After four years of hard work, the brave base-building beavers have finally dammed the great Early Access river. Or as normal people would say - Timberborn is a freshly launched city-builder where you play as actual beavers. With hats.

Now if you're anything like me, that immediately raises a few questions. Is this actually fun, or just a gimmick that runs out of steam after the first dam? Do you need a masters degree in beaverology to get into it? And is there enough here to keep you coming back once the novelty wears off?

 Video version of this review (~10 minutes)

Are They Really Beavers?

And the answer to that begins with another question: what are beavers famous for? Building dams, chewing through trees, and being adorable while doing it. Which, conveniently enough, is exactly what Timberborn is about. Every building, every tool, every scrap of industry runs on wood - and the whole system is powered by dams. And unlike most city-builders where the water might as well be an instant-death trap, for beavers it's just another highway.

Put all of that together and you get a city-builder with a ton of personality. I especially love the building designs as the heavy emphasis on wood makes it genuinely feel like a world built by sentient beavers. Nothing sticks out of place, so even though the visuals are fairly simple, Timberborn ends up being quite pleasing on the eyes.

But there is a small catch. Despite nailing the theme, the atmosphere is a bit too subdued. Even with dozens of factories running and beavers gnawing through trees, you mostly just hear the faint creaking of wind turbines. It's just... strange.

But is it a big issue? Not really, as building a beaver utopia is surprisingly addictive. Why? Because everything takes time. The best trees take 30 days to grow, and the crops take a week. Which means when a shortage hits you can't just wave a magic wand and fix it. You have to predict the problem and solve it before it even happens. And if you don't? Well, let's just say that there will be a lot of belligerent beavers in your future!

Welcome to Beavtopia

How Hard Is It?

But does this mean that playing Timberborn is about as pleasant as chewing through wood? Thankfully no. The difficulty is fairly high, especially early on, but you've always got enough tools to claw your way back from the brink - even if you lose a bunch of beavers and everything looks doomed.

The secret here is the game's robust prioritization system. While you can't control each beaver individually, you can make sure that crucial buildings and resources get taken care of first before anyone runs off to construct nonsense like robo-beavers. Because of this, I always felt in control. There was never a moment where I wanted to hurl my monitor out the window over a worker doing something stupid. They did exactly as they were told when they were told, and for a challenging game, that's a big deal.

Especially during the drought or badwater seasons. Depending on your relationship with stress, these are either the most exciting parts of the game or something that could drive you insane. What happens is that either the entire river dries out for a whole week, or toxic sludge starts oozing across the entire map.

But thankfully, you have a bunch of beavers at your disposal, so you can prepare by creating artificial reservoirs to help survive the drought... or just channel the badwater down pathways you don't really care about while your beavers watch in horror as the landscape rots away. But regardless of how well it went, you always get the pleasure of watching life slowly return to the valley - a sight that I will always pause everything in order to enjoy.

And that's Timberborn's difficulty in a nutshell. It'll smack you around if you're not careful, but if you figure out the puzzle you'll be richly rewarded.

If you're not prepared for it, badwater can be devastating

Is It Easy to Learn?

But does the game actually teach you how to handle all this complexity, or are you just thrown to the beaver-wolves? And the answer is yes... to both.

There is a structured tutorial that will guide you through the very basics, and I would highly recommend you go through it because Timberborn does a couple of things very differently than most city-builders. For example, your beavers exclusively move along roads - both on the ground and in water - which means that expanding far from your base comes with a lot of prerequisites. It really reinforces the game's 'plan ahead or suffer' kind of philosophy.

So what's the problem? The tutorial is extremely short, and once it's over you're left completely on your own - in a city-builder where literally every building is available from the start. Sure, you have to spend science to unlock them, but they're all there on your build menu, just taunting you as you try to figure out what you're supposed to do next.

It's a real shame because Timberborn has a lot of fun complexity just waiting to be discovered. There's a completely optional set of automation tools that let you essentially program how buildings - including dams - will behave. You can do stuff like make a factory run until you reach a certain stockpile, then shut itself off to avoid overproducing. And for a big ol' optimization-focused lunatic like me, that's basically heaven on earth.

It just sucks that getting there requires a lot of blind fumbling around, because once everything clicks, Timberborn becomes a very different - and very addictive - game.

Once you get past the difficulty hump, building stuff is a ton of fun

A Strange Problem

Quite a scary one too, because once Timberborn gets its hooks into you, it's almost impossible to quit. You might spend hours perfecting one big project, and then another suddenly becomes available and you lose yourself in that. And then a giant drought hits and you're forced to scramble around in blind panic trying to shore up your defenses before everything collapses.

And then, as soon as it's over, something new catches your eye and you don't even notice you've somehow blazed past 3 in the morning. Yeah... this is one of those games. My sleep schedule had no chance.

But as always, there is a catch. While Timberborn gives you a lot of tools to help make complex tasks easier, doing the most basic stuff can be surprisingly tedious. You can't just plonk a building on top of some random saplings and expect your beavers to pave over them. You have to manually order their destruction, bump up the priority so it actually gets done in a reasonable time, and only then can you place the building where you wanted it. It's the kind of thing that makes you feel less like a visionary city planner and more like a middle manager nobody respects.

You really should be able to just build over things

Is It Replayable?

The reason any of this matters is that Timberborn is the kind of game you're going to be playing for a very long time. Each run takes a while to complete, and that's if you don't turn your city into a wasteland along the way, so even if you never changed a setting you can still get a lot of hours out of it.

But if you do change things? Oh boy, you won't be leaving the house any time soon. Because not only does the game have two distinct factions of beavers - one eco-friendly and the other heavily industrial - but there's also a ton of different maps, each with their own sets of challenges to overcome. And if you don't like any of them? You can make your own! It's not even particularly hard.

And if you're like me and you don't feel like doing any work, you can just download maps other people made. Or, more importantly, grab a bunch of mods - some of which can even fix many of the gripes I mentioned before.

The only catch is that there's no story or campaign to explore. You're playing purely for the pleasure of it, making up your own goals as you go along. It's not something I personally mind, but just be warned - when Timberborn calls itself a "sandbox city-builder", it means every single word of that!

Steam Workshop continues to be a blessing

Would I Recommend Timberborn?

Which brings us to the most important question - would I recommend Timberborn? Yes, but not to everyone. Despite its appearance, this isn't a cute and cuddly city-builder where you get to watch your beavers frolic in the river. It's a challenging survival experience where the deck is stacked against you, but you're given all the tools you need to rip up the cards and eat the table.

And that's what makes it special. Because every time Timberborn beats you, you know exactly where you messed up and how to fix it next time. Which also means that when you get it right and watch disaster just sail past your base - the glory is all yours. You alone made it happen!

So if you're in the mood for getting humbled by a game about beavers with funny hats, Timberborn is well worth trying.