Townsmen on the Nintendo Switch, is not to be confused with Townsmen the mobile game by the same developer Handy Games. While both of them are city-builder games, only one was built from the ground up for the Nintendo Switch. And it shows once you start getting into it. Townsmen places you directly in the governor’s chair, giving you full reign over a village full of Townies. It is up to you, and you alone, to manage their needs and desires. Do this and you’ll bring them into the glory ages. After all, this is a game set in medieval times. This means bandits roam freely, plagues kill swaths of the population, and only you, Governor, can save your people by leading them to prosperity.

Developer: Handy Games

Publisher: Handy Games

10 Hours Played // Review Copy Provided // $19.99

Welcome Governor

As a new governor, one cannot be expected to know everything right from the start. In order to ease you into your new role, Townsmen has provided us with 6 tutorial scenarios. Each of these scenarios slowly builds upon the last so you’re not left behind. Expect to spend some time on these. It took me anywhere from 1 to just under 3 hours for each one of these tutorial scenarios. Governors are not built in a day it seems.

Free Reign

In addition to the tutorial, there are 26 other playable scenarios each with their own objectives, map size, and difficulty level. These include everything from making wedding preparations to curing a curse that plagues the Townies. If you don’t feel like playing through canned scenarios, there are 24 sandbox levels to create your own unique, sprawling masterpiece. Townsmen also hosts its own in-game achievement system which tracks items like total time played, number of things produced, and other, more disastrous, events.

Each Townsmen sandbox or scenario level comes complete with quests. By satisfying the quest requirements you can receive prestige, which looks like little crowns. Prestige is a unique currency that allows you to upgrade or build structures and purchase decorative items. Decorations cannot be purchased with gold and must be purchased with prestige. This severely limits the player’s ability to customize the city to their liking. Furthermore, since decorations are one of the main desires of your townie population, this was even a more depressing point for me. Decorations include really cool buildables from fantastic statues and large fountains to the simple hedges and basic fences. That’s right. Fences will cost you prestige.

Controlling the Townies

Handy Games threw in some unique UI and navigation elements to make managing your cities a little bit easier. Player to player tip here: shortcuts to important functions like influence area overlays, alerts, and time control can be accessed on the left D-Pad. I didn’t realize this at first, but these options being easily accessible drastically improve your ability to manage your city. Other common tasks, such as building and destroying, are done with ease through the separate menus. The build menu is neatly organized into building types, making it easy to find the next building for your town. Quest markers will even appear within the build menu, so you can find what you are looking for with ease.

You can play Townsmen purely with touch controls if that’s your preferred control method of choice. I find a combination of the handheld mode with some touch controls to be the most effective. All the menus, popups, and movement around the map can be performed with the tips of your fingers. Townsmen deserves praise for this as I don’t see many games giving the user this level of flexibility. I found touch controls invaluable when setting my Switch down to pass in-game time and watch the action unfold. A few quick touches without completely picking the device back up was nice sometimes.

Supply Chains

The supply chains in Townsmen can get quite long and require some future planning. I tend to like some depth to my city-builders. For example, to build weapons for the local barracks you need an armory. The armory requires things such as steel bars, which can only be built at the smelter. Bob, the local smelting expert, requires raw ore and charcoal to stoke his fires and produce iron bars. One of Townsmen’s strong points is that you don’t need all the pieces of the supply chain right away to begin seeing benefits. After you have a steady stream of wood from your lumberjacks, you can start sawing them into boards to supply your builders. After a while, you can start sending them to the charcoal burner to start supplying your smelter. Or, maybe you just want to sell them all to the traveling merchant and swim in gold coins.

Supply and Demand

Townsmen is not heavy on the micromanaging and takes a slightly more casual approach to managing your supply chains. To clarify, if you have a Townie assigned to a building, they will produce goods until they run out of raw materials. Due to this, Townsmen does not make you fiddle with switches or dials to produce X number of items for Y time. Paradox Interactive fans might want to look away. If you want fewer boards and more charcoal, then it is up to you to remove that Townie from your sawmill and assign him elsewhere.

Upgrading buildings will allow you to assign more Townies to each building, giving you just enough supply chain flexibility to hang yourself with. In case you forgot, that new building you need requires boards and 30 minutes ago you removed your Townie from the sawmill because you were all about making charcoal. As you can see, managing the supply chain is key; it’s only one of the many intriguing elements.

Research Trees

Townsmen also has an interesting research mechanic built into the game. In Townsmen, your profile is assigned a player level. You can increase your player level by obtaining experience from quests. At pre-determined player levels, you will be rewarded the ability to research “buffs” to your Townies, buildings, and overall gameplay. There’s a lot of room to grow here as the top level research item requires level 40 and I have only reached level 13 after 10 hours. These research items are independent of the map you are playing and are assigned to your profile so once you obtain them you have them forever.

More Supplies Sir!

Townsmen plays great and is a well built, complete city-builder package on the Nintendo Switch. It’s a joy to play and nothing overly detracts from the experience. To be fair, there’s a lot in this game and I have yet to reach most of it. If I had to point a finger at the “one thing” that doesn’t work well for me, it’s the fact that most decorations can only be purchased with prestige. My time with Townsmen is not finished. Townsmen is good enough to keep playing. Especially since I have yet to unlock a lot of the research items and more advanced buildings. Send me some messages on Twitter with your Townsmen experiences or pictures of your masterpieces.

If Townsmen and city-builders are your go-to genre then make sure to checkout our other reviews of similar games like Project Highrise, Prison Architect, or even Holy Potatoes! We would also love it if you could stop by the Nindie Nexus Discord to say hello every once in a while. We only fight occasionally and its usually with non-life threatening injuries.