Timberborn Review — Dam Good

Have you ever found yourself wondering, “What if beavers ran the world instead, and built little beaver cities where human civilization should have been?” If the answer is no, you’re probably not the kind of person I want to talk to.

If your answer was yes, then Timberborn is without a doubt a game that’s going to pull your interest. A colony simulator centered around evolved beavers, these dam-building survivors of the apocalypse come together to build new societies where the humans before them failed.

More than just a novel concept, Timberborn uses its unique beaver-themed premise as the central focus of its gameplay. More specifically, the game bases its entire gameplay loop, the success, survival, and growth of your colony, around water and your ability to dam or otherwise manipulate it, something beavers are notorious for doing.

To be even more specific, Timberborn challenges you to build a colony of happy and healthy beavers. Your population grows naturally over time, with your beavers giving birth to kits, which then grow over time to join your population. Said population has certain needs, both for food and amenities, and also functions as your workforce, meaning you cannot run a building if you do not have enough unemployed beavers to actually go and work there.

Where water plays a part in this is twofold: existing waterways both make land fertile enough to grow food and power industrial necessities such as waterwheels. While normally this would be as simple as building near water sources, Timberborn challenges you with the constant threat of wet and dry seasons. Droughts will appear, drying up all of the water and leaving the land barren. As a beaver colony, you must not only store enough resources to survive the dry seasons, but also find ways to dam and control the flow of water to beat these droughts altogether.

In the early game, this is definitely a threat worth worrying about. I spent plenty of time in my first few hours with Timberborn, just starting new games because I failed to account for the drought and ended up building myself into a corner where I wasn’t taking adequate advantage of the space available.

As the game progresses, however, the threat of a drought becomes less of a danger and more of a casual reality. The answer is always the same: as your population grows, prepare more stored food and build more reservoirs, and the act of actually doing so is not really all that difficult. Essentially, I am saying that the game quickly loses its tension and becomes kind of tedious, feeling more like a relaxed colony sim than I think the developers intended it to be.

The challenge not only begins to fade as you start to understand the mechanics, but I also found that the tutorial ended in a sort of awkward place, not really delving into the mechanics of managing water, building dams, and other related systems. I don’t know if the lack of guidance started to make my playthrough feel aimless, or if the extra tutorial would have cut my playtime even shorter, but it wasn’t too far past this point that I started to feel a bit of fatigue in my multiple playthroughs of Timberborn.

There was still a lot to build, but even with a limited understanding of the water systems (learning to manipulate the game’s waterways properly was the hardest challenge for me personally), I was making it through droughts just fine and finding myself in this sort of directionless loop of watching my population slowly rise and building new structures to accommodate them. The biggest issue, which was finding space and redirecting water so that said space was actually valuable, was not something I ever felt too pressed to solve in a hurry.

In essence, I personally found that Timberborn quickly began to lose its sense of urgency, and the game fell into a very predictable pace, leaving me feeling somewhat aimless as I watched my colony grow without any pressing need for expansion on my part.

Regardless, the game’s water mechanics are very intricate and interesting, and the colony simulation is very fluid and detailed, even if I felt like it did not require too much managing on my end. The game accurately simulates each beaver as an individual entity and has no noticeable lag or processing delays as each one carries out their day-to-day lives, going from work to relaxation and slowly growing the colony over time.

While I think the game could use higher stakes, and I personally started to feel fatigue around the midpoint in my playthroughs, I am not surprised to see that the game has had a persistently dedicated and excited fanbase. Timberborn certainly has its appeal, and I have no doubt it will continue to impress colony sim players, especially with its unique water management system and the excellent way it simulates each individual within a colony. If you are looking for a new colony sim and Timberborn has caught your eye, it is certainly worth giving it a try, and I would go so far as to say its price point is rather generous for the potential it has to offer.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Timberborn. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Timberborn is available on Steam.