Towncraft 2 Demo

It’s a special kind of feeling to see your very own village turn into a powerful empire capable of conquering the world, which is exactly what strategy games usually offer. Naturally, the scale is sometimes reduced a bit as not to overwhelm the players, but the underlying concept is the same. Raising a powerful army from scratch is what strategy fans loved in Starcraft, Warcraft, and similar games throughout the years.

Towncraft 2 is a basic real-time strategy game with some survival elements thrown into the mix as well, just to spice up the experience a little bit. You should pay close attention to the word “basic”, because the game appears to be merely an experiment and nothing about it is going to shock a versed gamer, not after all we’ve seen so far in the industry at the hand of big studios. It’s still a challenge, however, and it may deserve a shot.

To begin with, the gameplay mechanics are the classic ones from almost every RTS on the market. As such, your goal is to raise a decent population and support it with basic resources, while building a town at the same time. Food and wood are essential to survival and to erect buildings, which is why peasants are required to gather them. On the other hand, soldiers come in handy as well, especially in this case.

The soldiers are essential when it comes to protection, and that’s where the survival elements come into play. There is a clock running at all times, which slowly counts the hours of the day. Once night falls, all sorts of scary creatures start roaming the land, just like in Minecraft. Without guard towers and warriors, your workers are quickly eliminated, which sends your town into ruins.

Now, the word “basic” is yet again the best choice if one wishes to describe the technical aspects of the game. While the isometric perspective is not at all a problem in the genre, the fact that you cannot zoom in and the units are very small is a bit annoying. There’s barely any HUD or user interface to help you interact with the units, so it gets frustrating to keep clicking on the wrong stuff when you need to move quickly.

All things considered, Towncraft 2 is not at all bad, it’s just too simple. It may have been a better idea a decade ago, but nowadays we have much better games to opt for instead of this one. Hence, unless you are patient enough to wait for further developments, this is just too lackluster to be worth the effort.