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Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt will be immediately familiar to those slightly longer in the tooth players who remember Blue Byte’s pre-millenium Settlers games. Heck, we’d not be surprised if some of the devs were Blue Byte veterans, so similar is the game in feel to the hoary old series that first debuted on Amiga.
In all honesty, if you really want to play Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt you would be better off playing it on whatever mobile device you are. Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt feels familiar, but also outdated. Read our review to find out why we only.
THQ North acquired HandyGames fairly recently, this release continuing their habit of releasing remastered versions of their new IPs. Townsmen originally came out on iOS/Android in 2012, the relatively simplistic graphical style betraying its mobile origins a little. Thankfully the assets were of a reasonably high quality, so the townies AKA citizens are fairly convincing in terms of carrying out their daily tasks. At the same time though, this isn’t exactly pushing the PS4 to its absolute limit, nor would you expect it to.
You’re thrown into it somewhat, tackling the games mechanics during a six-scenario tutorial. This is more than welcome as you’d probably be in danger of being more than a little overwhelmed otherwise. During the first couple of hours you’ll become familiar with the vagaries of the supply chain underpinning your fiefdom’s economy. The bottom of the pyramid is wheat, ore and wood. All of these can be refined further to allow building of more complex trade materials. Rather than bore you with excessive detail, it’s all fairly logical stuff. Sausages need a pig farm for example, though ale is a more complex item to produce.
Early on you’ll be confronted by an annoying regal type who threatens to blackmail you for ransacking the king’s treasury. This sets in motion a chain of events where you’re stuck with an imperial garrison in your town. This becomes more necessary as bandit attacks that become increasingly bold are needing to be repelled. In fact, your first trophy is more likely to be for defeating fifty of them, rather than the tutorial as you might expect, such is their veracity.
Your production cycle is only really constrained by your ability to store manufactured and gathered resources. That said, you can exhaust mineral deposits fairly easily. Your ability to subsist is also dictated by the seasons, times of plenty coming in spring, summer and autumn, but you’ll have to have squirreled away enough resources for winter. Practically this means you’ll make hay while the sun shines and when it’s winter, move your farmers on to construction work to keep on top of your burgeoning fiefdom’s demands.
Even in the tutorial stages, it can feel a little bit overwhelming sometimes, especially when you’re bombarded by notifications. Oddly, there’s no apparent way to dismiss them. We can understand why a notice about an emergency can’t be expunged, but when it’s a warning about running out of wood, for example, it seems odd. We realised later you can set the alert options to only tell you about severe issues, that makes things slightly less hectic.
As well as bandits and seasonal variations, your town can be affected by fires that spontaneously break out or bubonic plague that can decimate your population. The former can be solved by having fire towers in range and the latter by having an infirmary in your town. If you have to wait to build either, it’s probably too late. You’ll do well to pre-emptively place them before you’re affected, put it that way.
Your town is nothing without the aforementioned townies. Your town can’t expand without a populace to inhabit it and staff your cottage industries into the bargain. Keep them sweet by providing for their needs; primarily food, warmth and habitation; and you’ll be set. As you progress, they’ll seek forms of entertainment and religion into the bargain. A single church will prove sufficient to start with, but eventually your population will grow beyond a level your amenities are able to cope with.
The further you go with Townsmen, the more you realise that this effectively the same mobile game with everything unlocked. Townsmen lends itself well to short gameplay spurts, especially since the missions are broken down into distinct bite-sized scenarios. As opposed to a distinct linked campaign anyway.
If you’ve accumulated enough Thaler (being an archaic German currency) you’ll be able to get through some objectives quicker than if you actually waited for your production processes to catch up. Though in the final tutorial mission where you need to find the bandit camp as your final objective, we encountered a bug. Despite having got our garrison to co-ordinate searches in each area of the game map, via each of the four sub-objectives, the next step didn’t trigger. Perhaps a bug or maybe deliberate obfuscation.
Either way, it felt like we were playing that scenario far longer than felt necessary. As we type this, we hope a complete power cycle of our PS4 and a virtual kick up the arse move things along a little. Sadly, upon getting home it was no different. Perhaps a patch will be forthcoming?
Sound effects and music are nothing spectacular, but neither will you be muting your TV either. It all bubbles away pleasantly enough, your townies babbling away in a Germanic-tinged Simlish analogue. Though when a townie is nagging you, it’s annoying regardless of whether it is a cute cartoon character doing it or not.
As well as being able to get trade goods quicker than you make them by buying them, you can expedite building construction. This uses what we presume to be a mechanism left over from Townsmen‘s mobile roots. You accumulate what looks suspiciously like a premium currency you probably had to shell out for in the F2P original. This breaks the balance a little bit, but not ruinously so.
In conclusion, Townsmen is a fair port of a mobile original that lacks only slightly in the campaign aspect. In that it betrays its F2P roots a little. Yes, you can get a little bogged down reaching some objectives, but nothing terrible here. It’s telling that we took a grand total of eighteen screenshots for this review, you can lose hours to this.
Townsmen: A Kingdom RebuiltPros+ Bright and breezy graphics and animation
+ As close as you'll get to Settlers on current gen
+ Spot effects and music are good value
+ Tons to do here as all the scenarios from the original game are unlocked
+ Absorbing gameplay
Cons+ As close as you'll get to Settlers on current gen
+ Spot effects and music are good value
+ Tons to do here as all the scenarios from the original game are unlocked
+ Absorbing gameplay
- Not exactly pushing the envelope graphically
- F2P mechanics are never far from surface
- Campaign afflicted by its mobile origins a bit
- Nagging in pseudo-Simlish is still nagging
- Completing objectives doesn't always trigger win conditions, pacing a bit off
Summary- F2P mechanics are never far from surface
- Campaign afflicted by its mobile origins a bit
- Nagging in pseudo-Simlish is still nagging
- Completing objectives doesn't always trigger win conditions, pacing a bit off
Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt is a good mobile conversion that needs a couple of kinks ironed out, but an accomplished post-THQ Nordic acquisition release from HandyGames.
The clue is in the title with this one, as in Townsmen – A Kingdom Rebuilt you must rebuild your kingdom to its former glory. The lengthy tutorial gives some indication that you have recently been given a new town to restore following an incident elsewhere, but the majority of the scenarios are all standalone with only minor references to any sort of story.For the most part in Townsmen you will be erecting buildings, assigning workers and trying to keep your population happy. There is a huge selection of buildings to choose from including smelters, bakeries, churches, vineyards and even a tailors. These buildings all offer resources but then there are structures such as the contest grounds and juggler camp that are more focused on simply keeping your Townies and Townettes happy. If they are too happy though then you can easily raise taxes to bring them back to Earth.Most buildings act like part of a chain reaction in order to get to the end product. Take the smelter for example: this melts down iron and gold ore into bars that can then be used to create armor and weapons for the soldiers. But the smelter in turn needs charcoal and the ore itself to fully work, and charcoal requires wood first of all.
Sometimes these chains can feel unnecessarily long but when everything is working together like cogs in a machine, you start to appreciate the depth and intricacies included. As alluded to earlier, it isn’t simply building a town up from scratch that you need to worry about; sometimes it needs to be defended. Bandits will appear later on in the tutorial – and in specific scenarios – to steal your resources and set fire to your buildings. You can set up defences and barracks to have soldiers protect your homestead, but you don’t have the option to go on the offensive and drive the bandits out for good. This isn’t so much a full blown RTS game, but more a relaxing sim-builder.Some scenarios will focus purely on building your settlement, and others will require you to defend yourself. These levels are clearly highlighted that they are a military map. The difference in sizes is also highlighted, as is the overall difficulty of each scenario.But even with these vast amounts of buildings and resources, each scenario boils down to completing objectives, constructing buildings and defending where necessary.
Sadly, this gameplay loop gets repetitive.And whilst we’re on about a negative or two, if you are struggling for resources then there are also Crowns, which act like a premium economy given away when completing quests as a reward. This has been left in from when the game opted for a free-to-play model on mobiles, but this comes at a cost: villagers are never in a rush to complete jobs, even with the option to increase speed 5x. It is this which can occasionally see the game come across as tiresome. Thankfully, Townsmen plays in an isometric view that, from a distance, looks pretty.
The game also has seasons, so you get a view of what your town looks like during the four time periods. These seasons are important too, and it’s also worth noting that during winter months your crops for flour making and beer brewing wont grow, so you’ll need to take things like that into consideration. Should you however zoom in to get a better look though, and the graphics do take a slight hit; the buildings and people look like 2D stickers stuck onto a background.With the surprising amount of depth on offer here, having notifications pop up on the left side of the screen is a welcome addition. These are also graded in severity; the most severe also having an associated sound effect so when a bandit appears or a building hasn’t been repaired and is now on fire, you can quickly give it your full attention. Or this could be worse when the plague hits your town.Townsmen has a whopping 100 achievements to unlock, and yet all of these can be unlocked through just normal play.
![Association Association](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125581789/126769901.png)
Each scenario has an achievement associated with completing it and the rest are all progression based. Some will obviously take longer than others – each progression award has either three or five stages to unlock – but the list doesn’t require any out-of-the-box thinking to complete them, so shouldn’t be a massive undertaking. Looks like a simple city builder with its cutesy and warming art style. But there can be a lot of depth also, especially if you go looking for it. On scenarios with harder difficulties it is essential you build the Forester’s hut to build the Sawmill to build the Carpenter’s Shop etc., but when playing easier maps or the Endless mode you can be free to concentrate on whatever you like, providing the Townies don’t revolt at the fact you don’t have any jewellery for them to buy; speaking from experience.
However, the high price point of £24.99, repetitiveness and some mechanics not working as well on consoles as they do on mobile mean that this sim-builder should only be reserved for veterans of the genre. You may have heard this tale on our podcast already but when playing through the tutorial of Townsmen – A Kingdom Rebuilt I was thoroughly enjoying the laid back approach to the gameplay, seeing my medieval town come to life. And then the next thing I knew my town was overrun by bandits with a penchant for setting my buildings on fire.
This wasn’t in the brochure! But whilst these pyromaniac bandits caught me off guard, I was unwavered, having had my fair share of enemies attack my cities throughout the years on other strategy games. The clue is in.
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