Custom Town Demo

Taking care of a household is a lot of work, especially if you live alone and you have to do everything yourself. Hence, it’s not difficult to imagine how much scarier it would be to take care of an entire town, let alone create one from scratch and keep everyone happy. However, computer simulations are easier to deal with, because there’s always the quick load button to get you out of trouble.

Custom Town is an apparently simple sandbox game that allows you to play the role of a city architect and build everything from scratch. However, things are not as simple as they appear at first, mainly because there’s no tutorial and no guides on how to get started. The interface is fairly confusing, which makes it difficult to learn by yourself.

The map is literally blank at the beginning of the game, and you have to start by creating special areas for residential and commercial places, but that’s not enough. Hence, you also have to create the actual buildings and place objects in them, such as building houses and putting beds, sinks and everything else in before people start to move in.

Besides taking care of every building and facility in town, the infrastructure is left up to you too, which include roads, vehicles and transportation. This is only obvious if you flip through the interface, because again, there are no tutorials or guides to show you the basics. Granted, the game is still in early access at the moment, but it’s difficult to believe that gamers are going to come back if the game is so hard to get into.

Lastly, the graphics are very poor as well, although this is not a major issue in the genre. Everything is transparent, on the other hand, making it difficult to place structures or see the different layers. The interface is not particularly helpful either, but it’s a lot better than you would expect, considering the rest of the game. Hence, it’s easy to zoom in, rotate objects and pan the camera around.

In the end, Custom Town might be up to something, because it’s certainly fun to create cities for AI-controlled people and watch them be happy. However, the game is anything but fun when it comes to gameplay, so it needs a lot of work in this regard.