Whiskerwood Review

Whiskerwood is a casual city-building simulation with elements of automation. The game challenges players to support a growing force of mouse workers with evolving needs and requirements that demand constant balancing, new technologies, and expansive building requirements to put at ease.

How is the game? Let’s get into the good, the bad, and the ugly after 50 hours of play!

The good

Graphically, Whiskerwood is a lot of fun to look at. The colour palette, the detail, and the constant animations and motion of your city as it expands and becomes more complex are always enjoyable to watch. I do wish, however, that your Whiskers had more variety in appearance and unique outfits based on their jobs to help differentiate them further. Currently, they all wear the same clothing and have only subtle differences, such as a slightly darker colour or a different size.

Building in Whiskerwood is fluid and allows for all sorts of unique builds. Buildings use a variety of materials like logs, planks, or stone, and you can build out over the water or even vertically on top of other buildings, at the cost of additional materials. Each build conforms and updates based on your decisions. This creates really unique cities every time you play, as you negotiate varying islands that may have steep mountains, vast flat areas, or be tiny and provide limited space to work.

Your greatest challenge in Whiskerwood is appeasing your cat monarchs by trading with them for large sums of products and resources that you take from your island city. These payments come up every few days in-game and increase regularly as you expand and start producing more complex items. This game otherwise falls on the more casual side for players who enjoy building supply chains and designing sprawling cities, as the survival aspect of this simulation largely depends on making increasingly large payments. This only becomes a real challenge if you expand too fast, as your whisker’s needs grow as you grow, become more complex and difficult to fulfill.

The Bad

That’s where the bad starts. For players looking for a challenging city, survival city builder Whiskerwood, in its default state, isn’t that. It’s a generally easy romp that offers plenty of flexibility to experiment without failing. The greatest likelihood of failure comes mostly from the RNG for the islands and the various resources you need to begin research. Start on the wrong island, and whoops, no tin anywhere nearby, and you’ve accidentally hardlocked your progress in-game.

Your cat overlords will send you basic supplies, at a cost, on a regular basis, but with no true trading system in the game, necessary resources are often off the table if you don’t carefully examine each island to ensure you have everything you need nearby to go through the research tree.

Given this RNG to begin, selecting a map and starting location is very difficult as the game locks your perspective, doesn’t provide you any ability to filter, or an option to quickly regenerate the map without backing out to the menu. On the larger maps, this means carefully scraping through each set of islands, visually identifying resources that may be available on nearby islands before making your selection. It’s a tedious process.

The Ugly

Though the simulation runs well most of the time, late-game performance issues to begin to crop up as your city expands across multiple islands and hundreds of whiskers. The auto-save causes significant stuttering and occurs frequently, even when the game is paused.

Speaking of pausing, this game has 3 available run speeds and a pause, but you’ll likely only ever use 2: pause and speed x3. It rarely becomes useful to run the game on normal speed, as things simply don’t happen very quickly. This is particularly the case for research, as it may take 2 or 3, or more in-game days to finish one research, and you can only do one research at a time, even if you have multiple research facilities and the necessary resources to complete them. This makes certain periods of the game drag on as you wait for the day to end.

Summary

Whiskerwood, despite some flaws and balance issues, is still a great addition to the colony-city-building genre. Its colourful graphics, detailed buildings and environments, crisp animations, and building mechanics make it a very enjoyable experience for players who like the city-planning element and enjoy watching their supply chain successfully complete. For players seeking a steep survival curve, you’ll want to increase the difficulty from the default settings, and maybe choose more difficult starting islands to test yourself against the generally easy to master survival mechanics.