (or at all). I’ve had countless townies die because they were stuck on top of a building I was constructing, and all I needed was a “Hey, I’m stuck!” message and I could have saved them. Some messages show up that help, like when you can’t create something because you’re missing a prerequisite. These messages are great, but they’re buried in a menu. A chat-like log would be extremely helpful.
Towns also lacks an effective tutorial. The tutorials provided are very basic – simply a page of text describing what you need to do, and a few objectives like “Get 10 wood”. I played through all the tutorials and still didn’t understand how to create a thriving town. While the tutorials teach you some of the core concepts, they leave out a lot of the detail required to be successful. Luckily, there’s a wiki (www.townswiki.com) that explains what you should be doing much better than the game does. After reading through the wiki, I found I could get the basics set up pretty easily.
Graphics and Sound
The graphics are simple and plain, which works on a certain level but leaves much to be desired. Chopping trees consists of a townie standing on a tree and making a wood chopping sound. Combat shows townies ramming into their enemy repeatedly. Townies will sometimes team up on foes, which creates an awkward-looking orgy as your townies surround the enemy and thrust themselves into it repeatedly.
Sound is similarly bland, though some effects – like chopping wood and mining stone – are easily recognizable and help to indicate what your townies are doing. Death sounds are annoying, especially when animals are naturally dying around your village.
Summary
Towns is still in an alpha state, and it shows. I think Towns will be a fantastic game with a bit more polish. The interface needs a lot of work especially, since I find myself confused about what’s going on most of the time. Even when I think I understand what’s going on, I still can’t figure out why things aren’t working sometimes.
That said, I find myself enjoying the game, so there’s definitely something interesting here. It’s just not ready yet. I’m hoping development continues and the game becomes easy to get into and still remain rewarding when your town thrives.
Towns is currently $15 (on sale for $12) on Steam, and I think that’s a bit much for the current state of the game. $5 or $10 would have been more reasonable. For all these reasons, I can only recommend Towns to someone coming from Dwarf Fortress or deeply interested in micromanagement. Even though I enjoy it, it’s definitely not for everyone.