[note 1: this is a review of base game, without mods; if you're willing to spend tens of hours to mod it, you might get a fun, playable and challenging game... until an update breaks the mods and/or one of the authors stops updating his mod]
[note 2: I played most of my time either offline or on another account; I was able to get all the cheevos and played the game for more than 100 hours in total; BTW getting cheevos by itself is trivial once you realize you can get them on any custom difficulty setting, even one that has no drought nor badwater]
After many years of being a Timberborn supporter, I think I'm done.
I had really high hopes when this was announced, was really stoked when badtide update came...
But then, the game is basically dead, left as a proof-of-concept for streamer sandbox midwits and people who are addicted to it, not seeing the actual game and problems it has.
It's not a bad game, but I just can't recommend it in its current form, due to how severe the flaws are and how noticeable they are to someone who played enough other sandboxes and sims.
Let's start with the good stuff:
* voxel-y small-scale city sim with no hard time or resource limit - never enough of those :)
* good 3D graphics, cute and thematic (although a little bland overall, all browns and pale greens - one might argue it builds the theme here :)
* fun worldbuilding (beavers taking over the world after humans, excuse me, HOOMANS got extinct after destroying the ecosystem),
* developers are definitely smart and they were able to come up with lots of fun mechanics and intriguing solutions to problems, they have a page with most requested features and many of them got into the game, and are fixing bugs constantly,
* core game flow is innovative, yet familiar (similar to Settlers),
* you can place many objects to customize your settlement,
* the two available races are HUGELY different, both in terms of play style and building selection,
* has many maps available out-of-the-box, and even more custom ones,
* has a multitude of mods available.
One might think, "a perfect game!"
So did I, for the first couple of dozens of hours and for a couple of first maps I completed.
Then you realize some problematic things:
* only two races, drastically limiting replayability (there are mods for more races :),
* lacks many basic buildings or blocks that are existing everywhere and that were requested years ago by many players (some of them even on the Most Wanted Update dev list), like ladders, lifts, 45 deg slopes, pipes etc. (some of the lacking buildings are added from time to time, like waterproof stuff that was just added in 1.1 experimental, and of course THERE ARE MODS FOR ALL THAT :)
* only two "disaster seasons" (drought and badtide), which are hugely imbalanced - basically, badtide has all the problems of drought (no usable water) but also poisons your water supply and kills crops - meaning _if you can survive long badtide, drought is irrelevant, and even often useful for engineering reasons_. People requested flooding, rain etc., it could have plagues or earthquakes or space debris falling... you name it.
* no real recurring problems or obstacles other than the seasons above - if the map has bombs, once they explode that's it, you have a static environment again. Nothing changes, nothing is randomized, the only bonus for "winning" a map (wonder) is flexible start... meaning you can make the map _easier_ once you already _completely beaten it_ :D
* UI ranges from "usable, but rough" to "almost unusable", depending on how advanced you are in the game; not everything has a keybinding, most icons are just light brown outlines on dark brown background (barely legible), and you'll spend many hours hunting for some buildings placed in some strange and not-really-fitting tab until you memorize everything, and then realize it could've used color coding or more menu levels or just a configurable hotbar etc. (there are probably mods for it :)
* robots/automatons are too weak compared to max happiness beavers and available only when you don't need them anymore, making them fluff, not core mechanic,
* almost all maps are same-ish (notable exception is Oasis, which I really like due to its quirks, and Plains, which certainly are great for your first playthrough), and there is basically only a single way of getting to the finish line,
* core development pace is glacial. You get new feature, you get new bugs, you get fixes, you get tiny mostly irrelevant rebalancing... meanwhile, the core game is exactly where it was, boring and predictable at this point.
* very few ways to improve logistics (basically only zipline is an easy and fast improvement; tubeway, while great, requires a lot of engineering resources and time to function properly), and districts being really tedious to set up,
* it's easier to wait for the resources to be produced small scale in small colony than to expand and do it quickly. There are very few ways to improve/upgrade existing flows, so you can only reduplicate the industry... but that increases the risk of catastrophic failure of your settlement if any variable in the holy beaver equation goes wrong,
* you can have beavers starving to death on a literal field of food, just because your production priority assignment got skewed etc.
* NO BLUEPRINTS IN A SANDBOX IN 2026. You'll be clicking like madman to set up yet-another similar settlement.
* NO HIGH-POWER EXPLOSIVES (3x depth TNT is max), meaning YOU'LL BE CLICKING LIKE MADMAN TO TERRAFORM.
Still not bad, right? Even with those problems, it could've been a great game, right? ...
Well, it is, kinda. Until you "crack the code". When you realize how easy the game is even on Hard or Hard++ (i.e. settings you customize to be strictly harder than hard), when you realize how repetitive the runs are, how irrelevant most unlocks, techs and automations are...
Then you'll be as bored as me. Basically, there's a SPOILER TAG HERE - DON'T READ IT IF YOU WANT TO PLAY THE GAME AND ENJOY IT.
Iron Teeth. You start hating it, then you realize they are broken in every way possible, due to their unique breeding mechanism... and tubeway on top of it.
Breeding pods need upkeep... for the first 80%. Then, they don't. And they can be paused. And you can have advanced breeding pods that produce adults instantly.
As a result, almost every map can be won like this:
* levee, get your hands on it ASAP and wall off water flows, then floodgates as on/off switches for the flows,
* forester, plant tons of berries and oak,
* 10 or so breeding pods, pause most of them on 95+%, leave just 4-5 running initially, then add more as you expand,
* lots of low-priority inventors so that you never have idle beavers, instead you have tons of research,
* rush metal, numbercrunchers, explosives and extract; get some automated power if possible (geothermal or pressurizer + water wheel)
* now tons of advanced breeding pods, leave 10-20 paused on 95+%
* no way to lose. Even if everyone dies, you just unpause the pods,
* bonus points: use tubeway for total verticality.
Once you get good at it, you can have 1000 days of drought, 1000 days of badtide, it doesn't matter. Even with no-one alive (or dead, you don't need automatons) the crunchers produce research, and you can just unpause your colony after you got enough research for what you want. There is no literal challenge.
>inb4 just play with FT then
no. It just makes the game more tedious, because you need to idle for longer, and because verticality is the winning strategy for for FT and IT. Try playing Diorama, you'll get my point :D
>inb4 just don't pause your pods then
yeah, I can also play blindfolded, or with my tongue. Any other bright ideas? :D
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tl;dr great game, gets boring once you "crack" it, then it's no longer great, requires serious rebalancing and many additions, I don't recommend it but feel free to try it out yourself.
