Community Inc

Developed By: T4 Interactive
Published By: tinyBuild Games
Category: Town-Building Simulation
Release Date: 10.04.2019

Community Inc is a town-building simulation game in which you will be bringing “Lings” into your town via portal — a la Oxygen Not Included, where you will be providing for the basic needs of these community members while engaging in diplomacy and trades with neighboring races and communities in order to be as profitable as possible. While dealing with brutal weather and various events that can crucially effect this little colony you have to keep in mind that at the end of the day, the Lings work for you, and you need them to power up the portals and turn a profit. Capitalism — The Game.

The story for this one is pretty vacant, as there isn’t a lot to what is happening here. It is conveyed to the player that you are managing a colony of worker, and you have to make as much money as possible. So, you can make some cases for the various things that may be going on here, but nothing is ever offered as a definitive reason for this grouping of people. The fact that rival races of dragons, mushrooms, and cat people also inhabit this land make it clear this isn’t an earth-based venture, but overall there is a veil of mystery to the goings-on in this region. You can build diplomatic relations with these other creatures and gain a ton of profit in trade from these relationships, but other than that you are just trying to survive and ensure the longevity of your colony. And, if things get to hairy, you can always just sell the colony and move on.

As you begin you are tasked with starting the colony out on an empty, randomly generated plain with trees, rocks, and various resources scattered about with which you will have to take control of in order to build a profitable village. Settling in, you need to take care of your Lings’ basic needs to ensure their happiness, as unhappy Lings means fires and trash talk that will cause a lot of problems for this community. Plenty of food, breaks from works, and a comfortable place to sleep are crucial in making sure these workers don’t cause any trouble and continue to properly conduct their responsibilities. You can then build up better homes and furnishing for the people as well as increasing the commodities in all areas to confirm nothing out of the ordinary comes out of the populous.

You will be determining the jobs each Ling holds, and these Lings will gain levels in the areas that you have assigned them to. This allows for upgrades to better jobs that open up the crafting tree, as well as allow for more profitability and efficiency. As you gather more Lings and fill out your work force you will have to make sure you have a well-rounded work force that is progressing in their field properly in order to make sure the progression as a whole continues at a steady pace. It is very easy to get stuck waiting for a character top gain level 3 in the carpentry trait so that you can make the next item necessary to fulfill a contract given by one of your rival colonies, and without making sure you have Lings moving forward you can find yourself having to spend unnecessary resources to gain those necessary levels. You can also get held up in this way with resources or necessary building requirements, and as such you will probably be restarting your colony a few times as you try to find the proper balance, as well as discover the right things that matter in this title compared to others. This isn’t a negative trait, as most games of this nature I have played needed multiple runs in order to understand the systems, but most games allow you to get yourself into serious trouble, whereas this game pretty much just brings your production to a stand-still and won’t let you do anything versus having some catastrophic issue.

Other than that, you will be trying to increase your trading spaces, with shops that can be built and managed by your Lings, as well as contracts and trades offered by the various other races that can increase your cash flow as a whole. This is really the goal of this title, regardless of the joking in this review, as the developers themselves tout the need for profit and single issue to move towards solving. I liked the simplicity of it in that way, as games like this can get pretty complex in their systems of survival and resource management, and as ports of PC titles in the genre that are complex rarely come over to positive feedback, this title allows for some pure fun and that is through the simple systems and single-minded goal. This is realty a perfect title in those terms for a console port, compared to something like Civilization that gets so deep in its gameplay that you can barely navigate the UI, let alone figure out how to properly manager everything on a console.

The different factions don’t get along with each other and so you will have to make choices with which who to align yourself in order to allow for trade to prosper. You can ride the line for a while, but eventually someone will be pissed you keep giving the mushroom people carrots and will strike against your kingdom. Luckily, you have played a few times and know this and have prepared with well-armed warriors to take on the rival menace, right? Right? Darn, another reset. Well nonetheless, you will have to make sure your colony is well defended at all times as well as you can quickly piss off the other factions and find yourself with a lot of issues outside of the random snow and weather that strikes your people.

This one isn’t going for top notch graphics and is very low poly, but the game runs well and only had some bugs and wonkiness here and there. The game definitely lacks polish, don’t get me wrong, but as long as you are just looking for a straight-forward experience and not the next AAA 4K experience than you will be all good.

Overall, Community Inc is a pretty bare bones city sim that will have most veterans of the genre looking for a little more depth. However, I would argue that this game is built well for the system in its simplicity, as those experiences do not come to console very well. With a fun, and straight-forward experience that lends pretty much everything to the imagination you will find this to be a surprisingly decent town building experience on a console that has had its fair share of reckless ports. UI issues are paramount when PC ports come to Switch, and this game does a good job through a stream-lined experience and a good system of controlling the populace.