Townsmen 6

Townsmen 6 is the handheld gamers answer to Settlers – only better!

For those who have a bit of time on their hands and fancy building an empire all of your own in 18th century France (about when the revolution and Bastille was kicking off and just before Napoleon started doing his conquering thing), then this game is worth a closer look. You are placed into these turbulent times as a dissident who’s not very happy with the opulent rule of the king (probably a Louis from my basic French history knowledge). Your task is to set about generating a self-sufficient town, from wood-cutters, to farms, to mills to bakers and so on.

About the only thing that’s not mentioned on this list of rather useful buildings is anywhere to behead your royal sympathisers. Not to worry, you won’t ever see a gruesome Guillotine or any bloodshed. Instead you will be responsible for the much more entertaining task of building a country up from its roots and making all your ‘Townies’ happy.

You start each level with a Guild Hall, and soon have to establish fundamental buildings to develop your settlement. For example, to build houses you need wood and stone, so must construct woodcutters and quarries to source these two fundamental sources. Once done and the people are doing their chopping and quarrying, you will soon have the materials to then build other essential buildings e.g. farms, bakeries and fishing huts – to feed your expanding empire.

This rather simple game starts to swiftly elevate in terms of development and not only do you have to keep an eye on the production and space to build, but also ensure you have enough people to man the buildings. Some micro-management then comes into effect to ensure that things are done in good time. For example you may be tasked to gather a certain amount of stone or another commodity and build a set amount of structures or (my personal favourite) conquering a rival town and expanding further. Once successfully completing your task and winning the land of a region you will go back to the map of France where you can pick which next region you’d like to tackle.

This is where the game gets even more interesting, the French King has been watching your progress and indeed after completing the first few levels which serves as a thorough tutorial, your lessons will be put to the test with a full frontal assault against the French Royal Army. The good news is, if this were any other army you’d probably have no hope of winning, the bad news is this is far from an easy battle to win.

So in a basic round-up, you’ll be having to play a dual-role, one to develop your town and help it to flourish, the second to amass an army to help fend off and indeed attack your opponents. Through either sheer brute force (via soldiers) or the art of democratic persuasion (using propagandists), you will influence the outcome both on and off the battlefield.

In essence this game is arguably worthy of crossing from mobile phone to PC or other format – it’s that good! There’s a depth and lavish look that’s been given to this game through the advances of its previous incarnations and all this helps give this game something of a rather unique and superior quality.

Rating 99%

Positives

Great graphics

Great gameplay and addictive qualities

Superb fun, both developing your towns and battling/persuading others

Good sound effects and even music’s quite melodic

Negatives

No such thing as a quick game; so be warned everything’s a bit of an epic – but at least all progress is saved if you have to shut it off prematurely.

As each game is an epic, you may need to be plugged into the mains