I keep playing games that are like the Settlers without actually having played the Settlers. The classic medieval city builder spawned tons of sequels without managing to maintain its relevance, and as such faded into relative obscurity. It’s a shame, as spiritual successors like Valhalla Hills have taken inspiration from the classics yet gotten bogged down with their own problems. Is Villagers finally the solution? Will I finally get to see a great, contemporary take on medieval resource management and town planning? Well, Villagers is an earnest attempt, but it doesn’t satisfy in the way I was hoping.

But first, the basics. Villagers casts you as a young man or woman–your choice–with a childhood gift. You’re really good at planning cities. Not exactly the most fortuitous talent for someone born to peasants, but as a result of circumstances narrated in excruciatingly exacting detail, you find yourself in charge of a brand new settlement in fertile, virgin lands. The key mode is a six mission campaign that slowly unlocks new buildings and resource options as it tells a story of perseverance, loss, and the power of family.

If that sounds a little too much like a Hallmark movie, that’s because it is. Villagers is far too deeply in love with the sound of its own voice, and its lengthy dialog segments are insufferably lengthy, plodding, and hackneyed. It also suffers from tonal whiplash, as it goes from cartoonishly suggesting that storks deliver babies in its opening to building a monstrous villain who is literally described as a rapist murderer. It’s terrible, and I’m saying that as someone who usually enjoys video game plots.

Gameplay

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But it’s ultimately about the gameplay, right? The basics are there, at least. When you start a new map, you’ll plop down a town hall and 10 or so villagers will move right in. Those villagers will be counted as potential workers, and are essentially your most important resource. You’ll use a cursor to paint trees and stone deposits for collection, and any otherwise unassigned villagers will set to work gathering those resources. As you designate building spots, free workers will ferry over resources and get those structures built as quickly as possible.

Hunting blinds and fisheries produce food, which your villagers obviously need to keep living. Forresters maintain forests and harvest lumber, automating the process of wood collection. Quarries gather stone more efficiently. Chapels increase your villagers’ happiness, causing them to work more efficiently. If iron is available on your map, you’ll be able to build mines to harvest it and construct even more advanced buildings.

Each of these buildings requires villagers to operate, limiting your pool of free workers and slowing down your construction and resource gathering. The factor that limits your growth is then your number of citizens. Getting more villagers is a matter of building a home, waiting for some old-fashioned procreation, waiting for a stork to arrive, waiting for a baby to grow to a child, and waiting for the child to become an adult. In short, there’s a lot of waiting. It’s a lengthy process that takes far more time than it does to amass the resources needed to build your fancy new structures. You’ll have a village for dozens when you have a population of 10, and no amount of fast-forwarding will make the wait any more bearable.

Not that you especially need that kind of population, because there’s not enough depth to the construction options to make continued expansion of any town especially worthwhile. Each of the campaign scenarios has you building a limited set of buildings in a prescribed order, and by the time you’re done you’ll already have played with most of the toys. There’s nothing especially compelling about how they fit together. It’s trivial to keep your village growing if you’re patient enough to wait for more kids to be born. The maps of the six campaign missions are also the only maps available in free mode, so your variety is incredibly limited.

Performance & Graphics

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MINIMUM:

OS: Windows Vista/7/8/XP

Processor: 1.2GHz

Memory: 2 GB RAM

DirectX: Version 9.0c

Storage: 512 MB available space
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RECOMMENDED:

OS: Windows Vista/7/8/XP

Processor: 2GHz

Memory: 4 GB RAM

DirectX: Version 10

Storage: 1 GB available space</b>

Villagers is obviously not an especially intensive game, so if you’ve played basically any 3D game on your PC in recent years you should be good to go. My machine rocks a 980TI and an i7 4790 which is obviously a massive overkill, but I don’t foresee any issues getting this to run on any but the most ancient of relics. It supports XP! Windows XP! It also runs fine on Windows 10, despite lacking any indication of it in the requirements.

Visually, though, the game is completely unremarkable. There’s little to indicate it came out in 2016 rather than 2006, and its overall art design is pretty bland.

Audio / Voice Acting

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As with the visuals, completely unremarkable. There’s no voice acting, and both music and sound effects are both serviceable but completely forgettable. After just a few hours with the game, I switched over to my own music and podcasts while playing.

Additional Thoughts

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Earlier in this review I brought up Valhalla Hills, which was a game very similarly focused on resource management and town building. Where it fell apart for me was its emphasis on player management of complicated AI pathing. Villagers doesn’t have that problem. If you want some resources gathered, you paint over them and anybody available will move to collect. If a building needs to constructed, the AI will take care of it. You just need to manage how many workers are assigned to specific jobs.

It’s simple. It’s elegant. It’s also very boring, which is about the most damning criticism you can lay against a video game. Getting the resources you need is trivial. Expanding your town is trivial. Increasing your population is trivial, aside the amount of time you’ve got to spend waiting for them to gestate.

By the time I’d suffered through the incessant dialog of the three hour campaign, I was eager to let loose in free mode, but within a few minutes I realized I’d already seen everything there was to see. The maps were the same, the strategies were the same, and rebuilding another town would just be the same matter of leaning all the on the fast forward button while waiting for something to happen.