Reseñas

• gamedeal user

  Sep 27, 2021

  A City Builder with a Story

  There is much to love in this already solid early access city builder game! It reminds me of some other city builder titles; like Dawn of Man, Ancient Cities, and Nebuchadnezzar. But it gets right what a lot of other games miss. There is an ease of play to the mechanics that make it seem like a more developed game. The devs thought of a lot of what the gamer would need. It is already perfectly playable in its current state. The story background is an apocalyptic future where the beavers out-survive the humans. There are ruins scattered around the map, presumably from the fallen human civilizations. What it does not have is any type of combat. It's a struggle with nature. The only weather element so far is the water cycle: drought and flooding. It looks as if seasons may be more fully developed in future updates. The city building is complex enough to allow the player to use strategy to combat nature... a typical PVE game. It employs hunger and thirst elements, as well as a need for basic resources to build with, like wood and metal scraps. I already get a deeper, more visual feel for the way the water cycle works than anything you can get from just reading books. Good models are like that. What I am enjoying immensely is the realistic engineering and landscaping. It allows so much more gameplay in this area than in games like City Skylines, which I do love. I love the ability to shape the land and use dynamite. I love being able to edit and create my own maps. I am also enjoying the trading elements of being able to trade between districts. The whole district component is a fun part of the game. What I look forward to is the addition of more factions and expanded gameplay features that are sure to come. But, most importantly, I would love the addition of a workshop to play maps that other gamers create and share. I think that multiplayer competitive and cooperative could be perfectly do-able in this game in the future. I also could see the addition of scenarios... which I don't care for very much myself in a game. But, some people like that. I certainly look forward to more maps and BIGGER maps. It's all good! The music is an enjoyable experience. The artwork is very good. It's a fun game that will provide hours of enjoyment. And, its well worth the money spent, since I already have over 80 hours in the first week and a half since release. I can't quit playing. I highly recommend this game for people who love city builders.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 27, 2021

  I rarely leave reviews, but I'm making the effort here because Timberborn is hands down best Early Access game since Factorio (IMO, YMMV). This game is a rock solid colony sim with a unique twist: it revolves around water resources management. Not simply making sure that you have sufficient infrastructure to supply water, but actually managing a seasonal and limited water budget. There are no shortcuts around it. While this might sound a bit tedious, it makes for an absorbingly refreshing twist on colony management sims. The fact that it's only in EA means that the game can only get better. Don't let the EA tag frighten you off, I had exactly zero glitches playing this game. Research, expansion, and planning are all integral parts of the game. Like any good colony sim, there are a ton of ways for things to go off the rails. In this game more than most, long range planning will pay off. My critiques are few and have little to do with anything fundamental: * First, while I think the the game has a well developed early and early-mid game, there's not much in the way of a "late-game" feel. I like colony sims/resource management sims where there is a clear transition along the lines of "survival >> establishment >> incremental expansion >> administrative/logistic mastery >> technological mastery >> environmental mastery >> monument achievement". Factorio, Rimworld, KSP, and a few others have this progressive feel. Timberborn sorta halts at incremental expansion, and the clearest "win" condition that I can see is for the player to completely overcome drought as a limiting factor for survival/expansion. The fact that this game is still in EA means that there is a chance that his might be addressed as the devs continue to work on the game. I want to underline, though, that this critique is not a black mark for the game at all; it is the opposite. Despite "higher" levels of gameplay not really existing (at least in terms of my model above), the game remains engaging and fulfilling. Within the bounds of the game, the only real limit is your imagination and ingenuity. * Second, (and possibly only important to me because I am a water resources professional) there are some concepts of water resources management that could be implemented but the devs either haven't gotten there or have decided not to go there. Some of these concepts are mechanical: automated weir crests, dam bottom outlets, water pumps, etc. In the case of water pumps, there is a strong chance that the devs might be afraid that a water pump would make the game vulnerable to infinite energy exploitation (though I can see ways around that as well that would not involve rejiggering game physics). In those other cases, I hope to see the devs release them as new features in the future. Other concepts would take more effort to introduce to the game: pollution, groundwater, evaporation management, seasonality, ocean-water/salinity, etc. To conclude, Timberborn wholeheartedly deserves the "overwhelmingly positive" reviews it has received in the first two weeks since its EA release. It presents all the colony sim challenges that builder-gamers like me crave, and does it with a twist that is unique in my experience. I very much look forward to continuing to play this game, and I can't wait to see where the devs go with this most excellent game.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 30, 2021

  I once lost all my colonists in Surviving Mars. Two hundred men and women, adults, children and elderly. They had pets. It was due to an unfortunate chain of events and gross incompetence on my part. It felt nowhere as bad as when I lost all my 12 beavers to a drought. This game is charming, working, and good. It deserves to be enjoyed and its developers deserve to be supported.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 10, 2021

  I am completely in love with this game. Colony sims are one of my favorite genres, and having one with no combat focused on hydro engineering and irrigation starring adorable sapient beavers is just wonderful. The gameplay is wonderful. I love being able to stack buildings and invent solutions to water management. I look forward to the updates adding more factions and buildings in the near future. My wishlist for improving this game for anyone interested: 1: Ability to hold shift when placing a building to automatically mark the paths/bushes/crops/saplings for demolition, and still allow you to place building blueprints on stuff marked for demolition. - having to manually delete paths is particularly annoying, 2: Ability to shift click multiple buildings in order to pause/unpause them at the same time. 3: Ability to cycle through all buildings of the same type through the map, e.g. so you can find all your gatherers huts to pause them (I'm a game dev and I know how annoying unsolicited ideas can be, so feel free to skip the rest, but this game just has me excited at the future possibilities) Some buildings that would be nice to have, maybe for other factions A horsepower-powered water pump that doesn't need a beaver worker A block that can let water pass through it but can have levees placed on it (for building aqueducts that aren't also dams) A more aquatic-based faction (my guess is this is probably already on the planning table) that *Has a crop that grows better on flooded tiles (rice, cattails, waterlillies or something) *A fun/social "building" that is just a water-polo field for beavers to play with a floating wooden ball (this would be adorable) *Has lodges similar to real beavers, where the entrance can be placed underwater but the top is above water (and resists flooding unless totally submerged) Maybe has more automated ways of pumping water uphill(?) I'd also love to see the Irontooth beavers add another way to get metal, and to have a horsepower-enhanced advanced research building that worked faster. Maybe some factions could have a power-storage device like a huge metal flywheel or Pumped Storage Hydropower, this would help a lot with making wind and water power more steady in the late game. Most colony sims have you researching batteries, and mechanical energy storage solutions seem fitting for both the genre and the setting.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 28, 2021

  Honestly.. Went into this pretty.. well actually blind entirely and I must say, Holy Crap this is a good game.. Extremely fun just to start over and over until you get that good start that you want. You should give this a shot if you love city builders. This honestly so off guard I just simply had to write a review to share my thoughts on what is currently an extremely enjoyable experience. If you chose to read my review, Thank you for your time - have a great day!
• gamedeal user

  Nov 8, 2021

  Timberborn stands out from other survival settlement builders through its use of water management (and its villagers being beavers, of course). By which I mean it is necessary as part of the core mechanics to build and maintain dams in order to control the flow of water, at first in order to survive the seasonal droughts, but then also to begin to divert river flow to bring life to dry areas of the game map. Is this a decent game in the state it is at the time of the review? Yes. But it's Early Access status is certainly showing. Not with its actual mechanics and stability, as it handles pretty nicely and whilst not fully without issue, is very well polished. But past the early game, there's not a whole lot to do. Progression revolves around research. Research revolves around... well sticking a guy in a building that doesn't even require any additional resources. Of course, it speed up research, you'll want a larger colony; and to maintain a larger colony, you're going to want to research more advanced concepts, which are going to require new resources as you bridge the tiers. And to be fair, there are a decent number of upgrades available through research. Enough that the core game is certainly there and in a complete state, but... ideally there could be more. Certainly, there is more to it than Banished, which is the typical yardstick people measure this kind of game against these days. The issue with this is though that there isn't much incentive to do stuff after you've cemented your survival. Great, you've built a huge lake that'll retain water throughout even the longest of droughts without risking the death of your crops. Now what? There isn't much incentive to expand, except maybe to scavenge for scrap metal. You can easily reach the end of the research tree on maybe 3 districts alone. And when you do, you'll be left thinking "now what?". So what you have here is a game with a great lumberpunk aesthetic, great core ideas and a robust game engine... but not a whole lot to do after a fact. Yes, there are multiple factions, but right now there are only 2 of those, and whilst they do play differently enough it does increase increase replayability, they're not different enough to make that second playthrough interesting once you've gotten used to those differences. It is my hope that Timberborn will fix these aspects before it leaves Early Access, because it really does have the potential to stand up there with games like the Anno series. It just needs some fleshing out to get there.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 16, 2021

  My original beaver colony was doing absolutely amazing. Was up to 96 beavers, producing metal, books, almost everything in the tech tree. Several droughts had come and gone but I barely noticed them with how well my dam and water supplies held out. And then the big one came, a drought that lasted just a little bit longer than I was ready for. The dam dried up. The water stopped pumping. My little guys were drinking from the reserves until those, too, ran dry. A day and a half before the drought ended beavers started to die from dehydration. As some died it made room in the houses, and they started having babies. The next generation ready to take over after the drought. But it went for just too long. In the last hours of the drought, my last adult beaver died off. The river came back though! And the 8 babies had survived it. The ran around like crazy, playing on the carousel, chasing each other down the streets. Working up a big thirst. But, none of them were big enough to pump the water. They were growing fast though, would they become adults in time?? As the day went the dehydration started to hit them hard and the first died off. The others ran around in a panic, working up a bigger and bigger thirst, until they too fell to the ground, licking the sand for any little bit of moisture it might have. As night fell on the second day after the drought the town lay still and quiet. No one at the campfires, no one in the rooftop terraces, and no one working the pumps in the pump houses...
• gamedeal user

  Dec 13, 2021

  Fun game with frustrating district range limits. Pros: -Terraforming - The ability to re-shape the land as you see fit with explosives/platforms. No mountain is too high, no land too dry. You can redirect rivers and create artificial reservoirs. -Beaver tech - The buildings all fit the theme and are quite creative. -Physics - There is a lot you can do with the water mechanics. If you screw up river flow layout, your water wheels won't spin. If you block a water path, the river overflows somewhere else. Gotta keep an eye on things so you don't accidentally flood yourself from another direction or overspill if you have more water flowing in than out. Cons: -District system - The game forcibly fragments your colony. The beavers can only walk ~70 squares of pathing from the district center. This means that to reach outer regions where all the scrap is, you need to set up a new district, which if not exploited properly means your new district starts from scratch (even if your main district is drowning in resources, the new one can't touch it and will starve to death even if you have a warehouse 1 block past the district limit gate). -Tutorial - It doesn't cover dams or their necessary parts (dam, levee, floodgate etc.) at all, yet you will wipe by the 2nd drought if you don't figure it out yourself. It also doesn't explain the various resource icons, which would be nice to see. Neither does it tell you about pathing limits which will screw up your layout. -Beaver job assignment - When you have more jobs than population, you can't just pick up a beaver from 1 building and tell him to work in another. You have to progressively "pause" every other production building until the place you want him to go is the only one still open. If you don't learn this, your beavers will die of thirst working in a factory because you can't tell them to go operate the water pump. -Power system cheating - The game has 2 sources of self sufficient power: Water wheel which works full time until a drought and windmill which has variable power based on wind strength. However, I've been observing patterns that don't feel random at all. My windmills keep operating during regular weather, often at full power, yet the moment a drought comes the wind magically vanishes. It defeats the purpose of a backup power system. Tips: -New districts - So far one of the best methods I found for setting up a new district is to build a warehouse/log pile/water storage at the limit of your current district, then once they get filled up, place a district gate before them and connect the path to a new district center. This way your new district is already full of starting resources which your beavers can use. When you start running low, you can always move the district gate back to let your primary district fill up your storage. This is often easier to deal with than the distribution network which needs extra beavers, lots of space and is a one way system in each case. -Connector districts - You don't have to set up a fully functional district to cross the map, but you do need district overlaps to get further out. What helps me is a dummy district with a district center ~60 blocks away from my current limit with nothing but pathing towards my district and the place I want to go. As long as you get overlaps, you can double migrate your beavers to the final location which can be a lot further out. -Dams - You don't need to build high river borders to create reservoirs. When the river dries up, build stairs into it and fill up the riverbed with explosives. You can make it deeper so the water lasts longer the next time. Focus on the edges near your crops/trees first. You should also always have a little dead end away from the river to create a static reservoir to prevent crops/trees from dying. Even a single line of water 2 blocks deep survives a long drought and keeps everything alive.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 21, 2021

  I've built all the things, I've researched all the things, and I've mined all the things. What did I get out of it? Something that feels like a first impression. Or at least I hope that's what it is. The game is fascinating in the verticality that it necessitates. It doesn't offer you the ability to build up, it requires it. So city planning is so much more in depth than any other game of the genre if only because you'll quickly realize that you built yourself into a corner and can't make roads. All because you didn't plan ahead.\ The need to build dams is also pretty cool and interesting in this game. Functionally, it's just winter for any other game like this, where a season comes and you lose access to farms (and water). Except here, not only do you have a way to mitigate that, but it becomes vitally required. You may (and probably will) have entire districts or entire cities dedicated to storing water and plotting routes for rivers. Another nice touch is the lower civilian count. Often times games will just dump loads of characters in to make it feel like a city. Instead here you just have what's realistically a small town even at large scale. Difference being that every citizen maters. A lot. Losing a handful of beavers can be crushing. So why does this feel like a first impression? It doesn't feel like there's any purpose here, or any lasting complexity. Once I figured out a really easy stairway pattern for housing and routes for storage & workers, there was very little difficulty in planning. Once I built a district for water storage and two dozen water pumps, water was no longer a threat even in massive cities during week long droughts. There came a point that I just started spawning new city after new city to expand rapidly. If they died there, who cares, send new recruits from the hyper stable core city. This is definitely a good game at time of writing, and I really hope they expand this to have a campaign with added complexity. Even as it stands, the team has already pushed the concept of a city builder beyond what currently exists, even if it's only a few extra feet. If they don't expand on the idea, it'll still be a good time, but it wont be a lasting one. I'm 15 hours in, and I honestly don't see myself touching it again until 1.0.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 23, 2021

  The game is great till you really start to make a large city then it lags. It is a total blast till then though. I found the lag is directly linked to the haulers. I made a city that has 1500 beavers and over 200,000 items/food in storage. If I pause all 50 hauling posts it runs fine no lag at all. If I turn the hauling posts on the game is unplayable it literally takes 3 days real time for the game to move 1 day with them on. Also you can't do anything in the game with out it being paused not even pan of move with them on. So the problem is with the code for haulers. The down side is with no haulers my city dies cause water and food are not moved to storage fast enough to keep up with the demand. I am currently trying to find a city setup that works with out haulers as a work around till the problem is fixed. Since I do love making large cites that hold thousands.