This highlights the worst part of Steam Greenlight. The developer posted a ton of ideas, some good-looking screenshots, and pitched a solid concept.

Before I even get to the review, I'd like to note that THE DEVELOPER HAS ABANDONED THE GAME. He took the "Early Access" money, cranked out an Alpha-at-best version of the game and left. He got another developer to theoretically try to finish the game, but the hopes of that actually happening are looking pretty dim.

So as for the game itself. You build a town to attract heroes to explore and clear dungeons. Sounds good. The execution is NOT. It's a buggy mess, with villagers having AI and path-finding so bad that they often get stuck and starve. You control which heroes arrive, can't tell them what to do, and can't even sell them items. The crafting system is tedious and the building system feels like it's constantly fighting against you.

It's a buggy, barely-playable mess with no endgame, few sounds, and almost no animations. Avoid like the plague.

Ok, I have a lot of hours in this game so maybe you could say that I got my money's worth - or maybe I just have a penchant for watching little pixel people go about their business(dying of starvation or eating everything in sight, dry-humping monsters to death or walking straight into a village full of hostiles) .. actually, I also go afk a lot and hang out in the kitchen.. that might be why :p


Anyway, I do not recommend buying the game in its current state:

- very buggy

- rough and unpolished(for example, last time I played the little pixel people had like 2 frames of animation when walking and looked like they were dry-humping monsters upon attacking them).

- feels incomplete, as in missing game-play features.

- very, very slow updates(if you can even call it an update when one or two little bugs are fixed after several months).

- Dishonest developer: this is the biggest reason for me right now as to why you shouldn't waste your money on this game. Let me clarify .. some other reviewers mention Early Access but the fact of the matter is that this game was not released as Early Access, it was being offered as a finished product when I bought it back in 2012.. well no way was it finished then and still isn't now 2 years later! It could be said that Early Access hadn't started back then so we might forgive that transgression - but then this game should either be categorized as Early Access right now or removed from Steam because it isn't the complete product it is being marketed as.


*if you want a charming game where little computer people wander round and build a home, eat, sleep, dig up treasure, fight monsters, etc.. then go check out 'Craft the World', this is an Early Access title that already feels like it's polished and finished(except for missing later campaign levels); it certainly feels like a AAA title compared to Towns..

Original Dev took the $2mil Alpha sales and scarpered. Sold it to a second dev who said, after abandoning it:

“I hope you are not too disappointed. And if you are: I’m really sorry. I’m quite new to indie game dev and I couldn’t really see that the game sales were declining that rapidly. I guess if I had more experience I would have seen it comming …,”

Abandon ware.

It's a real shame - what exists is broken but playable. If they delivered what was initially promised it would be a cracking little indy game.

Moral of the story? Don't buy Alpha, Beta or Early Access of anything. Ever.

The first and most infamous game to come out of Steam's "Greenlight" program, Towns is an incomplete and buggy mess, released in a beta state (yet conusmers such as myself were not initially informed of the fact it was still in beta) that never was completed, but rather ABANDONED by its programmer in a miserable state. That's right, the sole developer/programmer took the money and ran. The game is as complete as it will ever be, and that's very depressing.

Towns was billed as a "Dwarf Fortress"-type game, wherein you build a town atop a "dungeon" filled with various baddies. Your goal is to build a nice enough town to support guards to protect your citizens, and adventurers who will come to your city (given your city has the necessary buildings) and venture into the depths to assault the creatures therein. The problem is the programming is dreadfully incompetent. The AI is beyond dumb. People will stand around and starve to death rather than harvest and eat food. Citizens will wander off alone and get themselves killed by groups of enemies. The "tutorial," if you can call it that, teaches you next to nothing about the game. The still images of the towns initially shown on the game's Steam page were actually impossible to create in the game. Building (especially roofs) is an exercise in frustration as pieces don't seem to want to fit together like they should. The programmer's ambitions far exceeded his capabilities and after as few beta updates (which didn't really fix anything), he simply bailed. What a great guy.

Don't buy Towns. Get something better. And practically ANYTHING is better than this pile of excrement.

This is the game that made me lose faith in Greenlight. I have bought numerous early access games ( Prison Architect, Starbound, Space Base DF9 (ugh), Kerbal SPace Program etc.) Some have been solid games that keep building on themselves and are enjoyable even in early alpha (like KSP), some have been rocky but still enjoyable and are continuing to be made and starting to look better (Starbound), and then there are the games that don't really evolve much and kind of just.... stop.

I bought this game around the release date thinking that it was a neat fresh look at dungeon crawling with city building and some basic logistics managment. I was totally jazzed at the idea and played the game into the ground for a couple of weeks. I had a bit of trouble with the building system, but I figured that had more to do with me being a n00b at the game. (It was a mess since your villagers could get stuck on air and kinda just... sat there as they got eaten by the critters and such on the surface.),. To be fair though there wasn't a tutorial at all at the time.

I also found it impossible to attract addidtional villagers to the town or any heroes, even after fitting all of the criterea that the wiki said was required. The lack of forward movement gameplaywise is what lead me to drop the game until it hit beta.

Now many moons later I come back to check out what is up with a game that I wanted so much to love and find out that it has been pretty much dropped by the devs. I liken it to ordering a car from somewhere and stopping by for a test drive of a prototype. You drive it and think it's all cool and can't wait for the consumer model, but after hearing nothing for a while you drop by again to see how the car is coming and the one they let you drive is exactly the same except they added seatbelts. Granted that I didn't drop $20,000 on this game and that this game is not a car, you get pretty much the same feeling, like someone took your money and gave you a shoddy product.

If only I knew then what I know now.

TL;DR

Shoddy at best and the devs dropped the game.

I really didn't want to give this a Not Recommended, but due to how things have gone with development i just had to do it... maybe i will be able to recommend it if it can improve or gets a massive price cut

Don't get me wrong, the game is very enjoyable, maybe even to a point where I could consider it good, but it is however an unfinished product. A few very minor bugs are present, the AI is a bit dopey, the enemy scaling is absurd (due to the market system, you can get Gold, a top tier material early on and proceed to completely stomp the first 5 or 6 floors of the dungeon, then suddenly it all comes to a halt on the next floor as enemies can one or two shot your heroes regardless of armor because armor only increases evasion, it doesn't make people more capable of taking damage) the game can have massive lag at times when doing mass item hauling (most common when you want to sell several buckets of iron) and the punishment for doing something wrong can be horrible especially when you don't know why said thing is bad (ie you have to make graves for corpses or they spawn strong ghosts, but now there's an event lategame that can rarely spawn even stronger Zombies for your village to fight off if you didn't build your graveyard a mile away, even high level zombies can spawn potentially adding to the death toll unless your village is well equipped O_O

However, despite all the bad things, I feel like they're more nitpicks that could be ironed out later (if they ever do) the game is strangely satisfying when you do the smallest of things. I felt glad when I got my first town up and running with a constant food supply and with enough production to allow the town to build walls and decor to make them happier, which brings more people in, and eventually Heroes, whom I also got a nice warm feeling from when they moved in, especially a cameo from the fantastic Sips_ :D. When a dungeon level gets cleared there's also that good feeling when you clean all the loot out and equip the village with better items to withstand the ever increasing sieges that want to ruin all your fun. Overall there's just a great feeling I get from getting things done right, it's oddly satisfying to watch all your little people mine out all the stone before converting it into a storage room for your builders so you can continue to build up the town walls to make it harder for the sieges from completely stomping all over all your work so far, and i got a really good chuckle when the nasty hoard of yeti coming in to storm the place is almost completely wiped out before they reach their victims because you built a bridge that serves as the only way in that's completely lined with traps, and watching them set them all off (sadly there's no real animation, but it's still great to watch a big bad yeti get his foot caught in a bear trap and his friend who walked on ahead set off the bamboo shooter, hitting them both as well as anyone else nearby, then the log traps finish off the already wounded, before the villagers team up to pick off any surviving monsters that are likely bleeding from every possible area of their body. Perhaps next time they'll realize that the decaying goblin heads shoved on the pikes outside are a sign that this town is defended)

If you already own a copy go ahead and have a blast directing all your little people to their fates. Grab some mods to fix some of the problems and some of the frustrating elements and you're good to go. If it appears in a bundle with some other things you're interested in, go ahead and give it a go, you might like it. But I would not buy this game through steam now, especially at full price, when there are more options available that either offer more polished development, are cheaper or promise so much more in the future. Gnomoria, Craft the World and Banished are all around the same price but all offer their own quirks and are still being developed regularly or are even finished in the case of Banished.

The main reason I am not recommending this is because the devteam, they released a game which was basically in alpha, but not stating as such, they slowly developed said game over about a year, then dropped it. Now I can perfectly understand their situation, as one who actually browsed the forums, they got too deep into something they shouldn't have, their reputation was on the line, their own personal lives were causing them trouble. They hired another developer but their paycheck would have been so low that they too eventually dropped the project. When the game was left in this dropped state, the steam community went wild, with people buying the game just to give it a negative review, the product tags mostly consisting of "scam" and "abandoned" and the reviews said nothing about the game. The development of the game has since continued, however i would still not buy this game until they can promise to the buyers that they can bring out frequent updates (updates as of late have been very minor and slow, but a v15 is in development to help fix some issues)

So until then, if you have it already, have fun, otherwise it's probably best to stay away unless it's on sale for £3 and you're curious or have nothing better to do for a rainy weekend. Then again, if the devs do get off their butts and finish the game, this could possibly be one of the best entry level Dwarf Fortress clones ever...

Game was abadoned by the developers, don't buy it at any time and any cost. :(

Another early access game abandoned incomplete by it's developer.

My children and I play this game. We liked the look and feel of the interface. The game was interesting and fun for a bit but little things kept annoying us. Issues like folk will starve to death instead of dropping the task they are assigned and eating. I guess making that piece of armor was more important that their own survival. The town seems small compared to other games in genre. The depth is limited to about 19 or 20 levels. Some other games in genre go below 100 levels. For over a year the developer has been releasing rare and tiny updates. The game is not polished, but playable. I gave up on game and went to other games in genre that developers are actively making their product better. I'd recommend game for a few $.

This game is nice, well designed and good looking. When you play it you discover how to make tools, how to make farms, and most of all you find all the bad glitches in the game. I think the best thing about the game by far is the feature that crashes the game and shuts itself down without saving. If this doesn't throw you off buying the game look at all the comments for the game which 99.99% is mad rants. If you still have the guts to play this game good luck and I hope you find a way to enjoy it.

I've come back to this game a number of times and sadly I'm unable to recommend it.

While the graphics are generally ok, the font used is rather difficult to read - its simply a very poor and quite small bitmap - I've seen much better bitmapped fonts, from java even a pure opengl application its not too dificult to implement true type fonts...

If only the text were the only issue, I could get past that and get on with the game

The real issue comes when you attemt to create a building, it is almost impossible to be sure (even with their "2.5d" cursor) if you are building on top of a lower level blocks, and don't even start on a roof I hear its possible but a blavk art indeed. A simple ghost block above lower blocks might help, but its just really confusing trying to work out whats going on.

With a couple more months of developement this would have been a decent game. They took the money and ran. Don't waste your money.

I was with this game from the beginning. From the moment I heard about this game in the Royal Indie Bundle, I fell in love with it. I played tens of hours of it through Desura. I desparately wanted this game to succeed because it was like a beautiful growing flower that would blossom with so much potential. I was an active contributor on the game forums along with others who shared the same passion. Then Steam Greenlight was launched and when this game was one of the first to be on passed through it, I was absolutely thrilled. And then, it all went south. The game was becoming more and more complex (which isnt necessarily a bad thing) but the way the developer did it made it more robust and annoying to get into. On top of that, each update introduced more and more bugs. The developers became less and less responsive. One of them left due to family concerns which is understandable. The gap between updates became longer and longer. Soon enough, the developers just disappeared. The game stayed in its buggy alpha state for months. Then out of nowhere a new dev was hired to fix it up. Except after only one update, he too seemingly has disappeared and the game continues in its buggy alpha state. I wanted to love this game. I wanted to see this game completed and succeed, I really wanted to. I now see that that future will never arrive.

Don't get this game. It's dead and abandoned. RIP

I had a review up when this game was first released on early access.. I thought it was very decent for early access and bought in... HOWEVER, I must say this game is still the same POS as it was then... Hardly different.. Potential and My time WASTED!!?!?
40/100
Pros
-potential (aha there was)
-Some decent addons (this will make it just slightly more playable)
-Not buggy (not seriously buggy, however it would be more enjoyable if you could think of all the problems as just a mistake)
-:( still can't think of anything actualy enjoyable after my money was stolen for an unfinished game
Cons
-game will not be fixed (game is not gonna change now or ever GG)
-AI is ♥♥♥♥ing stupid as hell.. ( they will ♥♥♥♥ you off so bad..)
-Very boring and repetitive at times! (basic actions are way to simple and click heavy with very little aesthetic or enjoyment as a reward..)
-Not replayable (since you cant really ever do much in the first play or second or third or fourth.. you will achieve very little in this game as everything takes forever)

Don't BUY FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR PRIDE AND WALLET!!?!!

From what Im reading, the creators stopped supporting the game. Dont buy it. There are other better games out for your money.

RUN!! TAKE YOUR MONEY AND RUN AWAY AS QUICKLY AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN!

No words will ever describe how bad a game this is.
I got sucked in by the promise and was left horribly dissapointed.

Abandoned.

Unfinished, buggy, tedious. There's a kernel of fun to be had in the game, even in this pathetic state, but it will be obtained through a terrible UI, broken game mechanics, tedious micromanagement of the most simple of tasks, and poor game design.
The developers abanonded the game after they cashed in on early access, and then have the audacity to suggest a sequel to this unfinished game. Remember their names (Xavi Canal, Ben Palgi) and ensure that their reputation follows them on any future games. To the authors: EA Games could use more people like you.

I bought this game in early access. It was playable, but seemed to be missing a lot. I decided to wait and play later. Now it won't load at all. I recommend avoiding this game even if it's on sale super cheap.

Just to keep this short : this game has not been finished. Things were promised, hopes were up but in the end it has been abandoned and after a long time I have no more faith in it ever being completed.

I don't recommend buying anything from this developer.