Here I am, once again, knee deep in another indie city-builder and hoping it’s going to knock me off my feet like Airborne Kingdom and Against the Storm did. When I return home from my day job as an urban planner, I like to kick off my shoes, pop open a cold Coke Zero, and try to simulate what it would be like to have actual control over the direction of a city. Most of these games are half-baked, over-loaded with unneeded features, and don’t really contain any new ideas. Havendock is a lot like most of these games.
First off, Havendock is in Early Access, so it’s possible any or all of the things I discuss in this review will be different by the time you’re reading it. There’s also a free demo on Steam right now, so it’s worth checking that out first. Nevertheless, most of Havendock is completed and the campaign is fully playable. The frame rate was wildly variable, running anywhere from 27 to 144 FPS on my RTX 2060 Super, but things like that are understandable when a game is not yet finished.
You’ll be out on the sea for this town-building experience, constructing platforms, bridges, and walkways that connect small points of interest on a map. Your playthrough begins by designing a character, which I found to be pretty fun. While there aren’t many options, there are a lot of descriptions that were legitimately funny. I laughed out loud reading the many gear and class features that actually had in-game effects, and the little bits of flavor text here and there through the campaign also warranted a chuckle.
The first thing about Havendock that caught my attention is how nice the water looks. The second thing that caught my attention is how unbelievably ugly the UI looks. This is a contrast that continues throughout the course of the campaign, because while every asset in Havendock‘s world looks very nice and pleasant, the UI is one of the most horrendous I’ve seen. In addition to just looking flat out like a mobile game from 2013, it’s complicated, cluttered, and takes up a ton of the screen real estate. There is basically nothing intuitive about how to navigate to what you’re looking for and simply looking at the screen made me not want to play the game.
You’ll begin by interacting with Havendock‘s only original component: driftwood collecting. Your character wakes up on a small deserted patch of sand in the middle of the ocean, and by collecting driftwood passing by will be able to begin building a town. Each platform over the water can be built on, essentially becoming floor, and from there you can begin the heavy task of setting up the fundamentals. As with all games in this genre, you’ll have to do a few tedious things yourself until you’re able to build a pier and settlers come knocking. At that point, you automate by assigning them stations. They have a happiness meter that is constantly ticking down, and compared to the dozens of city-builders I’ve played in the past the happiness meter ticks down much too quickly. Even after building three structures that aided in settler happiness, I only was able to get them up to 9%.
While it has all the usual trappings of management games, Havendock misses pretty big by being totally unintuitive. While I like the simplification of the resources a lot (all plants, fruits, and veggies are just called “vegetable”), it all falls apart when you have to start crafting. Want to make a cocktail at the bar? Great, that’ll be one slab of glass, one fish, and one vegetable. It’s one thing to be able to see what’s required and then plug it in, but the issue is that I can never guess what will be needed for what in the future. I need eight grilled fish to turn into a cocktail bar? How could I have known this? Suddenly I’m putting out fires, running around collecting charcoal and upgrading the grill as fast as I can while my citizens are at 1% happiness despite all being housed and rested.
One neat feature is that while you work, you’ll be collecting whatever floats by in the river. These materials can be used to build new structures, craft, or fuel research for new technology. My biggest issue with Havendock is just how much is going on under the hood and how little any of it matters. Looking at graphs of water output and lists that are nested three menus deep, I can’t help but wish it was all more streamlined. None of this would have been needed for the game to be fun, and I’m left wondering if the developers fell to the curse of “more complex is more content.”
In every other city-builder I’ve played, the player is some god figure with a big sky hand reaching down and moving things around. That’s not the case in Havendock. At first I was excited about this break from the norm after making my snowman character, but about 20 minutes in I realized why every other management game controls the same way – running around as a little guy from place to place sucks. You cannot interact with a machine or stove or anything if you’re not standing next to it, nor can you build there. There’s an element of organizing your dock to get from place to place quick enough, but even after creating easy pathways I was continually running back and forth across the piers like I was on fire.
Overall I’m very underwhelmed by Havendock. It seems to break from the norm of city-builders, yes, but basically in the wrong direction every time. And while the actual game world is beautiful and the art is purposeful, the entire UI is so ugly and unintuitive it’s enough to turn me off the game by itself. It definitely has heart, and it’s genuinely funny, so I feel like I want it to succeed despite my dislike of it. I’m not sure what the developers hope to achieve with Havendock, but I’m hoping dearly that Early Access gives them time to figure it out.
Nirav played Havendock in Early Access on PC with a code provided by the publisher.
