Towns - a neat little indie game with big ideas.

I like indie games. They are often easy to really get into - find a new indie game with a small but busy community, and help out. That's just what I've been doing with Towns.

So uh.. where to start?

Towns is a game made by a tiny european indie company called SMP, or Super Mal Parit. It's an extremely ambitious title, with aspirations to take all the best parts from building sims, city sims, tower defense games and even dungeon explorers. It's still in an early alpha stage (0.40.2 as of writing) but it's still fun to play.

The basis is that you start off with a small handful of unarmed civilians dumped into a randomly generated map, full of grassland, desert, snow and jungle. It's up to you to issue orders and guidance to your townies to keep them from starving or getting themselves butchered by the indiginous wildlife, which currently compose themselves mainly of hideious half snake half crab abominations and frogs wielding spears. You have been warned.

The actual gameplay is all done via mouse, with keyboard shortcuts for those who can use two devices at once. You click areas and buttons and tell your townsfolk to chop trees, hoard wood, build workshops and eventually mine downwards. And that's where the game may truly shine when it's complete.

Ah, that's better.

The eventual idea is that you build up your town and fortify it to attract Heroes - a part of the game that is currently non-existant. These heroes will then explore the sprawling, random, deadly-monster-filled dungeons below your town. Blood will be shed, heads will be lopped, and treasure will be looted and brought back for you to use.

This treasure will have two uses - attracting better heroes, and being crafted down (using the really neat, despite being early and buggy, production system) into weapons and armour to prolong the life of everyone in your town.

As I've mentioned, the game is still early - heroes are non-existant, so you only have civilians and soldiers to play with, but the game is still fully playable. Civilians can put up a heck of a fight if armed to the teeth with Hobgoblinite weaponry and armor. That being said, however, the aim of the early builds is not to live forever - you will eventually lose. Seiges can happen randomly, and occur more often and more difficult the longer you play, the deeper you mine, and the more townsfolk you attract. Eventually you will run into a seige of 100 dire wolves which will eat through your town. You will have to restart.

Fight! Fight! Fight for your lives!

And you will want to. How can you do things differently? More efficiently? Maybe you'll make huge cow farms this time? Go for a fully bread-consumption economy? Deforest the entire surface? Quickly attract 50 immigrants and raid the dungeon? Build walls around your entire town to protect against seiges? The possibilites are... well, not endless, but quite vast, for an early alpha.

So take a look, visit the official forums and grab the demo from the official site. And when you get stuck, visit the wiki. I'm an active member there and we already have quite a few pages up.

Go. Try Towns. Get slaughtered with a smile on your face.