Tiny Town

Sim games have a familiar pattern. You're given a patch of land and prompted to build on it. As the population of your settlement grows, priorities shift towards catering to the whims and needs of its inhabitants.

As in real world economies, there’s an escalating spiral of demand and supply. Building huts encourages people to move into the village. The presence of people encourages small businesses to open. But businesses need supplies to manufacture their wares, whereupon a farming class arises to support them.

Tiny Town retreads all this ground and more besides. There are times when you might rub your eyes and do a double take, so striking are the similarities to other farm/village/city sims. Unfortunately, it’s when the game attempts to veer from the formula that disaster strikes.

How bad could it be? Here’s how bad. Instead of allowing you to freely manage your town as you see fit, the game overlays a quest system on top of the action. This means that every so often a villager complains about something and you’re tasked with resolving the problem.

Taken in isolation, this wouldn’t be an issue. But if you were to try to plan ahead and build things before the quest system prompts you to, it won’t recognise that you’ve already met the objective. For example, you’ve sown two fields of strawberries just before the game tasks you with it, and it expects you to sow two more fields.

It's an irritating state of affairs, where independent initiative goes unrecognised and you're yoked to the leaden pacing of the game. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that building uses 'energy' points, of which precious few are allotted at timed intervals.

This brings us to another problem in Tiny Town: the freemium model.

At every opportunity possible, the game prompts you to spend money. Constructing a building is broken into several stages, for example, but you can pay up to speed the process. Collecting revenues and harvesting crops uses up energy, but it you run out of energy you can buy more.

This last point is infuriating, because the crops will spoil if you don’t harvest them in time. If you’ve run out of energy, then you can either put up or shut up.

There are one or two things about the game that do look interesting. The edit mode allows you to reshuffle the layout of your village at (surprisingly) no extra cost. There’s also the ability to visit neighbouring towns to see what they’re up to and lend the occasional hand.

But these features do little to salvage what is essentially a fatally flawed design that’s rigged to make you spend cash to play it. This is patently unfair, and the game isn’t good enough to persevere with on those terms.

If you really want to see a farming sim done properly, you’re better off taking a look at Oh! Edo Towns instead.