GAME ON: This little kingdom doesn’t want to die

If you've played a resource-management game, then you know how the genre works. Construct houses, start producing food, advance technologically, increase your population and work to satisfy their ever-growing demands.

Your choices — in this game, as a noble Lord overseeing a village of smallfolk — determine whether your people will flourish or perish.

Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt isn't a total overhaul of the genre, or even its own earlier editions, not by any stretch of the imagination. It's more a fresh coat of paint than a total refurbishment.

That said, it's a game that's easy to get into. To get players started ruling over their new little utopias, there's a six-part tutorial that guides aspiring Lords step by step through the basics of how the game works: how to build houses, grow food, trade, fight off bandits and more.

By the end of the tutorial, players should have a pretty good grasp of the mechanics, at which point Townsmen offers 26 ready-made scenarios to conquer, each requiring several hours of gameplay.

A scenario is a map with specific quests that tell a story and require that a particular challenge be overcome, such as bandits, drought or disease.

And of course, there's an "Endless" sandbox mode, where rather than trying to complete a scenario (such as hosting a tournament for the King), the goal is simply to survive and help your village grow as much as possible. The sandbox mode offers dozens of geographic settings and map sizes to present as much or little challenge as desired.

The game doesn't take up much file space and runs snappily while still maintaining colorful, cheery graphics and a thematic soundtrack. It might not offer the depth of some of the more popular resource-management games such as SimCity, Stellaris or Civilization, but I'd rank it slightly below one of my favorite games in the genre, Banished.

It's definitely on the more casual side, though. Even on my first playthrough, I was able to survive quite well on Endless mode and never really felt at risk of my entire town dying off. I prefer to teeter a little more precariously on the brink of total disaster.

The upgraded user interface is a welcome addition. An earlier version of the game was created for mobile phones, but this update was done with PCs in mind. Quests and other notifications appear on the left-hand side of the screen, and keyboard shortcut keys will pop up relevant menus.

At first, money is a big concern, but eventually your peasants will start producing lots of resources, and clever use of merchants that stop by every few minutes will help make your town prosperous. It's a bit of an unexacting affair — the biggest threats come from running out of food, natural disasters or bandit attacks. The latter can be mitigated by building guard towers and barracks spread throughout the town, just as how police and fire stations worked in SimCity three decades ago.

Again, there's nothing really too innovative here, but that doesn't mean the game isn't successful at what it sets out to accomplish.

Townsmen: A Kingdom Rebuilt also offers a leveling system — completing quests and making people happy earn experience points, and as levels rise, players unlock permanent upgrades that persist across different games. It helps to give a sense of progression and make it so every game has value and is contributing to overall success.

It's also always nice to see developers take care of their fans. Anyone who owned the original PC version of Townsmen gets this upgraded version for free.

But mostly, this game is best for newcomers to the genre. It's not too expensive and will introduce core city-building mechanics that are standards across almost all resource-management games. There are also versions of Townsmen available for Android, iOS and Nintendo Switch, and a virtual-reality version as well, but this updated version is PC only.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by the publisher.

Style on 05/20/2019