Project Highrise

As real building a simulation as unicorns and flying pigs are. This is not the successor to Sim Tower or Yoot Tower. In those games, the fun was growing the tower and seeing the building all blue or satisfied. In this game, there are built in roadblocks to making it enjoyable. Grime is the first problem, in real life you'd need to have a building next to a mine, coal processing plant or auto salvage yard to get the same ammount of grime this game creates in the building. FIVE game days in the grime creep starts. You can have a janitor on every floor, a broom closet on every floor, yet the tennents will complain "this place is so dirty". You spend absolutely unreal amounts on maintenance and refurbishing, to no avail. If you forget for ten seconds after you built a new floor to run electricity the tenant will move out since the game gives NO WARNING OF IMPENDING ISSUES. The only warning you get is the Red face of SomaSin and they are gone. There is never enough traffic to make profit a reality for shops and restaurants, not until the rents are at 50% or less. Smells and noises are another complaint.HOW DO SMELLS AND NOISES TRAVEL BETWEEN TOWERS 30 SPACES APART (flawed mechanics that's how). How can a tenant be unhappy with the amount of traffic and noise when they are the ONLY one on the entire floor? Its as if the Devs decided, "we need to make this a micromanagement puzzle because we don't care what you want". I watched these same problems in the Let's Play videos Summer 2016 and waited till recently to buy the game hoping they were addressed. They weren't. In real life building tenants PAY for extra services in this game EVERYTHING is included in the rent and YOU the player pay for everything extra and if you don't pay for the services the tenants move out destroying your office or store after them. Meh. 3/10. Everyone who claims this is the second coming of the Sim/Yoot Towers wasn't playing Dos games in 1995. Too bad they muffed this one. There is also a game breaking garbage collection bug whereas the garbage isn't picked up at 8AM, the bins fill up and tenants move out. Should have been patched long ago. Another example of choosing cosmetics and fluff over function. But hey you can build nice lobbies and casinos in the DLC where the bug still resides. Now it's noisy elevators in the dlc and noise complaints from hotel guests. So we have to put up with another bit of broken mechanics to annoy us in the game? Why can't the Devs just make the damn game fun to play instead of throwing these roadblocks in the game? Grime, out of control, noise and smells, out of control, noisy elevators, Excessive daily 'refurbishments'. What's next rat infestations? They have flat out stated they dont think we should be able to turn off the annoyances and play as we want no matter how much money you've spent on the game. It is my opinion they aren't the ones controlling the content. Until they give us the ability to build as we see fit, the game will be flawed. PS you can change the rent value in the mods and use external programs to make enough money initially to build the tower of your dreams untill the walls are so dirty the tenants move out. . They are NEVER going to fix the issues. The grime and now the noise. It's on YOU the player to work around the faults they've built into the game. If you think the game has slacked off dramatically, there is virtually no activity in the forums. Maybe that will spur them to fix the broken mechanics. But I highly doubt. They care more about squelching comments than fixing the game.

...Hindered by lacking features. It's an ok management sim, a reasonable adaptation of the flash game you've probably played for free online somewhere. It's got some DLC to give you a few more themed items which is ok. The big thing it's missing is mod support. Their own tutorial shows you how to access the local mods folder and to edit and create said mods, but since you're not on steam you're out of luck. There is no mod button at all in the menu. They even released a new DLC without adding mod support to the GOG version, so they haven't abandoned it as I had previously thought. They're just refusing to enable the "Mods" button.

It's SimTower in style without the substance, thoughtful design, or any modern interface features you would expect. The core design of the game seems to push all players into creating a do-everything super-tower. You can't just build an office tower, or an apartment complex or a hotel. You have to build a shopping mall, complete with mall security, and an office highrise and so many ridiculous things that no real world tower has like dedicated flower arranging and office supplies servicemen. You can't know how many clients those services will support, either. Did you know that one apartment of 4 tenants requires not only an entire flower arranging service all to itself, but catering as well as numerous other amenities while they pay in rent only half of what you spend on keeping them satisfied? That and many other "reasonable" decisions you will find in this mess of a complexity-for-the-sake-of-itself game. You will be left in the dark as to what requirements are for high tier tenants. For example, "need more tech offices for this tenant" means you need roughly 20 medium "Tech and Creative" offices to fulfill the requirements. Of course, you wouldn't know that because the UI won't tell you and not even the official wiki website has any such information. Have fun placing that many tenants one-by-one from every category as you attempt to uncover how to attract "better" tenants that take up more room than they're worth. Meanwhile, everything regularly falls into disrepair from high traffic and custodians for general maintenance and cleaning don't exist. There is nothing to manage but your frustrations within this game. Avoid at all costs. Project Highrise may look attractive, but you are really looking at an animated spreadsheet designed to appease the designer and no one else.

Reaching the upper tier of achievement is very underwhelming. It takes a lot of work to get to the point where you can install rooftop penthouses and business headquarters, but once you get them into your building nothing cool happens at all. The helicopter charter service that the CEOs demand doesn't make there be any helicopters for example. You work and work to get the top levels of everything and then nothing happens at all.

I was a huge fan of SimTower. I remember playing it for hours when I was a kid. I bought Project Highrise because of the nostalgia factor and I was not disappointed. I don't understand why this game has so many negative reviews. It has everything that I liked about SimTower and more (with DLC included). Not only that but it removes the only thing that really bugged me about Sim Tower: elevator management. Elevators still exist but having people reach the top floor no longer has the same level of difficulty as climbing Mount Everest. Contrary to what the other reviews say, managing utilities is not that big of a pain. Just periodically check the capacity and usage. Also make sure that you know what services the rooms will need before you build. If I have one criticism of the game it is grime mechanic. Apparently, these tower dwellers are total slobs. I found keeping on top of the condition of the rooms to be rather tedious. If you were a fan of SimTower, you will probably like the game. If you were never into SimTower, I don't know. Nostalgia certainly impacts my impressions of the game so you might not get as much as I did out of it.