Townsmen

Review

The Medieval Era is mostly remembered for its men wearing tin suits, either on foot marching in a square formation, or on horses (poor horsey) charging against their enemies in an attempt to defeat them and conquer their kingdoms.  But what about the noble men who transformed small villages into epic medieval towns? These men were the Townsmen!

Townsmen is a strategy/city builder/casual game where you are a governor and your goal is to take a small village and develop it into a town. You will have two options when you start your new game; you can either choose a scenario or just jump in on one of the sandbox levels. By choosing the scenario option, you will be able to access two very comprehensive tutorials, one (named tutorial) will educate you on types of buildings and how to collect or increase taxes. The other one is the military basic training which will help you to understand how to protect your village and its inhabitants against bandit.  It will take you at least 30 minutes to go through them but they are worth it.  

From here you can either go to another scenario or a sandbox level.  In scenarios you will have to achieve a main goal to win.  As you progress through it, you will be given smaller quests to complete. Every time you clear a quest you will be rewarded with either coins, resources or even prestige points. These points are extremely useful but come in small quantities. For example, you might need to build a tavern and a church to keep your habitants happy but through either bad luck or pure negligence on your behalf, you don’t have the dough or the resources in hand. Well, you might have prestige points and by using them you will acquire those two buildings straight away but will lose a fair few of prestige points, so making the right choices is pretty important. Also, try to clear the quests that have prestige points first, you will need them.

Sandbox levels are basically never-ending games and you can choose whether or not you want to fight against bandits. You also have different terrains to choose from, which can be a bit tricky. You will have quests to do but all rewards are prestige points.

Gameplay-wise, you will be going through seasons. If you need to cultivate wheat to be able to produce flour and then loaves of breads, make sure to select your workers during spring, summer and autumn. It’s not going to work in winter. Also, build plenty of housing as you will be given inhabitants from whom you can collect taxes.  Your castle will have four workers at the start, who   are running around collecting resources from merchant houses to deliver to the castle, and vice versa. Alternatively, your worker may be required to deliver to another merchant who may be in need of a specific item to create a product. As you expand your city, it is always a good idea to construct additional warehouses so that merchants who are quite far from the castle can drop their supply there instead or running all the way to the castle. Barracks and watch towers are very important, especially if you have to fight bandits.  Every here and there during a game and trader will knock at your door to trade resources, which is a great way to build up your coins.

Another thing; each time you build a structure or achieve a quest, experience points will come your way. At the bottom of your screen you will have two gauges, one for XP and one for research. Each time you reach a new experience level, you will be able to select a topic to research as long as you have the right number of resources and coins to activate it. And no, you can’t use your prestige points in this case.

Graphically, Townsmen is a nice 2D game. The soundtrack is good and the controls are mostly responsive. On a couple of occasions when I selected a farm and wanted to move it in one direction it went in totally the other way, but then it worked fine as soon as I reselected it. Not a big deal but a bit frustrating.