Community Inc Preview

Start your own little village and grow it into a thriving town with Community Inc. Along the road you'll meet some interesting races who will either become valuable trade partners or worthy adversaries. How it all ends up is totally up to you.

Community Inc Preview

introduction

I'm a huge fan of city builder and management games. Unfortunately, it's incredibly hard to find a decent one. Even those created by large development companies struggle to become anything memorable because usually the mechanics simply don't work that well.

I have come across a few lesser known management games in the past that have exceeded my expectations and so I was excited to see what Community Inc had to offer. Even in its alpha state, there seemed to be a lot of promising elements here and I believe that with enough time T4 Interactive can end up with something special.

You can follow any updates on Community Inc on Steam.

Community Inc Preview. Some of my friendly neighbors queuing to give me some money at my trade desk.

Gameplay

Your world is generated with nothing but a gateway where you'll summon your villagers, called "lings". Each ling can be assigned up to 5 different career paths which you can swap between as needed. These include builder, farmer, miner, guard, herbalist and so on. Some career paths also lead to new professions. Lumberjacks can later be appointed as a carpenter or a herbalist can become a physician.

Once you have a few lings assigned to the most basic tasks you can get started with gathering resources. Chop down trees for wood, mine stone and gather plants. This is when you start crafting the raw materials into more refined substances used in building and further crafting. When you designate some materials to be gathered or items to be crafted, the assigned lings will get to work automatically, other than that you don't have any direct control over them.

Before long, you'll receive a message from your neighbors asking you to deliver certain items in return for money and improved relations. You can choose to reject that request if you have more pressing matters but these could be highly lucrative and also help you to gain some allies which you'll need should you wish to maintain peace.

Next, you open the technology tree to discover better technologies and unlock shiny new toys. Research takes a lot of money though which requires a lot of time to accumulate.

Community Inc Preview. Crafting items start off basic as seen here but become rather complicated later on.

Add to the above responsibilities, the happiness of your lings. You need to provide homes, food and luxuries or they might revolt and set your town alight. Trust me, an angry mob of lings is not a pretty sight.

One of the things I enjoy about Community Inc is that although the game starts fairly simple, it becomes more intricate as things progress. Initially, you might be bothered with crafting planks and planting cabbages, while later you create furniture and cook up delicious recipes to increase the happiness of your citizens.

design

The visual and audio designs are basic, although in charming sort of way. The game has a comical feel to it which I appreciated. I especially enjoyed the other races you encounter in the game such as the Mushfaces, Stone Golems and Orcons as can be seen below. Your interactions with them are limited to opening trade agreements, declaring war or peace and sending gifts, but they'll frequently visit your community which is always a treat.

Community Inc Preview. These are not your average neighbors.

drawbacks

The mechanics work, in theory. However, since the game is still in such early stages of development there's still a lot that needs improvement. 

The bugs in the game are plentiful, ranging from the countless grammatical errors to the mouse pointer disappearing when trying to place certain items. The camera view too was a little buggy for me and there is no way to change the sensitivity of the movements, also large items like trees don't become transparent to let you see what might be on the other side. 

Additionally, although the game has a tutorial, this only covers the most basic controls and menus but leaves a lot of the game mechanics for you to figure out on your own. While you definitely want the player to figure things out for themselves, it gets old when you have to start a new game every 20 minutes because you made all the wrong decisions in the last half a dozen games. Without trying I always ticked off one of the other races quite early which resulted in some of their soldiers arriving at my door looking for a fight. Crafting swords in order to create guards is actually trickier than you'd expect so I frequently ended up losing everything when this happened. On the odd occasion when I did manage to fend off my attackers, I'd turn off the alarm to signal to my citizens that everything is safe again only to have them all commit mass suicide, I wish I was making that up. There is a peaceful mode which I wanted to try but this was still disabled during my testing. 

However, the biggest drawback I found was the incredible amount of micromanagement needed. As mentioned, your lings can be assigned to various careers. You can reassign them to other careers when needed but to do so you need to open the ling menu and check each of them individually to see who can be assigned to those tasks. You'll then have to go through the same process to change them back later. Additionally, when constructing or crafting you are shown how many of the various materials are needed but to see how many you have available, you have to open your inventory, click on the relevant tab and scroll to the materials in question. Since certain items require numerous raw materials, this can become highly time-consuming.

Community Inc Preview. The citizen management view is well laid out but requires a visit way to frequently.

conclusion

Community Inc still has a long way to go and I'm sure most of the bugs mentioned above will be resolved by the release date, my only hope is that the game is balanced well enough to still be enjoyable. A good management game should be easy to get into and then increase difficulty to keep challenging the player and keep him interested. If a game is overly difficult at the start then it runs the risk of losing the player's interest before they have a chance to fully enjoy it and unfortunately this is where Community Inc finds itself.

So few development companies seem to be able to get these type of games right but I think T4 Interactive might just be able to pull it off. I just don't think it'll be soon.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

×