Township is a cozy farming and city-building mobile game developed and published by Playrix. With 500 million downloads on the Play Store, it’s one of the biggest and most popular mobile games to date. On top of that, it has a whopping 11+ million reviews with an average score of 4.8 stars which is an astonishing accomplishment. They must be doing something right.
The game has been out for more than 13 years and somehow I never played it. In my defence, I’d already played Hay Day (see my full review here), another mobile farming game where I invested so much time building my farm that I had my fill of it for years to come.
Recently I had an urge to play a farming game again, and instead of going back to the same old thing, I decided to try something new — which happened to be Township. I’ve been playing casually for over a month, and here’s everything I think about it.
How Does Township Look?
Let’s start with the best part of the game right off the bat: the visuals. The design is exactly what you’d expect from a company with resources like Playrix’s. The colors are bright and inviting, the world design is clean, and the level of detail in the town, characters, and animations is impressive.
At the beginning there’s enough empty space to spread out all your buildings comfortably, but it gets crowded fast. As you level up and build more, you’ll need to expand, and truthfully, there’s never going to be enough space.
Once you reach a higher level, another problem presents itself.
You unlock so many buildings, factories, and miscellaneous structures that you’ll need to organise everything just to find what you’re looking for. And while you’re at it, you might as well decorate and make it look nice, which is not something you can do in an hour.
Some of you might think that’s no problem at all, but this has been my ongoing battle for years. I’ve faced the decorating dilemma many times, and no matter how much effort I put in, it never looks quite right. The same thing happened in Township: I invested hours into decoration and somehow it ended up looking worse than if I’d thrown everything down randomly with my eyes closed.
What’s Gameplay Like?
I’m not going to bore you with every single detail because most of you have already played or seen some version of a mobile farming game. But in case you haven’t — basically, you have fields where you can plant seeds and grow crops, animals that need to be fed to produce goods, and various factories where you can manufacture things.
All of those products can be sold, used to complete tasks, or used for deliveries, which in turn earns you money and experience to level up and unlock more content. Township follows the same formula: after a set amount of time, you collect whatever you put into production and do whatever you want with it. Simple as that. You can speed things up with real money, but that requires swiping your credit card.
Township also has mini-games built in, like mining — which is fairly similar to Pocket Mine, if you’ve ever played that. There’s also Magic Academy Mysteries, where you navigate a map using energy, complete tasks, and earn small rewards. If you run out of energy, you can either play Match 3 to earn more or spend real money.
Monetisation
Township is free-to-play, but it’s far from balanced. To its credit, there are no ads or pop-up purchase prompts, and the options for paid packs are pretty limited compared to most games in the genre.
As I mentioned, you can spend real money to speed things up and boost your account well beyond what any free player can reach, but they’re not locking you out of the experience entirely. It just takes significantly longer to get there for free.
There’s a reason Township is consistently one of the top-grossing mobile games in the world. All I’ll say is: if you’re going to spend, do it wisely and responsibly, and only if you can genuinely afford it.
Conclusion
Township is a solid cozy farming game that’s perfect for logging in a few times throughout the day to complete simple tasks. It’s been my go-to mobile game for a while now and I’ve been genuinely enjoying it. I’m taking the slow route building and expanding at my own pace, no rush. Have you ever played Township? Let me know what you think in the comments!
