this game is so close to being SO good. if the developers added a few more things and made it ten dollars this game could be amazing for building. id love to not have to be over water the entire time. a road maybe white grey and brown. be able to choose where windows go or not. change the color of the roves. white orange brown and black. i really don't like HAVING to be over water. it makes making large builds strenuous. a grid that's straight and not curved would be awesome. i got it on sale so i'm happy, but this game has far too much potential to be left in this state. i love how large and tall you can make the builds i just feel without these things the game feels unfinished.

The Game *Had* Potential but Fails in Every Meaningful Sense.

The other negative reviews also share the same gripes that I have with this title. Its under baked, it's missing basic features that are necessary for a town-building sim to be interesting or worth buying for this price. While Townscaper is certainly beautiful it doesn't provide any substance which would truly elevate it to what it should have been. You can only interact with the world by placing one building at a time which is like drawing an image by placing only one pixel at a time, which is a pain if you are trying to build anything that's larger then a 5x5. It doesn't help that grid mode doesn't actually help you align anything since it gives you random uncontrollable shapes that you just have to build around, such as 5 or 6 sided stars. If you try making any medium to large towns it looks ugly since it'll look very deformed. You can't even control what kind of buildings are placed when you do decide to actually try to make something. The world feels dead since the only living things you can even find despite the expansive world you don't actually see any living things except for some birds that will randomly sit on your buildings but fly away if you decide to build anything else nearby. Since there's no tutorial and the dev has abandoned the game in this state you're stuck with this unfinished product that doesn't tell you how to do basic things that should be communicated to the player, such as making gardens, and, as far as I can tell, you can't even make the floating islands as showcased in the tutorial. Since the game decides to procedurally generate what decor that should be placed randomly it feel like this is less of a tool and more of an obstacle to overcome. It constricts you to that ocean setting which could be nice it does get quite boring to be locked to the one setting without being able to change it. While it is nice that you can save your towns and start anew you can't name the saves and the game will randomly take an image which can make it hard to tell what you're even looking at. It sucks that even if you have a vision that the game will decide to change things even if you don't want it to, such as making your roofs into terraces just because it feels like it.

So as I said at the beginning of this review, the game *had* potential, but due to the dev abandoning the game and no longer updating it Townscaper hasn't lived up to the amazing game it could've been. In good faith, I simply cannot recommend this game to others considering the state it is currently being sold in.

this game features no skulls, and no cigars. i dont recommend.