Is The Kindred The Next Big Town-Building Game?

Games based around voxel graphics have been big business for a while now. You may be aware of a game called Minecraft, which released some years ago and kickstarted this trend, and it has been barrelling along ever since.You’ve only got to take a little look around the Google Play Store to discover a whole host of appalling game-alikes like DigCraft, MineDig or DigDig. There have been a number of games based on the MineCraft formula that have been rather good, and many more that have been god awful.

Still, there is one offshoot of the voxel/mining/survival genre that has never managed to quite gain a foothold on PC: the voxel-town building game. It’s easy to see why this could be a popular hit, cute voxel graphics and tiny little towns; the whole thing sounds delightful. But despite a few titles popping up on Steam, not one has managed to really find a large amount of success.

Timber & Stone, Stonehearth and, dare we mention it, Towns, have all attempted to kickstart this genre, but none have stuck. Timber & Stone and Towns were both abandoned and while Stonehearth has gained a cult following, it has not managed to gain anywhere near mainstream success. So that’s why The Kindred is trying to be the next big thing in the voxel town building genre.

The Kindred gives you a handful of supplies: a group of little Kin and the wilderness just to survive. First things first, assign your kin tasks. Woodcutting, farming, mining, hunting, crafting plus many more. Jobs are assigned tools if needed, such as axes, hoes and the like, and only if you have them to spare. If not, then you’ll have to use your resources to craft more.

The game is as you imagine: order your Kins to work where needed. Chop those trees. Mine that stone. Farm the land. The jobs screen had a lot of info on it and it threw me, ordering the Kin around was rather easy, and while many games of this ilk can be difficult to get into, this game seemed a lot easier and in a short amount of time my Kin was chopping and mining left right and centre. It takes a bit of getting used to The Kindred’s job screen, but once you do it was seamless.

The aim of the game is to build your very own utopia, a little town or maybe just a massive house for everyone to live in. It’s early access so there isn’t an endgame as such yet, but it’s the sort of game that doesn’t really need one. The Kindred is very early in development and at the moment there isn’t a massive amount to do, but it’s fun and like all great Early Access games, makes you look forward to the game expanding through further updates.

Code was provided for preview purposes