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Lakeburg Legacies review: what’s love got to do with town management?Not as much as the devs would like, to be honest
Not as much as the devs would like, to be honest
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ishtar Games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ishtar Games
As a republican it pains me to suggest you install a castle and a royal family as soon as possible, because they’re very useful, but in fariness to me that suggestion is only in the specific circumstance that you’re playingLakeburg Legacies. It’s an almost experimental little town management game where you have no control over building placement, your citizens all look like they were made in Picrew, and love is a plentiful yet almost useless resource. I quite like it, but I wish I liked it more.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ishtar Games
There are three tracks to build, divided as Primary Resources And Prestige (prestige is almost useless and you can ignore it) like a hunters tent, Transformed Resources like a butchers, and Various Effects, the ‘stuff’ folder of building tracks like a church or a hospital. You work you way down them to embiggen Lakeburg and provide fancier things for your people. I’ve made a joke but the resource system is nice and clear: if you’re not making enough of something to meet demand, it has a red highlight.
When you do select something to build, you have no choice on where it goes - Lakeburg is a pre-designed place, and thank God because the townsfolk know just how to make it look pretty. I appreciated the reins being wrested from me in this regard, because I’m the sort of town planner whose choice result in something like Swindon’smagic roundabouthappening. It’s something I’d like to see other management games experiment with in the future.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ishtar Games
Family TiesThere are many things attached to people (like events that happen every so often giving them new traits like being frustrated or whatever) that I regretfully found I could basically ignore. The game also includes heritable attributes for children, for example, but it gets a bit dicey with some of the negative ones - like being genetically ugly or stupid.Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ishtar Games
But you quickly realise that it’s much more beneficial to the town to have someone who is good at fishing as opposed to good at fishingand married, and the only real downside to a couple breaking up is that you have to build a new house for one of ‘em. So you start trawling through prospective dates keeping a weather eye on their capabilities far more than their compatability with Simon Bighead, 24-year-old lumberjack. Your concern is much more that you need to increase productivity at the farm, but don’t have the money to do it, godammit. Who cares if everyone has a love match?
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ishtar Games
Which is where the castle advice comes in, because Love is ten a penny, but money trickles in really slowly, and this effectively kneecaps your progress in the early game. Money is how you make your various resource buildings produce more and be less terrible places to work. Your cardinal currencies need rebalancing a bit, because you end up with an embarassment of the ones you never actually spend. You don’t have a decent way of generating coins until you get a castle, because that’s when you can raise taxes. It’s for your own good, you fools! We live in a society! And it’s one where I choose who you have children with based on my whims!
But my whims are entirely disinterested ones. The issue, I think, is that the relationship simulations don’t really matter to the wider destiny of the town. Happy matches generate Love and babies, sure, but the Love economy is a closed loop that I can’t use on improving the town itself. I’ve no motivation to care about the USP of this game. If someone splits up with their husband, I just generate them a new one and move them to work somehwere else. I really want to enjoy Lakeburg Legacies more than I do - it’s pretty and has smart ideas! - but it’s a game where I can effectively ignore some of the core parts of it.
