Villagers is a beautifully illustrated and richly detailed town-building game where you build a thriving community using the people and resources around you. Success or failure depends on your ability to create a town that can grow and prosper, and overcome the harsh realities of medieval life!
Gather and manage natural resources for buildings, ensure a plentiful supply of food and water to keep your villagers happy and allocate them jobs to continually improve and expand your settlement. Watch out for travelling artists who can spread illness, fierce bandits and wild animals that attack your townsfolk and extreme weather conditions that threaten their very survival!
In Story Mode you follow the journey of a group of medieval settlers living through dark times filled with war and illness. Using your town building and resource management skills you must guide them through six challenging missions that introduce the different aspects of Villagers gameplay. The campaigns guide you through building your first town, trading with merchants, food and water provision, managing the emotional wellbeing of your villagers, coping will illness and defending your townsfolk from attack!
Villagers Key Features:
1, 2 modes of play; Story Mode and FreePlay
2, Engaging and humorous storyline that illustrates medieval life
3, 27 beautifully designed buildings to construct
4, 16 illustrated and colourful characters
5, 16 professions with their own clothing sets
6, Sophisticated AI that influences happiness, relationships, families and duties
7, Challenging missions; trade with merchants, manage livestock; control food and water supplies, produce and sell crops….
8, Unlimited fun in FreePlay mode with over 6 maps to explore
Gather and manage natural resources for buildings, ensure a plentiful supply of food and water to keep your villagers happy and allocate them jobs to continually improve and expand your settlement. Watch out for travelling artists who can spread illness, fierce bandits and wild animals that attack your townsfolk and extreme weather conditions that threaten their very survival!
In Story Mode you follow the journey of a group of medieval settlers living through dark times filled with war and illness. Using your town building and resource management skills you must guide them through six challenging missions that introduce the different aspects of Villagers gameplay. The campaigns guide you through building your first town, trading with merchants, food and water provision, managing the emotional wellbeing of your villagers, coping will illness and defending your townsfolk from attack!
Villagers Key Features:
1, 2 modes of play; Story Mode and FreePlay
2, Engaging and humorous storyline that illustrates medieval life
3, 27 beautifully designed buildings to construct
4, 16 illustrated and colourful characters
5, 16 professions with their own clothing sets
6, Sophisticated AI that influences happiness, relationships, families and duties
7, Challenging missions; trade with merchants, manage livestock; control food and water supplies, produce and sell crops….
8, Unlimited fun in FreePlay mode with over 6 maps to explore
| Minimum System Requirements | Recommended System Requirements | |
| CPU | 1.2GHz | 2GHz |
| CPU SPEED | 1.2 GHz | 2.0 GHz |
| RAM | 2 GB | 4 GB |
| OS | Windows Vista/7/8/XP | Windows Vista/7/8/XP |
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA GeForce 510 | NVIDIA GeForce 510 |
| Direct X | Version 9.0c | Version 10 |
| HDD Space | 512 MB | 1 GB |
| Game Analysis | Provided that you have at least an NVIDIA GeForce 510 graphics card you can play the game. To play Villagers you will need a minimum CPU equivalent to an Intel Pentium 4 2.00GHz. You will need at least 512 MB of free disk space to install Villagers. By contrast, the game developers recommend somewhere around 1 GB of free disk space on your system drive. Villagers system requirements state that you will need at least 2 GB of RAM. If possible, make sure your have 4 GB of RAM in order to run Villagers to its full potential. Villagers will run on PC system with Windows Vista/7/8/XP and upwards. Additionally it has Mac and Linux versions. | |
| Minimum System Requirements | Recommended System Requirements | |
| CPU | 1.2GHz | 2GHz |
| RAM | 4 GB RAM | 4 GB RAM |
| OS | 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11 | |
| HDD Space | 512 MB available space | 1 GB available space |
| Minimum System Requirements | Recommended System Requirements | |
| CPU | 1.2GH | |
| RAM | 2 GB RAM | 4 GB RAM |
| OS | Ubuntu; other Debianbased OS untested | |
| HDD Space | 512 MB available space | 1 GB available space |
Soundtrack and art
Read above... oh wait, €20??? Yea... that too.
The game has two modes, freeplay and story, like most historical RTS games. Naturally I choose story and am immediately immersed into a text based narration of the protagonists biography. The narration jumps between a real time conversation involving a scribe and some random chick at a bar, then to the book they/he is writing, then to the events unfolding and finally to the game it’self. So it’s kind of an off putting narration-ception… can I say that?
The game starts easy and limits the buildings and stages you can take as a beginner, in what is to be a tutorial that makes up the entire campaign. The story promises all sorts of adventures, war, disease and the looming duty of royal city builder but after three or four maps of tutorial it finally gives up and decides the ultimate goal in the game is to build a bath house and roll credits. What a rip off! Yes there is 6 hours of promised story game play but literally all of it is spent in tutorial. The final building you are allowed to build is a bath and the moment you build it the king’s buddy pops up and says the war’s over, let’s all go for a pint.
The game is also buggy. Very buggy. Aside from the aesthetic bugs like birds being permanently stuck in buildings and the narrator repeating himself. There is no end of ‘map-reset’ bugs, like villagers not being able to reach their spots, traders blocking the harbor despite having left the map and unable to place buildings anywhere for no reason. All of that might be forgiven had they not made it IMPOSSIBLE to manually close any window without opening the quest screen.
Conclusion: All in all, a buggy game (can be forgiven) with a short and pointless campaign (can also be forgiven) with basically nothing going for it that every pre 2004 historical RTS hadn’t already done. One redeeming fact is that the game is genuinely a refreshing little addictive muse that plays on my nostalgic strings and has good music.