Townsmen (Mobile)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.8 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Steve Palley
• Reviewed on: 01/01/2004
• Updated on: 04/28/2004
• Originally published on GameSpot: Townsmen (Mobile) Review

There's something strangely compelling about city-building. If you live in a city, as I do, you're constantly thinking about how to improve it. I've decided that fixing Boston would take an army of civil engineers, weather control, suspension of habeas corpus, several hundred million dollars to get the Red Sox to the World Series, and an additional hundred million to reconstruct the metro area after the resulting riots. This is of course totally unfeasible, so I suppose I'll have to content myself with rockin' mobile simulations like Handy Games' Townsmen. Fine by me. Townsmen is currently locked in a stalemate with Anno 1503 for the title of Most Profound Mobile Game Ever in My Opinion--it would have won hands down if its controls were the least bit usable.

Townsmen's concept runs deep, especially for a game that's built around a single gameplay screen--namely, a pastoral hillside view of the valley in which you build your town--and a handful of menus. This valley is your canvas, the townsmen your brushes, and a handful of resources your paints. Your job is to make the correct economic decisions and turn your sleepy two-bit burg into a bustling metropolis, complete with traffic congestion, ludicrously high rents, and a snotty underground "scene."

In reality, you only have to worry about a few things: building, upgrading, and maintaining a few different types of facilities, such as fishing huts, lumber mills, and mines; deciding when to expand your workforce; and how to best allocate production and trade. However, given the sad state of Townsmen's control scheme and in-game documentation, this is more than enough to deal with at first. Navigating the necessary menus using the number keys verges on the futile for 30 minutes or so, because you have to use guess-and-check to ascertain the function of all the different keys. It also doesn't help that nothing in the game is labeled. The provided tutorials are a very nice touch, but they aren't actually all that helpful in teaching the basics. They feel more like a concession from Handy that its gameplay system is wildly complex and necessitates a great deal of instruction.

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