Timberborn

Good graphics but very shallow. Fails to deliver its proposed selling point (verticality and hydrodynamics). "A city-building game featuring ingenious animals, vertical architecture, river control, and deadly droughts." This is how the game is currently advertised. Unfortunately the verticality and water mechanics are more limited than most other city builders available. I wanted to love this, and I expected to since I love to manipulate water on my builds but it becomes boring fast even for someone that loves the genre. The verticality requires a big footprint for stair access and going for the smallest footprints requires you to have your buildings facing inwards, reducing your design freedom. There are many buildings that don't allow stuff built above. For instance you can't make a real world inspired dam, you can't make levees above platforms to make an aqueduct. The water mechanics are very limited, the above restrictions mean that you can't experiment with water pressure. While the game is beautiful looking the lack of freedom due to design choices removes a lot of replayability and kills a lot of creative design from players. It looks like it tried too much balance races at the cost of fun even though it's a single player. Map editor is a plus and it tries to fix this replayability issue but sadly the core loop limitations don't allow it to shine through. For players more focused on calamities/enemies to hinder your progress, there are no enemies and seasons are lackluster. Difficulty wise go with the hardest difficulty and if you survive the first 10min or so you won't ever die. While I love the graphics and what they tried to achieve with the game, sadly they came short and the game is one of the most limited of its genre. Its selling point is inferior to other games released several years ago like Dwarf Fortress, Gnomoria and others that didn't have that sort of theme and Timberborn doesn't do anything better... unless you love beavers :)

A great builder game with personality. Also, the modding community has done great things, and the devs aren't afraid of implementing some of the mods.

The style: fantastic The concept: great The challenge... not so much. To survive the first drought... that's a challenge To survive the 3rd or later, trivial. The badtide, creating a second 'non-trivial' moment 3 hours in... a very small step in a good direction. Basically a very relaxing nice building game. (falsely) presented as one in which failure is a realistic option, based on 1 or 2 moments, very early on.

I felt how much I'd love to try Timberborn when I came across the game; and I've spent hours of building a city (or even net of cities) for little beavers. The game is relaxing, especially in the easy mode. It managed to catch my attention for hours, which is rather rare. Big thanks for developers!

I love the game, I really do. The way you shape the environment from barren wastelands to lush meadows is very satisfying. Unfortunately, when expanding, you will unevitably hit a point where the game starts lagging frequently, unless you parcel the territory into multiple districts. And at this point I usually flip and start a new game, since managing districts... sucks. It brings unnecessary complexity just to remove the lag spikes whenever the game tries to calculate the routes . Devs, please, fix the spikes and you'll have 5 stars.