Remember SimCity? You know, that game that was complicated back when you were 12 and you had no idea how to develop a city so you just loaded a pre-made one and sent every natural disaster on it at once? Well, here's a modern-day alternative. Towns! Recently receiving the Greenlight from Steam, it features a more RPGish feel to the whole build-and-control scenario. While it doesn't have a giant robot bent on destruction (skynet for prez 2016), it does feature blood-curdling screams as your people die, be it from starvation or from that goblin king that snuck into your mine going on a homicidal rampage. You begin like you do in Minecraft, only able to make wooden objects. However, as you delve deeper into the depths below your feet you gain access to many different building materials. Rather than controlling one person, you control as many people as your computer permits, or the programming allows, and so the same task can get done much much faster with multiple people. You're able to attract multiple heroes, who go out and fight enemies as they encounter them, sometimes regardless of their own safety.
Long story short, it's effectively single-player MineCraft entirely in third-person view, where you're in control of multiple "NPC"s. I say "NPC" because every individual has a unique AI in that they all require sleep and food at different times, though actions you tell them to perform will always get completed. Just the AI may take its time in getting around to it. That said, it's still currently an Alpha build. It has some terrible AI at times (seriously, the non-soldier citizens will fight something to the death rather than run, and if a hero runs the attacker chases the hero down...), its sounds are repetitive (one sound per use; there's only one death sound for males, one for females, and one for any mob), and it's got some terrible grammar and spelling mistakes. It's currently in .8a, so I expect more content/better content to come out with time.
The demo is 20 in-game days (believe me, more than enough to get some decent stuff done), and as far as I can tell the time limit is the only difference between the demo and the full release. It's incredibly small in size, only about 20MB unpacked (yes, it ships as a .rar or .zip, can't remember which), so give me the benefit of the doubt and take it out for a spin.
Oh, and did I mention its graphics are as slick as MineCraft's? Because they are.
