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Outlanders review: a charming town builder with a hidden sense of humourA slower pace of life, with food rationing
A slower pace of life, with food rationing
I’m the sort of person that likes the idea of a rural, low-tech lifestyle, where you have a lovely little wooden house and know all your neighbours, and all your food is locally sourced from the farm down the road - but I’m self-aware enough to know that I’d hate it in practice. In the case of new town builderOutlanders, I’d have to share a house with five other people, the farmer just died of old age, and my leader wanders around doing nothing while occasionally issuing edicts forcing me to have children. But at least there’s a chance of pumpkin pie.
It’s getting harder to reinvent the wheel that is a town or city builder these days, but Outlanders doesn’t reinvent so much as put a different spin on a few things. It’s to great effect though, creating a chilled out, cottage-core adjacent vibe for millennials like me, but with enough challenge to remind us that it’s hard work out there. The framing for Outlanders is that a group of settlers (lower case) have struck out for new land, so you’re building everything up from scratch.
OUTLANDERS - Gameplay TrailerWatch on YouTube
OUTLANDERS - Gameplay Trailer
World’s Best BossOutlanders knows micromanagement is a big part of the game, and thus has a built-in micromanagement overlay for when you need to keep swapping your workforce around, or see where most of your resource is going.
You quickly realise that your most useful resource in Outlanders is people, which is true in most town builders, but requires much more fine management here. Each building can have a maximum number of workers, the minimum being one, but in the early days of your town you’re not going to have enough workers to man everything you need, so you have to shuffle your work force around: one man will be chopping trees for a bit, then turning those same logs into planks, and then be on building duty. Luckily everyone in your town is born with an innate ability to do literally anything, from quarrying stone to making beer, but you have to watch the numbers like a hawk.
There are a few leaders in the game, and while they don’t actually do anything different, they’re all characterful little blighters to look at.
You can, to combat your low workforce, make people shag. As the leader you can issue temporary edicts, like to “love each other”, or to ration food. The former will make everyone have babies, but at the cost of work efficiency, while the latter preserves food and stops people starving to death, but makes people generally a bit sad. You have to deploy them strategically and be mindful that, e.g., making everyone breed will result in lower harvest yield, an increase in housing, and won’t produce more workforce until the kids all grow up at once into presumably very genetically shallow adults - although I had to resort to food rationing quite routinely. It’s for your own good.
If you want to skip that and get instant access to the more interesting buildings, including pumpkin crops to make the aforementioned pie, lettuce for the salad stand, fancy stone houses, schools and even the humble potato, you can play in the sandbox. It’s probably the most relaxing way to play Outlanders, as you can adjust your starting parameters to give you more settlers and ease some of that mid-game slow down, but the campaign has a sense of humour I recommend not missing out.
It’s sort of an ever-present undercurrent in the game, though it primarily sells itself as charming and relaxed - and it is - it’s pretty funny. Outlanders has a low detail, high impact art style, almost cartoony in how some people have big top heavy shoulders, and how older people become grey and bent over. I love seeing my leader strut around, holding a lantern at night as if checking everyone is in bed. I love the little flute trill that plays when you confirm or cancel an action, swinging up or down like a luxe slide whistle. I love that in this game about settlers building a new life for themselves, you can have a smoothie stand.
