Townsmen VR Review

Townsmen VR turns a familiar medieval city-building formula into an immersive god simulator, letting you manage tiny villagers firsthand.

The city-building and god simulation genre has been around for decades, letting you establish settlements, manage populations, grow economies, and protect your people from outside dangers. Some experiences focus on building giant cities, while others are more personal, letting you influence the lives of individual inhabitants.

Games like SimCity, ActRaiser, and Dungeon Goalkeeper 2 have all put their spin on the genre, but Townsmen VR does something truly distinct by bringing the experience into virtual reality. HandyGames developed Townsmen VR, which is based on maintaining a medieval settlement. But with the VR implementation, the familiar mechanics feel like a whole new level. 

You are, in effect, a giant surveying a small society, helping residents live and slowly build their settlement. It’s reminiscent of previous god simulators like Populous, especially in how you guide a population rather than directly commanding each individual. Townsmen VR is primarily about managing your hamlet, acquiring resources, building, and slow growth. The way it’s presented makes it feel like a little universe that lives, and you can explore it physically.

The idea is especially well-suited to VR.

The game doesn’t necessarily revolutionize city-building mechanics, but interacting with the landscape with your hands creates a level of physical connection that would be hard to replicate on a regular screen. The narrative in Townsmen VR is rather basic. You land on separate islands and have to help the people there form towns, collect resources, build structures, and eventually defend themselves against enemies.

As your population expands, so do your duties, and ultimately pirates and rival groups threaten the stability of your burgeoning nation. Each campaign level opens with an intro that sets the scene and shows you what must be done. Your personal advisor, Sir Clunkelot, occasionally provides voice-acted dialogue that explains key developments and offers guidance.

This gives each island some meaning, rather than making the game feel like a totally unrelated series of building challenges. The story isn't very intricate, so don't expect an emotionally gripping novel with lots of dramatic character development. Instead, it gives you enough drive to keep you interested in the next goal. As you carry out duties and grow your settlement, you'll get more dialogue here and there to clarify things or propose the next challenge.

Another more visible drawback is the campaign's structure. You generally have to follow a prescribed sequence of objectives rather than having the freedom to construct a large medieval society. Once you finish the chores, you move to another island, and much of your previous progress doesn't carry over. This makes the game feel less like a single kingdom-building quest and more like a series of distinct settlement-building experiences.

Still, the changing surroundings, goals, and slow introduction of new buildings provide enough diversity to keep things moving. The best thing about Townsmen VR is, no question, the game's interaction. Like any medieval village, you will build structures, gather resources, allocate labor, keep food supplies, and prepare an army. What’s impressive is how seamlessly it translates these experiences into VR.

You begin with a modest settlement and gradually build the infrastructure to support its inhabitants. Basic constructions are dwellings, wells, lumberyards, and stone masons. These let your folks collect materials and build up the settlement. As you go, you will gain access to more buildings, such as farms, pubs, harbors, armories, castles, and more, to increase your village's capabilities.

Pretty simple construction. Pick a building from the relevant menu, find a good area, and place it on the island. As long as you have the resources, your workers will start construction. Then you can watch them move stuff, do their duties, and slowly turn an empty region into a working settlement. The experience is even more delightful with hands-on interaction.

If a worker takes too long to pick up wood, you can take it and move it directly to the construction site.

You can also pick a worker up and drag them closer to their target. If you need more help in a building in your community, you can simply pick up a villager and deposit them into another workplace to alter their assignment. This direct engagement provides the god simulator a far more tangible presence. Instead of traveling through multiple menus to handle every little thing, you can step into the little world and make your own adjustments.

You can also zoom in to see the locals doing their day-to-day jobs. It makes the village feel more alive to see a cook making meals, a hunter bringing back an animal, or workers gathering supplies. You can also interact with objects like wells, church bells, and other ambient features. There's a certain joy in looking down and seeing the tiniest intricacies of a world you helped build.

Another fun part of the experience is exploration. You can walk around the island, check out different places, look under rocks, and even explore underwater. Fish swim away as you get close, and villagers respond when you pick them up or accidentally disturb them. You can even slap characters to stun them, though it’s more of a fun interaction than a key gameplay aspect.

Other environmental interactions include altering clouds. As you earn additional heavenly powers, you can merge lesser clouds into larger ones and use them to create meteorological effects. These powers provide another layer to the experience, albeit not every interaction is as valuable as it could be. This experience is all about managing your resources.

To expand further, your town needs enough food, drink, building materials, and people. If you assign too many villagers to one duty, then other tasks may be neglected. But the building system has a few annoying limitations. While many places may seem like the perfect spot to build, the terrain or slope could make it impossible.

You can't just flatten the earth or reshape the island to fit your plans.

Also, once you place a building, you can't just lift it and move it somewhere else. You have to pull it down and build it up. The camera controls might also be unreliable. Pinching your controllers together or extending your arms lets you zoom in and out, which feels intuitive in theory.  However, the required movement can vary, and you might not find the exact distance you want. Better analog camera controls would have made the experience more stable.

Townsmen VR is nevertheless well worth experiencing for its core interaction mechanism despite its flaws. It makes even simple management tasks feel far more engaging. Townsmen VR isn't entirely about fighting, but combat becomes more crucial as your city expands. Pirates and rival armies will ultimately threaten your island, so you need to build defensive troops and make sure your population can defend itself. 

You can develop the buildings you need to create and support various military units: archers, spearmen, swordsmen, and gladiators. These soldiers count when enemies show up, and you have to make sure your settlement has enough resources and personnel to keep up its defenses. The battle mechanics are a little simplistic compared to strategy games. You don't control each troop with complex orders.

You don't. You organize your troops and become ready for approaching threats. This can make a difference, since spreading your army too thin leaves individual groups exposed. Positioning and keeping your units together can help. Losing soldiers can be disappointing, especially after watching your colony grow and helping train these characters for battle. It makes it feel like their loss was the result of your choices, not just another bad relationship.

That said, battle is a supporting aspect rather than a particularly complex strategic framework.

The primary draw is still creating and administering your settlement, with military conflicts providing an occasional change of pace. There are also no major problem areas demanding difficult solutions. Most tasks involve organizing resources, placing structures, maintaining production, and completing each island's objectives. This makes it approachable, but those hoping for a complicated strategic structure may find the overall mechanics very limiting.

Townsmen VR isn't about the standard experience-point grind. Instead, you’ll proceed by accomplishing goals, building up your colony, and unlocking further structures and skills. You start with quite simple constructions and eventually unlock more advanced options as the game throws new requirements at you. This creates a natural progression cycle, where each additional building gives you another way to support your population.

It’s rewarding because you can see the results of your decisions instantly. You have a lumber yard that provides wood, a stone mason to help gather building materials, and more food-producing facilities to feed a growing population. As your settlement grows, you have varied obligations to balance to keep things going.

You can also explore each island and find secret treasure chests with vital building materials. Sometimes these are hidden in less visible places, so you have to check waterfalls, cliffs, and so on, instead of focusing all your attention on the primary village. Progression, however, can be fairly limited. The campaign is always directing you toward certain goals, so you don't have much freedom to build up your settlement.

You might also spend time developing a village only to abandon it when the next task starts. There is also a sandbox mode for those who want to tinker without following the campaign goals. You can change some factors (such as difficulty and population settings) and create your own challenges. This adds replay value while keeping the same set of islands and building options.

Visually, Townsmen VR is neither very demanding nor technically remarkable, but its graphic direction works well for the experience it tries to convey. The game has a colorful, cartoon-like look, with somewhat rudimentary character models, environmental textures, and building designs.

The individual elements may not look great outside VR.

But the sense of scale VR provides is a huge asset to the presentation. You can look down on the whole island first, then slowly zoom in on the individual residents and structures. This shift in perspective is really astounding. Overlooking a town gives you a sense of the layout, but at ground level, you can appreciate the bustle throughout the village.

You see workers bringing supplies, animals roaming around, and various structures, all working together as part of the same small ecosystem. The islands also have distinct weather and environmental layouts, so the campaign changes as you go. But the environments and people models can start to feel similar, especially when you spend more time exploring the same types of communities.

The campaign comprises 13 islands; however, they aren't usually drastically different in appearance. The PlayStation VR2 version also doesn’t quite do the hardware justice. The visuals are usually vivid and clear, but the basic textures and low-poly models are clearly ported over from the mobile and previous VR iterations of the game. There aren't many major visual changes beyond presentation and resolution.

The game also has several technical flaws. You can occasionally see ghosting when turning the camera, and uncommon visual disturbances can make the left and right eye images look a bit out of sync. They don't happen all the time, but they can interrupt what would otherwise be a comfortable presentation. But the graphics work because this isn't a game that needs realistic textures or sophisticated visual effects; it's fun because of its scale, activity, and sense of presence.

The sound design in Townsmen VR is totally functional, but it’s not one of the game’s stronger points. Background music, speech, and environmental noises add enough ambiance to make the islands feel like working villages.

You may hear wood being chopped, stone being broken, and other village activities. The sounds reinforce the idea of a community that's always busy, even while you're focusing on another duty. The voice acting is also really great. Sir Clunkelot guides you through the adventure, and additional characters provide dialogue during the campaign intros and major events. The performances may not be especially memorable, but they do suit the humorous presentation.

The three-dimensional audio also lets you tell the general direction of certain sounds.

This can help if you are looking for villagers in distress, especially if you hear someone making drowning noises. Unfortunately, the drowning sounds might become a technological annoyance. While some of these sounds can be attributed to villagers accidentally falling into water, sometimes the sound continues to play even when no drowning character is present. This suggests an audio bug that needs fixing.

The music and environmental effects do their job, but the audio presentation rarely goes beyond what the gameplay needs. Townsmen VR is a delightful god simulator that showcases how great classic management games can be in VR. Its biggest feat is turning everyday routines into physical interactions that make you feel like a real-life giant in charge of a tiny nation.

Picking up folks, transferring supplies, inspecting structures, and watching your community grow are all delightful components of the game. The game also gets some praise for making its management mechanisms relatively easy to grasp. You don't need to spend hours figuring out confusing menus or learning a ton of mechanics. Instead, you can take your time to learn how your settlement works and make any needed improvements.

But the experience is not without problems. The campaign’s hard objectives restrict your freedom, and the individual islands often feel too small to support the massive population you might originally envisage developing. The inability to change terrain or transfer completed buildings unnecessarily restricts construction, and the camera controls and occasional technical glitches break an otherwise fun experience.

Longevity suffers from a lack of diversity in surroundings and systems. Sandbox mode is more replayable, though it doesn't fully overcome the lack of variety in building options and the identical island layouts. Another missed opportunity is the lack of multiplayer; cooperative settlement building or competitive challenges could have added a lot of appeal.

And then there’s the question of value. Townsmen VR offers plenty of fun, but at its price, the flaws stand out more. If you're especially into VR god simulators, there’s plenty to enjoy here. Townsmen VR is ultimately a great illustration of how VR can breathe new life into a well-worn genre. It’s not as difficult as the major city-building games, but its adorable presentation and rewarding physical interactions are worth checking out.