Townsmen Nintendo Switch Review

We’ve been playing Townsmen on Nintendo Switch for a few days now, and while the game might be a bit rough around the edges – especially the amount of time you sit there waiting for things to happen – there is an incredible number of scenarios and campaigns to complete, on top of free play mode, all of which are a fun and exciting to play thanks to some deep strategy, city building elements!

City building titles have always been a personal favourite of mine, and I’ve always gravitated to games that are set in medieval times. I love castles, love the ideas of quaint villages, and want to build something from the ground up. And Townsmen gives me that opportunity. From you humble beginnings using stone and wood to craft rough structures, to more grand structures that require better minerals and carefully crafted planks, on top of much more.

As it is based on a long running series, developer Handy Games and Publisher THQ Nordic have a long history of bringing these titles to market. And it’s the sheer number of things to do that astounded me most by Townsmen. Let’s dive into the numbers!

• 26 scenarios to play through, and 24 sandbox maps to build your own from the ground up
• Research up to 75 different technologies
• 45 Production buildings, and over 120 other structures
• $19.99, a very cheap price considering the package you get

Whats been phenomenal about this game is how well it controls. While it would be much easier with a computer mouse, everything has been swapped to a controller in an almost perfect way. Although I was a bit lost when I was getting started – as the tutorial walks you through various things, but not everything – it didn’t take long to get all the mechanics under my belt!

The strategic elements in the game are fantastic as well. Planning your city to maximise the efficiency of your building and workers is only the beginning. You’ll need to build better buildings to provide your city with better wares, both for building more ‘stuff’ and keeping your citizens happy and healthy.

Things are definitely not perfect. The graphics are a bit dull, and don’t really entice me to want to pick this up – should I be browsing in the eShop, for example. And of course, the game can be a bit of a slog at times, especially as you play through the tutorial. During the tutorial, you will be given various tasks to complete, and they must be done in a specific order to complete that level. This often includes building a number of things in your city, which early on would be townhouses, a mill, and a bakery. All of these buildings take time and resources. Time you have lots of, but resources take time to collect, and even more time to deliver them from their respective sites to the building location.

What that means in layman’s terms is that you spend a lot of time waiting around. You are waiting for more wood to be chopped and stone to be mined. You are then waiting for the character to walk across the map to collect the items and bring them to the build site. Later in the game, this is less of a problem as you manage a larger, more busy civilization. But early on, it’s a bit of a slog.

We’ve enjoyed our time with Townsmen, and readily recommend it to those looking for a city building game on Nintendo Switch. You won’t be disappointed!

Townsmen on Nintendo Switch gets a 7.5/10!