Review Hacksaw 4/5 · Jan 20, 2026
Leave it to Beavers
Timberborn's reputation feels earned almost immediately. Its praise is reflected by its having been built as a genuinely thoughtful and well-executed city builder that understand the genre and the audience, pretty rare situation. That's to say the praise isn't the product of marketing momentum or novelty. It's just a really good game. Yet despite how much I admire it, …
Timberborn's reputation feels earned almost immediately. Its praise is reflected by its having been built as a genuinely thoughtful and well-executed city builder that understand the genre and the audience, pretty rare situation. That's to say the praise isn't the product of marketing momentum or novelty. It's just a really good game. Yet despite how much I admire it, I'm reluctant to hand it a trophy for pioneering.
That said, it most clearly distinguishes itself through its treatment of water. You play as beavers, dam it (ha), so of course water is an important part of the game. It's not a simple resource to be accumulated, nor is it a passive modifier on growth: it's the central organizing force of the entire simulation. Rivers dictate settlement pattersn, droughts impose existential pressure, and the seasonal rhythm of abundance and scarcity gives the game its most engaging tension, for me at least. Dams, levees, floodgates, and the like are necessities, and learning to shape water, whether it's to slow it, store it, or redirect it, is the closest Timberborn comes to, well, poetry, for lack of a better word. These systems are intuitive for the most part, and they reward foresight in a way that feels mechanical and thematic. Civilization here doesn't conquer nature so much as negotiate with it. That's my shit.
That negotiation is framed by one of the game's more subtle and alluring premises. Humanity is gone. Good riddance, I say! In its wake, intelligent beavers have inherited the infrastructure, the ruins, and the ecological consequences of human domination. With that inheritance comes an implied question: what does it mean to rebuild civilization differently? The default faction, the Folktails, seems to have an answer: they're environmentally gentle, aesthetically pastoral, and oriented toward sustainability rather than brute efficiency. Their architecture and mechanics suggest a society attempting to live within limits, to adapt rather than dominate. If only we'd adopt this ourselves.
Buuut... this moral framing becomes more complicated with the introduction of the Iron Teeth. Unlike the Folktails, the Iron Teeth are explicitly extractive. They exploit the environment more aggressively, trade comfort and longevity for productivity, and gain access to buildings that make growth faster and easier at the cost of ecological harmony. In mechanical terms, they're not villains and they're not strictly superior, but thematically, they complicate the game's post-human fantasy. If the Iron Teeth are viable - and they are - then the beavers haven't transcended humanity's legacy so much as inherited its logic. Progress remains tied to extraction, efficiency, and environmental sacrifice. It's fun, but as a work of art, it kind of undermines the whole thing.
The maps themselves brilliantly reinforce this tension. Chef's kiss, here. Life clings to river sources, while land further downstream becomes increasingly barren and desolate. Droughts arrive with punishing regularity and they get worse over time, forcing careful stockpiling and infrastructural planning. Later, the introduction of toxic "badwater" adds another layer of ecological hostility: polluted flows that kill crops (and potentially beavers as well) unless rerouted or contained. These systems are clever, demanding, and very satisfying to master. But they also point toward a possibility the game never quite allows you to realize. That's my main painpoint with it.
I found and still find myself wanting - perhaps unreasonably, but persistently - a mode of play oriented toward healing rather than just surviving and optimizing. You can only get so far with that loop. And Timberborn's premise seems to invite it: after all, this is a world wiped clean of human exploitation, stewarded by a species that understands rivers instinctively, and that feels like fertile ground for ecological restoration. Yet Timberborn offers no way to truly purify badwater sources or reverse the underlying blight. You can block them, redirect them, or exploit them to manufacture dynamite with which to further reshape the land, but you can never erase them (at least to my knowledge). The tools available are managerial rather than redemptive.
I LONG for a different endgame: one in which the ultimate objective is to re-green the entire map, to cleanse the water, to spread life outward until the scars of human absence finally close. Not merely to survive the apocalypse, but to undo it. I can't fix the mistakes of my species - allow me the fantasy of being able do so! That this fantasy remains unfulfilled isn't a flaw so much as a missed opportunity, one that feels especially poignant given how carefully the game gestures toward a gentler world.
Still - don't get me wrong - Timberborn is hands down one of the most enjoyable city builders I've played, and I've played many. Its systems are elegant, its pacing feels deliberate, and its tone is so delightfully and refreshingly calm without ever becoming passive. The developers have every reason to be proud of what they have built, and they have my genuine gratitude and support. Even as the game approaches version 1.0, it feels less finished than poised, like a foundation sturdy enough to support far more than it currently does.
More than anything, Timberborn feels like a game that deserves to be expanded, deepened, and challenged by its own ideas. It's already earned its acclaim, no doubt about it. What remains is the question of how far it's willing to follow the implications of the world it has imagined.
