Timberborn Review

City-building games have always had a soft spot in the hearts of many gamers. However, the genre remains oversaturated with games that range from decent to bad. Every now and then, a new innovation, or an attempt at one, comes along to essentially shake things up and offer something new.

Timberborn offers a different take on city-builders with its beavers and water management. It is being developed by Mechanistry, an indie dev team consisting of seven people. The Polish studio is also responsible for publishing the game. While still currently in Early Access, the game gets fairly common updates that enhance its whimsical premise.

Take control of a colony of beavers as you build up your small town into an industrious city, picking up from where humanity fell off.  Like most city builders, you have to ensure your colony has enough food and water, all the while expanding and unlocking newer buildings.

The game lets you pick from a variety of maps, each with their themes. Alternatively, you can also make your map. You will notice that the game is grid-like, with square grids and a limited map size. But the game also has a mechanic that lets you build vertically, adding an interesting element.

You start off with a district center. These are 3x3 buildings where you assign buildings, with a maximum of 4. Eventually, you can build more district centers and migrate a part of your population to these other districts. The district center also determines an initial build area. You can, however, expand the area by building paths. Be careful, though. You need stairs or natural slopes to go up a level.

Before you get ahead of yourself, you have to build a lumberjack flag or a gatherer flag. These are a one-tile area structure where your adorable beavers store their goods when they are finished gathering. The main resources in the game are ingredients, food, materials, logs, and water. The latter two are your most important resource; yes, even more than food. Like, really, you need logs, a LOT of logs.

Naturally, you gather logs from trees, which are a finite resource- sort of. Your lumberjack flag is used to mark the area where your beaver jack can work. To actually make them cut down trees, you will need to assign areas/specific trees they are allowed to cut down. This is because some trees offer more than one resource that can be collected. Pines have their resin; Chestnut trees give chestnut, and so on.

Eventually, when you get to build the forester’s hut, you can assign areas to replant trees and choose which tree to plant, turning a once beautiful and natural forest into an industrialist’s dream part-orchard part-farm. The forester can also plant blueberry or dandelion bushes, letting your gatherer flag harvest these. The two bushes are an excellent food source and are the key to success in the early game.

Speaking of the early game, it is pretty much a clear-cut process of slowly and carefully expanding, utilizing the tools at hand, and planning out what to unlock first. You have five buildings to let you get ‘science,’ the game’s resource that lets you unlock new buildings, from decorations and well-being structures to key infrastructure and production buildings.

Don’t hold your breath, though. The rate at which you gain science is incredibly slow at first, massively slowing down your growth. Your population will grow as you build more housing, first as children and then eventually as adults.

Aside from that, you have to actually take care of the beavers, so you’ll need to build structures like the medical tent, campfire, and so on. This is tracked in the well-being tab; here, you can see the many ways to improve the lives of your beavers, from giving them a variety of food to providing other essentials like a shower.

You will occasionally run out of space. Here, the game’s verticality starts to play in. For most, it’ll be an afterthought, but for the aficionado, this is essential. You use bridges, stairs, and platforms to go up and get more building area. The other major way is by using buildings that have the ‘solid’ attribute.

With the game’s ingenious water physics and power mechanics, the game can get pretty complex. You have to use water, wind, or beavers to generate power to produce advanced materials that are needed for larger buildings.

Of course, there are a few more roadblocks than just resource management and waiting. There are cycles of droughts and non-droughts. These droughts prevent water from flowing out of the various water sources around the map and additionally make all water still, so more energy from water. With no water, your crops will die, and trees will wither, acting like this game’s ‘Whiteout’ from Frostpunk 2.

Another thing you need to deal with is the badwater, a leftover from humanity. This impure and contaminated water will poison your beavers and affect your production. The only way to fix them is at their source, but that’s only feasible in the late game. For now, you’ll have to work with the herbalist and redirect the water flow.

As you move onto the late game, you will expand into newer districts, open up barriers to let the river flow more and find ruins from human structures. This gives you better access to metals and metal structures. Eventually, you may even get to automatons and more.

Timberborn does a good job of being fun and surprisingly challenging. The challenge is also deceptive, and at higher difficulties, you will often find yourself scrambling to try and get in a harvest before the drought or picking and choosing between different buildings to keep at work. While a lot is simple to maintain, there are production chains with storage hubs that need to be tended to. Your production might as well be really high, but it won’t matter if you don’t have enough storage.

The gameplay loop also works really well, with the game informing you of the droughts. You have to increasingly get more audacious in the territory you expand to, all the while being careful to avoid badwater. The variety of buildings you can unlock, and the different maps add to the replayability of the game. The game isn’t needlessly complicated, with a lot of its logic making sense. Buildings share power with each other, and the tile-based system works well with all the different buildings and resources you need to keep at hand.

What holds it back is the slow gaining of research points. Even with multiple inventors and observatories, you will find scraps of ‘Science’ being used for the most essential buildings that you really need to unlock.

Like most city-builders and management games of this type, it has a certain learning curve at higher levels, and you really need to dip into min-maxing, which is a little annoying for those who want to get to the end faster. Additionally, the game lacks any real narrative aside from the ‘well-being’ scale and level needed to unlock the second faction.

The game also lacks a certain depth with the inability to directly upgrade buildings or otherwise augment the production speeds of materials. You will find yourself just waiting around at certain points just for the beavers to finish making a gear or a plank.

The game does a great job of catering to both the hardcore city-building crowd and the relaxed diorama-building crowd. You have all the charts and tools at your disposal to create multiple districts, specify imports and exports, maximize efficiency, and create the ultimate and most productive city that’d put any billionaire to tears. Or, you can unlock decorations, spread things out, and make things look pretty. The game gives you the freedom to do all that and more.  With its newly added wonders, you can even roleplay as the perfect beaver-mayor.

Timberborn looks pretty well, reminiscent of Roller Coaster Tycoon’s simplicity. Here, simplicity isn’t bad; it complements the simplistic style of the game. You can easily tell what’s happening and where an area lacks moisture. The structures all fit each other, and the overall art style is pretty neat. The UI is also well-made but not something too noteworthy.

The game contradicts itself with its beavers as it is full of life and devoid of it at the same time. The beavers are there, carrying on with their jobs or occasionally doing something else. But it never feels alive or real. They don’t really make any sound other than the beaver-speak they do when you click on them.

This extends to music and sound as a whole. The game lacks effective sound design, and you will often think you’re just playing with your headphones off or with some other music in the background. This is a shame, considering the game’s unique premise and otherwise nice atmosphere, given that you remain zoomed out.

Overall, Timberborn has a few minor hiccups and more than a few structural ones. Despite this, the game manages to gnaw itself into your hearts with its furry cast of beavers. Whether you are drawn by the practical, logical management or the aesthetic and pleasing city-building, you will be left enamored and hooked by the game.