समीक्षा

• 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

  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 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

  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

  Sep 21, 2021

  TLDR: In current state a really nice zen game. Stability and performance are good. Not very deep - as of now. Research is currently terrible. Issues: It's an early access game, so there are issues related to it. 1) The game seems rather short on content, as it is, it is rather a zen-like game, where you just happily build loads of housing complexes, that may not be efficient, but they just look nice. Production chains are very simple, and there aren't many. I really hope more are getting added later in the development, because I see huge potential for deeper gameplay. 2) Research: You can set up multiple settlements in the same game, called districts. Then make them transfer stuff and pop from one to another. This is nice, but having to research the "distribution" outpost and the "receiving" outpost separately, seems like a mistake, as these buildings are absolutely useless without one another and that's very telling of the current state of Research in the game - redundant and frustrating. I am pretty sure I've seen the dev response somewhere mentioning Research is getting a rework, but, I'd just straight up disable it until the rework is done. As it stands now, the research is just an extra layer that makes you build things in a way you don't like, until you get things like platforms and bridges, taking away A LOT of the joy you could've had in the early to mid game. Research is done through a single building, you're expected to spam. It requires no resources and no energy, just one beaver... and that feels pretty dumb and unsatisfying. I'd expect research to open up ways in which you can certain things, like, windmills instead of water wheels. I get that you don't need a windmill, but it may be situationally better building, hence available though research. What I don't get is locking simple wooden platforms, and thing like the Forester building behind research. You absolutely need forester, and you can also pretty much softlock yourself if you kill all the forests without having built the forester, which seems pretty stupid. Wooden platforms and stairs are essential to any "fun" you can get from building, so those should be absolutely available from get go. + You've already got mechanics that stop you from building "advanced" buildings to start with, such as, different materials. Research as it is currently implemented is just redundant, unsatisfying and frustrating. It's also easy to tell there wasn't much development time spent on its current implementation. 3) They feel like hamsters: They are visually beavers, but there are no swimming or underwater mechanics... there's even a hamster wheel as power source. I really hope they add some beaver mechanics related to water beside few different types of dams. 4) Maps have size limit: Why? If I wanna run a pointlessly large map, just let me (unless it's limited by the engine or smth). The outpost mechanics would flourish in huge worlds. 5) Main danger is easily beaten. No matter how long the droughts last, they're easily beat by a few dams and water storage spam. Suggestions/examples for present issues LOW CHALLENGE: Rains (in 3 days - rain instead of drought) -> need for drying canals. Floods with flotsam , damaging dams if the flotsam is travelling at higher speed - need for flotsam breakers/water speed control - there needs to be a punishment for slowing the water too much - water Power wheels need to scale with water flow speed, current implementation, where you put water power wheel into stale water and somehow it generates 180pwr seems very off. Food should spoil over time. Food conservation techniques - many options for research. (underwater warehouse - realistically lower temp - food there spoils slowly. Canned food, other conservation methods. Spoiled food = fertilizer - extra production in future as balance set off (similar effect to beehive, Flag with "x" storage for fertilizer, effect in "y" radius). Spoil speed should be affected by warehouse placement (for example on ground, "spoil rate" = 1 - ("amount of adjacent ground"*0.05 + "roof surface"*0.05 - "warehouse surface"*0.05); "time until spoiled" = "given food endurance"-"spoil rate"*time, if ("time until spoiled"<=0) then "given food" = "fertilizer".) MORE WATER STUFF, example: addition of water vegetation as food source - vegetation grows on the riverbed - potential for purposeful drying of parts of the river, to collect loads of food from the riverbed quickly, or long term diving posts (essentially a Flag next to river). Water vegetation would just grow on the riverbed over time, making it yet another food source. Underwater housing (inside/adjacent to dams). These pops would get water from their housing, but the housing would be very resource heavy. RESEARCH labs could be semi-advanced buildings, requiring power, multiple beavers, and research specific resources. Example: If you wanna research a windmill, you need a bunch of cogs, planks and wood, and X amount of time, which can be divided by the amount of hamsters working in the particular lab - but, more hamsters working means more Power required... The building would need to *ding* once research was done, or no research was in progress, requiring extra input from the player by making him choose the next research. But I don't see that as an issue, as the game isn't exactly micro heavy. They could probably slap that on top of a research tree, but really, they need more buildings for that sort of thing, 70% of the buildings available should be considered essential and unlocked from the start... so... like... but I am fine with any other solution that doesn't completely suck as well though. //Edit: 28.9.: After playing some more, I'd like to list a couple of extra suggestions Windmills seem too unreliable. That is not exactly an issue, as it seems about right. What doesn't seem about right is the lack of compensation techniques. Ex. lets say that your windmill system provides 500 power per average (peak being 800, minimum 0 (no wind)), within 400 power required system. As it is now, you might as well end up with 60% efficiency due to lows and zeroes, even though your system provides more than enough average power. Energy produced outside of working hours is also getting wasted. Solution - inertia batteries. Since there is no stone in the game, you could just make mid sized, hollow wooden wheels filled with water (with a piece of plywood across the insides, so you wouldn't get the water spinning independently to the wheel and lose a bunch of kinetic energy to fluid friction). These would work essentially as any other power consuming building, with a twist, being, it only consumes Power when the system has extra, and the other way around - being a power source when the system lacks power, while having given max power stored capacity and max power provided stats. These stats could be realistically given by max tolerated stresses inside the transmissions and mechanics of the "inertia battery". Switching between modes could be done by centrifugal transmissions - so, it should make sense. Could also make the water levels within the wheels deteriorate over time, hence giving them water consumption and making them more interactive. Another suggestion, that might help the water gameplay, are water pumps and pipes. Think they would be fun.// Conclusion: Fun, but very much a work in progress, rather short on content. Meaning it's not really a complex strategy game (yet). But, the mechanics and graphics currently present in the game (beside Research, which should be temporarily disabled until reworked, imo), are solid enough to make it a fun zen game, where you just build stuff and enjoy looking at the beavers go ham. I see great potential on what it could become, I hope the devs won't disappoint. So far it seems like they've been very responsive to the feedback, which is also one of the main reasons I've bought into this early access.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 20, 2021

  You can unlock the camera and zoom in really close to the ground to see the cute little beavers carrying stuff on their backs.
• 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

  Sep 21, 2021

  This is a game about a beaver society. It is my civic duty as a Canadian to buy and play it. It is good.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 17, 2021

  I bought Timberborn as soon as it came out, lost my mind on how cute the Beavers are, and suddenly I've now been playing for over 21 hours in a single session. The city builder elements are interesting and clever, but also challenging, while at the same time offering a lot of interesting options to manage risks and systems collapse My eyes are killing me, eventually I'm going to need to sleep, but over 500 beavers need my guiding hand to expand ever further The Dam must grow! ***Edit: **** 24 hours of playtime in, still not slept, I've crawled the fps down to 7 when at triple speed, which means I'm winning. Over 500 beavers, 5 districts, looking at a 6th and 7th soon. The earth now fears the crack of my explosives, I've churned the ground to make deep trenches irrigating the vast majority of the barren lands, and run power using great lengths of cranks and shafts spanning huge distances in total. When droughts roll around I sometimes don't notice until halfway through, because my waterway Management at this point has enabled me to supply the land with water even through the 7-10 day droughts the game now throws at me I highly recommend if you enjoy games like banished, but with some extra clever additions that do nothing but add to the game :D the game will punish you, but you will succeed, and by Lumber make your mark! TL:DR I raised a tiny tribe of beavers to 500 in numbers and conquered the land using almost nothing but lumber, 10/10, even in EA I approve :D