Timberborn Review (Der Liebe Frankie)
Dear Beaver,
You have started your colony in a fertile plain near a beautiful gurgling river and nearby cool forests and berry bushes. You have no man to fear here - they have gone extinct with their foolish ways. But you have your own challenges to face. You will soon see, that after 12 carefree days or so, there will be a drought that lasts about 3 days, and you will have to prepare, or the same fate as foolish man will await you! The river's water supply will dry up completely , and you will live in a desert wasteland where everything dies, and you too, will go the way of foolish man if you have not prepared for this time of famine!
Your job, my Dear Beaver, is to keep your clan alive with diligence and planning. You must find the way to live through the drought times, and exploit technologies to your advantage. It will not be easy. You will work long hours and late into the night - but otherwise you face certain death. Plan your moves carefully!
Sincerely,
Mother Earth
P.S. You are absolutely adorable when you snore at night. Just sayin'...
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Pros:
+ The periodic droughts are severe enough to make the order in which technologies are attained, and in which buildings are prioritized, critical.
+ Immersion due to the problem-solving is quite deep. I could not help speculating on optimal dam designs.
+ The drought cycles break up time in an interesting way - so that I find myself waiting for the next drought to see how my designs hold up. So time is split up not just as day and night, but also as a multi-week water and drought. The goal is to not need to pay attention - not need to reallocate workers to different jobs and keep them focused on whatever long-term goals there are - but the drought breaks those jobs up. Workers have to attend to irrigation tasks, or collecting extra water to plan ahead, extra food because everything will die, etc.
+ After a certain point, depending on how much social time the beavers are allowed, the population explodes, and there's really no way to slow it down. I tried. This explosion drives the need to build new cities - which can be done with a new town center and migrating beavers over to the new place. It adds a yet a new level of complexity just when it seemed like all the obstacles had been overcome.
+ The game shows the evolution of thought (in beavers): Humans were never that different from beavers (other than having the ability of language, which this game seems to give beavers for free). We now take many things for granted that were developed, such as agriculture, books, and other technologies.
+ The fluid dynamics really shine. What a mess I just made flooding some area because I hadn't set up the flow correctly. It took weeks to get set right, and the flooded areas killed crops and resulted in a serious food-shortage due to crops being flooded! Horrors!
Cons:
- The mouse does not support left-handed configuration (it's a fixed active mouse button rather than looking at what the operating system has selected as the active mouse button). And please don't tell me "hey you could go in your Windows settings and... blah blah blah..." If I had a nickle for every time someone told me that, I'd buy a cup of coffee. If you're going to make a game about engineering (i.e. beavers) then please fix the mouse with your brilliant engineer beaver developers or code monkeys. Thanks. EDIT: Also - changing the Windows settings mouse settings is still ignored - the mouse button is hard-coded in the game.
- The AI for the beavers sometimes appears to be faulty - although moving where the beavers are employed should fix that (i.e. it's me, not the game).
- In its current EA state, the game is a bit cryptic - you have to just build things to see exactly how they work and what benefits you'll get from them and to figure out exactly how you want to use them.
- Also it can be forgiven because this is still EA, but the game-save load time is slow (as in several minutes to load a game).
Spoiler screenshot:
This screenshot is a bit of a spoiler. It took many hours of playtime to get to this point too.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2746756142