By Cam Nealie
Towncraft is an ambitious attempt to marry Minecraft and Farmville on the iPad.
It’s a debut title by a small Sydney-based developer Flat Earth Games, and it’s an impressive undertaking, with the promise of many updates (and hopefully bug fixes) to come.
You begin in the midst of an isometric forest, with no inventory and the only sign of civilization being a rough stone path hewn from one end of the map to the other. Using only the resources around you – trees, stones, particular types of plants – you’re tasked with building a town from the ground up.
I had whipped through the tutorial level moments earlier – and a good thing too, since Towncraft seems to think leaving you to figure out the gameplay is part of the fun. With sticks from trees and some small stones you can fashion a rudimentary hatchet, which eventually leads to mining coal, and before long you're farming cotton to process into clothing.
This is where TownCraft earns its name. As you collect these different resources, you have to figure out how to put them together to make new items, which in turn leads to the opportunities to make even more. Those of you who have played Doodle God will be familiar with the concept, which at best is a delightful exploration of creation items, and at worst a frustrating trial-and-error grind to figure out how to make a simple bucket. I can’t describe how long I spent trying to make that bloody bucket!
Before long, people start drifting down the road, presumably to gaze in awe of this individual building an entire town with his bare hands – seemingly without food or sleep. Many of these souls are able to trade items with you, others you can put to work as farmers or miners, and later to watch over your shops and taverns.
If you’re feeling benevolent, you can even build them a house to sleep in (or rather, you can build a house and they can choose whether or not to sleep in it, an important distinction that makes me a little uncomfortable). Judging by the dialogue, this is all set in a medieval age; you’re told there’s a castle off-screen somewhere, where the rich king and his terrible cohorts are mistreating their people. When your town reaches a high enough social status, some of those upper crusters deign to visit also.
There's an overarching goal you're trying to achieve: growing enough food for the king's upcoming feast is the first example. This manifests itself as single quests (get x of this item), but the primary objective quickly gets put on the backburner as you start considering the best way to upgrade your towns total wine output, or possibly trying to figure out, for example, how to make a bucket. Ugh.
Towncraft tries to keep a lot of balls in the air, and I've sunk several hours into building my town and its budding economy. There are a lot of holes that have been left in the crafting tree for the developers to expand on later, but before they start adding anything, somebody needs to look at the mountain of bugs this game has collected. Mid-game I was having to design my town to accommodate for these problems – frustrating when it stalls your cotton production because your farmer has let a tree grow in behind him, or your shop keep has simply lost the motivation to leave her house. The screen can get a bit cramped at times and you’re stuck moving slowly over the rather large map: the ability to zoom out would be a relief.
But overall TownCraft is a promising start and a respectable time-sink, even with the bugs there’s hours of satisfying tinkering and crafting locked in the title. It's a fun, well-realised concept that demands patience and care from its players, and has more going on in its programming than its cutesy veneer would suggest.
Many of my misgivings could be resolved in future updates, and once that happens I look forward to creating a town that looks good as well as being functional. Some more hints are definitely in order, and there’s even potential for this game to be funny if its dialogue was honed and given a consistent tone.
As it is, TownCraft's shortcomings bring your progress to a screeching halt midgame as you play catch-up with the bugs. Still, I find this game's aspirations to be really alluring, and I’ll be playing TownCraft for a long time yet.
Three stars.
3 News
Towncraft
:: Developer: Flat Earth Games
:: Format: iPad
:: Rating: G
source: newshub archive
