Hit beaver city builder celebrates 1 million copies sold by finally investing in a decent trailer

A city-building game where you lead the construction of a beaver colony has proven to be such a massive hit in Early Access that the devs have finally been able to invest in a decent trailer.

Timberborn has you directing a colony of intelligent beavers out to make a life for themselves in the wake of a mankind-induced climate calamity on planet Earth. (Man, video game settings are getting more believable all the time.) Naturally, building a successful beaver city is all about manipulating the flow of water to your advantage, and the game distinguishes itself from other colony sims by offering a lot of tools to redirect rivers.

That's proven a winning formula since Timberborn hit Early Access two years ago, and the game has sold over 1 million copies across PC storefronts and garnered nearly 20,000 'overwhelmingly positive' reviews on Steam even without the benefit of its 1.0 features. Now, in developer Mechanistry's own words, "To celebrate the two years of Timberborn Early Access and over 1,000,000 million copies sold, our small indie company has finally ordered a better trailer for the game."

You can watch the "Better Early Access trailer" above, and yeah - it's a pretty good trailer! It showcases a variety of gameplay features in ways that communicate why they're interesting, offers glimpses at what high-level play looks like, and offers a few goofy interludes to break up the pacing of the footage. Most importantly for any indie game trailer, it also makes a point to show a bunch of cool-looking gameplay moments within the first five seconds.

The original Early Access trailer wasn't awful, but it did focus a little too much on the post-apocalyptic beaver theme at the expense of really communicating why the game's fun to play. The new trailer also shows off much more impressive cities, which really helps sell how cool your constructions can get - an improvement surely aided by the game's numerous updates since launch.

If you're looking for more of the best city-building games, you know where to click. We all need something to fill the time until Cities Skylines 2.