Timberborn:
Timberborn is a casual city-builder with unique water physics where you take over the leadership of a group of evolved beavers as they try to rebuild a ruined Earth. Build crafting buildings, set up supply chains, manage food and water supplies, all while doing your best to control the flow of water through various seasons.
The Good:
The setting of Timberborn has you take control of dozens of cute beavers, as they chew through wood both literally and figuratively to build a sprawling city with various levels of technology. Your biggest efforts will revolve around control of each map’s water system, which typically consists of several clean water sources, several bad water sources, and seasons that change randomly every 10-15 in-game days between wet, dry, and bad tides.
Timberborn gives you a ton of toys to play with, and a variety of ways to manage seasons. Want to design detailed aqueducts, causeways, and water control systems? Sure. Want to create automated flood gates that switch flows and production with each change? No problem. Want to simply store a vast amount of water in a massive super structure and watch the world burn each season and rebuild? You can successfully pull that off too.
Your freedom to create is on full display in Timberborn, and no approach is completely off the table. With a variety of maps, customizations, and a very active modding community, you can find various challenges or really casual approaches to just build an interesting town.
The water physics, though not ultra-realistic, are fun to play with and figure out unique ways to control the map’s water, and avoid the dreaded bad tides that have endless poisonous water emerge that sickens your beavers and destroys your crops instantly.
The Bad:
There are two factions out with Timberborn’s full 1.0 release. Each offers some unique capabilities, but for the most part there isn’t much differentiation between the two. You’ll largely take the same steps, though with slightly different buildings to meet the same requirements for water, food, and energy. It would have been nice to see more key differences in each faction's supply chain, or some unique factor for each one that needs to be handled very differently than the other. A good example is a modded faction that, unlike the base game factions, actually suffers if the beavers get wet and need to be kept warm, forcing you to change your playstyle dramatically.
The Ugly:
Timberborn suffers from two issues common in the genre. You’ll spend the vast majority of your time speeding up time and watching the simulation play out while you wait for resources, or wait for a particular construction to finish. Outside of the most difficult maps, which are usually the custom ones, and the highest difficulty levels, you’ll typically come to a point where your group of beavers becomes self-sufficient and can survive most events the game throws at you. The end-game becomes less about survival and more about building large projects and watching the simulation just because. Although it can be satisfying watching your population grow, or a massive project finally get completed, the survival aspect of the game tends to go away completely unless the player makes a critical error.
Summary:
Timberborn is a satisfying city builder with a unique mix of setting and use of physics. A strong modding community for the game highlights a number of intriguing ways the game could go with new factions, mechanics, and survival mechanics that could potentially give the end-game a big boost, and do provide a number of reasons to replay if you’re willing to download mods. Though I got a little lost in the simulation at times, the map variety and the ways you can exploit them still provide hours upon hours of fun inside the game.
