Regardless of how a person first became a fan of colony builders (from Settlers to Dwarf Fortress, Banished to Timberborn), one of the first things that you learn is that the biggest threat to your existence is overextension. In Crowded – A Crow City Builder, the titular corvids have evolved and the sky is the limit.
Human civilization has been a mere blink in the existence of mammals, and even less when compared to the age of the Earth, yet there are already several creatures out there that cleverly use tools to solve problems that their bodies simply can’t. In Crowded – A Crow City Builder it’s Crows that make the step beyond tools to fire and society, with you carefully controlling the population as you build nests to support your growing population.
I played a substantial amount of Crowded while at Gamescom and particularly enjoyed how the ability to fly simplified pathfinding when it came to resource gathering and management. There’s still, of course, radiuses and catchment areas on things, but the lofty trees and ‘as the crow flies’ navigation really allowed me to focus on the layout and choice of the nests in my trees, and also start thinking about the direction that I’d plant trees in much earlier than I normally would.
It seems like a compelling offering from what I played, however I’m not too sure how it will scale into a longer game based on what I saw. That said, it was very obvious that the full tech tree wasn’t visible yet, and more technology naturally brings more issues. I’m especially looking forward to the previously teased mention of using wind to be able to fly further afield. As it stood, though, I had a great time setting up a network of nest-filled trees and carefully balancing generating grubs and gathering water.
Crowded – A Crow City Builder is currently in development for PC.
