Review: Community INC (Nintendo Switch)

Community Inc is a village-building sim, a genre I have not played much on the Nintendo Switch. Let’s see what builds this game or what breaks it down. 

In the game, you are the manager of a community. Your goal is to have the community running efficiently within thirty days and sell it for profit. The secondary goal is to get a list of tasks completed within the given time. So, how do you get this done? The answer is simple: you hire human-like creatures known as Lings to do the work.

There is a tutorial, three of them to be exact. Each one teaches you about one or two things. The first tutorial teaches you about Lings and assigning them jobs. The second is about building structures and farming. The final tutorial teaches about diplomacy and combat. Even after playing each tutorial several times I still felt lost and confused because they all offered some information but not enough to get a good understanding or start on the game. It may have helped better after tutorials were offered at the start of a new game and could be skipped if wanted, rather than as an option from the start menu. This may have helped start the village a little quicker instead of from scratch, making an easier transition to remember everything that you needed to do. Each tutorial seemed to end abruptly; after completing a task or two it was over but it felt like there was more to learn. 

Gameplay boils down to micromanagement. You must command each individual Ling up to set up their time to eat. I am almost surprised I didn’t have to schedule a potty break. If a ling does not get enough food or rest it will result in them acting out. This behavior consists of causing chaos within your village, such as destroying stuff, running around crazily, and, most frustratingly, not listening to your commands. This made me feel like I was running a daycare rather than a community or business. 

Ling’s can learn up to five jobs, which seems useful. The problem is each ling looks exactly the same. So identifying which ling had which job was hard. The only way to identify them is by what tool they are carrying, but that only narrows it down. There is a section at the bottom of the screen to help track them but this is broken down by the name of the ling. Not to mention each job had certain tasks they could and couldn’t do. Some jobs were obvious: a builder builds things, they also put out fires. Trying to remember what each job can and can’t do becomes a little irritating. 

The surrounding communities ask for trades, which is an interesting feature. The issue is they constantly ask for items I had not even begun to craft. This became frustrating because it hurt the relations between our two communities. I quickly learned to just decline the request.

I only felt any kind of satisfaction or accomplishment after one of the few times I managed to get a task done on time or managed to get a ling to calm down. 

If Community Inc, sounds like work, it’s because it is. It felt like I was going from real-life work back to virtual work. I was initially very excited to be reviewing and playing Community Inc. Unfortunately, it falls victim to micromanagement with only a few feelings of surprise and accomplishment thrown in.