That of the management it is a genre of video games that is nothing short of magical and which over the years has seen various phases of more or less fame without ever stopping. He put us in charge of zoos, farms, airports, casinos, schools and so on and so forth. But never in our lives would we have thought that we would be in charge of a beaver colony in a post-apocalyptic world. No, we didn’t spell it wrong, these are the premises of Timberborna courageous management game with survival mechanics created by Mechanistryan independent Polish software house and this is theirs review.
Before we begin, please know that at the time of writing this review, Timberborn is still in Early Access (Update 5)this means that although the game can be purchased and played, it is not yet complete and features and defects that you will read about here may change or disappear during the course of development.
Our review of Timberborn
Timberborn is set in a post-apocalyptic world devoid of humans who seem to have disappeared from the face of the Earth inhabited only by beavers. The intrepid rodents are intent on staying alive in an arid land, with few resources, food and water. To this are added (with the latest update) also the toxic effluents of pollution, small souvenir left by humans. The aim of the game is obviously to make the newborn colony of beavers live as long as possible, growing their base, developing technologies and building homes, factories e farms to make the Earth habitable again.
At this stage of the game there is no real plot. We don’t know what caused the extinction of humans, there is no campaign and we have no real goal. A initial tutorial will provide simple missions that will guide you on your first adventure in the company of these adorable beavers. But don’t get too comfortable, no tutorial will properly prepare you for what awaits you!
Developer:
Mechanistry
Price:
19,6 €
Opportunities and unexpected events
The basis of Timberborn is that of any management software with survival elements: There are resources to harvest and transform, food to grow and water to collect and store and if you can’t do that, well you’re done for. The beavers will move depending on the actions you take and cannot be controlled individually. This means that if you think they are doing something wrong, the problem is you.
You will begin to collect berries and trees (few) that contaminated nature offers you but you will soon realize that you will have to grow fields for cultivation and forests for timber yourself. Unfortunately, as anticipated, the Earth is in a sorry state and most of the map will be completely barren or worse contaminated. Water will be your best ally and will give fertility to the lands it touches but be careful! Periodically there will be periods of drought that will soon dry up the rivers and lakes on the map and you will have to be ready or goodbye beavers!
This is where it comes into play the strategic element of Timberborn. You must be able to react to periods of drought that can last for days (our record was 8 days of drought), accumulating enough water in the deposits or transforming the game map by building dams, digging lakes with dynamite, creating new beds of the river and so on. Start sharpening those teeth!
Building system
Food and water aren’t the only items you’ll need to keep tabs on. Beavers will need a roof over their heads and an intimate space to make lots of beavers (you guessed it). Resources will have to be worked to obtain more refined and important materials and research centers will be needed to develop new technologies and constructions. But it’s not just work! Beavers also need recreation, to stay healthy and even a little beauty around town. The happiness of beavers is essential and it will help improve their work performance, moving speed and so on.
The construction system is as simple as it is effective. A system of roads connects each individual structure and beavers will use it to move objects or travel to their work site. Homes and factories can be positioned freely on the map with the possibility of linking together, for example by sharing electricity, or stacking vertically so as to optimize space. That of verticality it is one of the most interesting elements of the game and provides new ways of building and managing the colony.
The bad weather is coming!
As if our beavers didn’t have a hard enough time living in the fallout, the latest Timberborn update (released a few weeks ago) adds a new game mechanic, the bad water. These are streams of water contaminated by past pollution that infest the entire map, killing everything they touch. This is one of the biggest updates and undoubtedly the most interesting which adds new mechanics, technologies, constructions and new ways to take out our beavers.
Bad water can also infest drinking water and thus alter our wonderful projects but it can also become a useful resource! There are now new constructions to extract the bad water and introduce chemistry into play, allowing us to build dynamites, pods to contain the effluvia and even robot beavers.
But the difficulties will have ended here right? Deluded. A new negative event has now been added to the periodic drought which transforms the drinking water of the rivers into bad water. This means that your beautiful little river, the dams you have built and any irrigation canals you have worked so hard to dig, can now become potential instruments of death. Will you be ready to handle them?
From a technical point of view…
…Timberborn moves in the wake of indie video games of this genre without offering us anything special. At first glance it could in fact be one of the many titles on the market without offering particular textures or interesting animations. Indeed, these precisely leave a bitter taste in the mouth, not even managing to allow us to savor the potentially interesting movements of the beavers; from afar they could be anything. Against, such a minimal graphic style makes the game extremely fluid even on less performing systems and also when the city grows excessively.
We found the same flatness in the soundtrack which has about ten tracks repeated in loops that are very similar to each other. There is certainly room for improvement!
The Timberborn review in brief
The features that differentiate Timberborn from other video games of this genre are very few and perhaps if they hadn’t used the brilliant beaver card, we wouldn’t be here writing/reading this review. However Playing it was extremely fun and learning the new mechanics in the latest update was very rewarding (despite the corpses of villages we left behind, OPS!)
Beaver charm or not, Timberborn certainly has what it takes to become one of the most interesting survival management games out there, everything is in the hands of the developers and future updates until the official launch.
