What is Towns?
Towns is a city-building/rpg game in which you lead a small settlement, housed near a dungeon, to glory!
Why is there a dungeon right where they decide to build their settlement, isn’t it kind of counter-intuitive of them to do so?
Well, there was this king... oh, shut up, it’s fun!
What is the basic game-play like?
You start off with a small group of settlers and you must set up camp, acquiring resources by chopping down wood and building buildings, much like other real time strategy games.
The twist is that you don’t have control over what the citizens do, you give basic build orders and they will try to accommodate their time to your needs, or, you know, slack off....
Once you get a basic hang of the game-play, you can start digging deeper into the earth, mining ore and uncovering treasures and dungeons. If you aren’t careful you might dig too far down too quickly and open yourself up to some very nasty creatures.
What makes this different than X game?
Well the advanced game-play makes this game unique in quite a few aspects, we have taken cues from our favorite games. Diablo, Dungeon Keeper, Evil Genius, and even Theme Hospital are in the mix, although an honorable mention must be made to the absolutely gigantic elephant in the room, Dwarf Fortress.
How does building work?
In Towns you are not building a complete pre-set buildings, but actually design the exterior and the interior of the building.
So the first thing you will have to do is build the exterior walls of the building you wish to have and then designate the zone this building will occupy. This basically tells the game what is that room was built for.
After you have a room with a designated zone, you can build furniture and workbenches to produce and craft large variety of items.
What about the RPG system? So far all I am seeing is a city building Sim, I feel cheated!
Hold your horses! The game is a RPG in many ways. There are procedurally made dungeon floors, hero units that come to your town and level up by killing monsters, quests, and maybe even a dragon or two.
It’s just not in a traditional RPG sense. This game is more of a reverse RPG than a traditional one. To put it in terms of context, picture almost any normal RPG. Normally you would have an adventurer go down into the dungeon, grab loot, come back up, complete quests, and hopefully kill the boss at the end. In Towns you basically run the town that houses the hero. You build buildings that he will like, cater to his needs and hope that you have enough good equipment crafted to be able to offer him as a reward for a quest you give him. Entice hero units to form groups and take down larger bosses together, have hot food and a bard playing for them in the tavern and pray that they are entertained enough to stick around and defend your little village when a stray dire-wolf comes up from the depths... but keep an eye on those adventurers, as some of them might even prefer to steal things rather than buy them.
Couple that with the fact that you can craft weapons using materials dropped by enemies, and maybe even forge epic loot with it’s own randomized name (Red iron longsword of pillaging, for example), and you have the basis for a unique adventure Sim.
