.FLYINGHEAD WE GOT GAME!
.TITLE Village Sim lets you control your own village people
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY Author Heather Wardell is a simulation junkie. How about you? If so, then Village Sim, the newest real-time simulation game from LDW Software, is for you. Read on for the full scoop on the continuation of the Plant and Fish Tycoon series.
.DEPT
Are you a simulation game junkie? Is it your life’s ambition to be the supreme ruler of a village? Then Village Sim, the newest real-time simulation game from LDW Software, is for you.
Village Sim is essentially exactly what the name says: a simulation game of a village. The premise is that a few people managed to escape when a volcano destroyed their island home, and their boat has now washed up on the shores of the island of Isola. Your job is to nurture and guide them as they create a new home.
.CALLOUT In the early stages it feels rather like trying to get a cat to complete a task.
I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester for this game, so I’ve been playing it extensively (excessively? obsessively?) for the last month. The first version released to the testing group was pretty rough; several important parts didn’t work, graphics weren’t always right, and the game’s speed was different depending on whether your handheld was on or off.
With each new version, the game became better and better. The villagers were given new and interesting behaviours, the game’s balance was adjusted, and new island events were added. Island events are random occurrences that have various impact on your villagers, such as the stored food going moldy, or a whale washing up on the beach.
Finally, "the powers that be" at LDW decided the game was ready for its debut. This review focuses on the final version, released April 8, 2005.
.BREAK_EMAIL Click here for Heather’s full report on how to run a village.
.H1 Installation and early game play
Village Sim is easy to install and works right away. There’s a file for the game itself, and three music files. You can install any, all, or none of the music files; they provide quite a nice bit of background music for the game. The graphics are quite good for a handheld game, and the sound effects are actually very good as well.
While the background music plays non-stop (there’s a setting to turn it off), the sound effects change depending on what part of the island you’re viewing. Construction sites have the sound of hammering, while the ocean makes nice wave sounds.
When you start a new game, you’re shown a brief explanation of what has happened to the villagers’ original island, and how they came to be at Isola. You’re also given the opportunity to turn on a tutorial, which provides good advice on how to play the game.
The tutorial, unfortunately, doesn’t always line up perfectly with what is actually happening during the game. This was improved substantially during the beta testing period, but is still occasionally an issue. For example, right after I dragged a villager to the berry bush to look for food, the tutorial suggested that I…you guessed it, drag a villager to the berry bush to look for food.
This isn’t really a major issue though, and I suspect it has to do with the very open-ended nature of this game. It’s completely up to you what you have your villagers do, and when you have them do it. You can choose to have them all look for food, or all build a hut. I would imagine this freedom would make creating a tutorial extremely difficult. The tutorial does excel at providing the general information you need to know though.
Basically, you need to tell the villagers what to do. Being human, they often don’t do exactly what they’re told, but you can tell them what you want them to do. A large part of the game play involves picking up a villager who has wandered off, and returning him or her to the assigned task. As a villager develops skill at a particular task, focus also seems to increase, but in the early stages it feels rather like trying to get a cat to complete a task.
There are five main tasks to which you can direct your villagers’ efforts: farming/fishing, researching, breeding, healing, and construction. Each of these tasks helps your village grow and become stable. Some villagers are born with skill in a particular task, but many are not; either way, you can choose exactly what skill should be their focus. Figure A below shows the Details screen, with a villager set to be a researcher.
.FIGPAIR A Mazi the researcher.
It’s completely up to you how you choose to deploy your villagers, but you may find that many ways end in failure. For example, if no one is looking for food, your little people won’t survive for long. Researching is how you earn tech points, which are used to increase skills in the five tasks, so doing no research is also risky. Playing at the low difficulty level, I’ve had to restart quite a few times due to having only one or two villagers left; my understanding is that the hard difficulty level is quite the challenge.
Once a villager is pretty well trained at completing a particular task, that villager tends to wander off less often. They do, however, often head out to do things such as drink well water and be curious about any number of things. You can haul them back to their assigned task, but they’ll generally come back to it on their own after taking a short break.
More than one villager can work on a particular task at a given time, and you’ll likely find yourself having them do this quite often. This can lead to some interesting pile-ups in the graphics. Figure B shows five of my six villagers hard at work at the research table.
.FIGPAIR B The scientist convention.
When this occurs, it can be very difficult to select precisely the villager you want; fortunately, you can scroll through them on the Details screen, then select Done to be moved to the desired one.
.H1 Ongoing game play
On one level, Village Sim is really very basic–survive! There are some very subtle points however, which add interest over the long term. Exactly how should I allocate my villagers? Who should I allow to breed? When do I begin construction on a new hut? Do I focus on research or food gathering? Varying your answers to these questions leads to very different games.
Most members of the testing group found themselves terribly attached to their little villagers. Several times during the test, we were required to uninstall and reinstall the game, and the outcry was substantial. The game can be rather addictive, and you may find yourself popping in every few minutes to see what has changed.
When you earn enough tech points to get a new level in any of your basic tasks, the game changes. It’s not always obvious exactly what has changed, which is a good thing, but something new is nearly always available. When you move to level two of harvesting for example, a new potential food source is accessible.
To find out what has changed, you need to drag a villager around the island. At the start of the game, there are many places where they’re confused; when new tech levels are purchased, suddenly the confusion ends. Figure C shows one of my villagers, confused by a collection of rocks.
.FIGPAIR C Villagers will be confused until their tech level is high enough to understand.
The game also contains twelve puzzles. I won’t give any of them away, but I will tell you that you’re likely to find nine or so just by wandering around the game. Not right away, though. Each of your five basic tasks has tech levels associated with it, and many of the puzzles cannot be solved at the first tech level. Whenever you increase a tech level, it’s worthwhile checking into any of the places where your villagers found themselves confused; often something new can be done after a new tech level is purchased.
This takes care of about nine puzzles, so what about the remaining ones? A villager will solve two of them without any intervention on your part, and the third, frankly, is essentially impossible. It requires a completely different approach from the others, several very high tech levels, and serious persistence–and there are no hints in the game as to how to solve the puzzle. I find this particularly frustrating because the game has essentially trained me to play a certain way and this last puzzle does not fit the same pattern.
.H1 Overall
Village Sim is a very complex game masquerading as a simple one. The villagers interact with each other in a variety of ways; your choices of how to spend tech points have a huge impact on how the game progresses, and the island events add a degree of randomness, which increases the sense of realism.
The LDW team provides outstanding technical support for the game, and have put a tremendous amount of effort into making Village Sim a solid game. If it weren’t for the "puzzle of doom", I’d rate the game a 5; as the game stands now, it deserves a 4.
.RATING 4
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information about Village Sim, visit http://www.ldw.com/vs/index.html.
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