Review: Iron Village

If you first heard the name Iron Village without seeing an associated screenshot, you'd be...very confused. For some reason that name conjures up a very different game for me, like a Viking-infused version of Anno or a spiritual successor to Dawn of Man.

Iron Village, happily, is not that game. What it is instead is a cozy little town builder with a Stardew Valley aesthetic, built around a simple-but-moreish trading loop:

1. Plop houses, fields, and factories.
2. Set priorities for which field or factory villagers should work first.
3. Use the output of those fields & factories to re-supply or trade with passing trains. Trains telegraph what they need or have available for trade, with enough lead-time that you can optimise your village's output for each train as it passes.
4. Happy trains give you more villagers and unlock new houses, fields, and factories.

Most of my time playing was spent in the trading-with-trains phase, which somewhat surprisingly I'd say isn't the game's strongest part. It's not a particularly complex trading system: each train buys or sells a handful of commodities in exchange for gold, and there isn't much need (or opportunity, frankly) for stockpiling or careful price-watching. That said, the short trading window – a minute or so – plus the need to re-assign my villagers to resupply the next train kept me on my toes just enough to give me that 'one more turn train' feeling. You won't find a lot of depth here, either in the trading with passing trains or in how you design and build your village – but what you will find is absolute bucketloads of charm, and just the right amount of nostalgia.

The town layout part of the game left me slightly cold, too – there's some optimisation to do here, but it feels like it doesn't really matter beyond tweaking the layout to make supply lines a little faster. Maybe at higher levels – once you've unlocked more buildings and trains start being a little more demanding! – this system really comes into its own, but in my first hour or so I mostly plopped buildings and roads in what felt like the most visually satisfying places rather than trying to min/max the layout.

And you know what? That...actually made me pretty happy, despite my instincts!

Overall Iron Village gives you just enough plates to keep spinning, enough to keep it from being boring but never enough to be really demanding or even, frankly, to pull your whole attention. What it ultimately is, though, is a delightful, comforting snack – and one that I'll definitely be coming back to from time to time.

At the time of writing Iron Village is £6.90 on Steam, and absolutely worth the price of entry.