Townscaper: Game review

Townscaper is a cute, indie game by Oskar Stalberg (the creator of bad north). The game revolves around creating cute, picturesque towns with a visual style of Venice. It is incredibly simple, only requiring two buttons to build or remove blocks allowing the construction of any town you want, allowing you to build to your heart's content without needing to manage all the micro details. It has some incredible variety possible due to its grid being made of many strange and warped shapes rather than squares, allowing slight imperfections that make the buildings look like the style of buildings that were made in the renaissance era.

The game provides a relaxing experience with perhaps some of the best audio design I have ever heard in a game with splashes and other relaxing sounds that give the player feedback of what they are doing, and all actions seeming to have many different variations of a sound effect, removing the monotony of hearing the same sound over and over, an issue that some other games face. The sounds end up more than adding to the brilliant and stylized graphics and making the whole experience a huge amount of fun.

Perhaps the most useful feature is being able to export the towns into 3D programmes. It even separates features into different layers, allowing one to remove features from the model that you don't want. This is a really powerful tool as it allows you to quickly and easily create towns and use them in games or renders.

I've sung this game's praises a lot because there are very few issues with the game. I have never experienced any bugs when playing the game but I would say that this isn't a game I could get stuck in for hours like others but rather a game I would play in short bursts but I still love it as it is such a unique concept even in the genre of town builders as in this there are no issues to worry about, such as managing traffic, apart from making the town look how you want, while letting the game take a lot of control and manage the little details and letting it drive more of the shape of the town.

So, what would I rate this? 4/5, it has some really relaxing gameplay and playing it is frankly fun, the way the game allows you to be incredibly creative, incredibly quickly by letting the game do a lot of the micro work and letting the player focus on making what best suits the world makes the creations more creative as even if you want to build an industrial tower, the game makes it interestingly curved and adds little details like windows. What I think the best thing about Townscaper is the way it takes control away from the player but ends up making it a better experience. The only thing stopping townscaper from getting a five is the issue I find it difficult to play a lot (I only have 4 hours of playtime despite having owned the game for quite a few months), although if I understand correctly, this isn't the point of the game.

Thanks for reading my review of Townscaper - Gaming Tardigrade