Project Highrise

Project Highrise is a game with plenty of decisions to make but at the end of the day (and this is the only time in the game when you get to make decisions) the decisions just don't matter. Sure, you can choose to build stores, offices, apartments, or other types of buildings with added DLC, but they're functionally similar. All you really have to do is make sure your new officespace or what have you meets the requirements that space needs and that you maintain it once you've built it. A restaurant late in the game feels like any othe property. It's there to accumulate rent. Rent is only accumulated once per day and once you've made a little money, you build another floor and then you're out of luck until the end of the following day. There's nothing to do between midnights when you have no money to spend. You just watch the day go by. In the end the game cycle becomes extremely passive. I could do my day job and play Project Highrise and the quality of either task would not suffer. As a clicker it's cute and charming. If that's what you're after, great. Purchase on sale. If you're looking to relive SimTower, unfortunately you'll have to look elsewhere.

I've purchased it 5 times: Twice on PC, then on Switch, Android, and finally, iOS. All the extra times in a denial state of "latest patch was 4 months ago, I bet they're working on fixing this or that!". Well... time never stops, and now it's been 4 years since the last update. It's still filled with annoyances that should be easy to fix, but the radio silence from the devs on this game while releasing a new one feels like they are ashamed of Project Highrise. An incredibly promising game with one of the most annoying AI I've ever seen that drops the veil on what's the actual gameplay of this game: It's a waiting game. You'll experience first-hand how your well planned budget will turn into a huge debt because of the AI that instead of focusing on finishing one task at a time, it'll make your workers do one tile in one floor, then a tile at the basement, then again at floor 2 and so, until you end up bankrupt. The solution? Minimize the game, go watch a movie, go out to dinner, and then come back until your bank account is with thousands of dollars, so you can invest it and continue playing.

The game is decent, and it can be fun to build a large tower, but there is very little real complexity to the game. Elevators don't really move people around but instead act like teleporters which means you don't have to worry about building anything but a single monolith. There are no events like building fires, flooding from apartments, bank robberies...or anything that would make the game exciting. The only events are global events that impact things like the price of paint. The UI is terrible, for example you will get a requirement to build an "Office Supplies Store" which is not a store, but rather "Office Supply Services" which is located by pressing the services box, choosing the office services, then placing the office supply services (which is not named store). The requirement for placing a legal office is "a greater variety of cafes" which I later discovered, after placing a ton of cafes, they REALLY meant a greater variety of small restaurants. Trying to find various building staff can be confusing at first. To place a maintenance shop you go to the construction icon, the building staff tab, then the maintenance office icon. To place a janitor you go to the services icon, press the office services icon, a menu pops up and you scroll to select the janitor. To place a supply room for your janitor you go to the construction icon, select the facilities tab, then build a supply room. Nothing is in the same place in the game and it is organized very poorly.

You are faced with a game with nice graphics, ok sounds and lots of different tenants (Some are variants of other buildings, like if you build an apartment it has normal, nice and luxury variants with small visual changes). All that is good. Now the bad: There are too many steps to build anything. The game is too simple, with elevators acting as teleportation machines. No way of managing rent or easily disclosing costs and profits, power/telephone/etc usage. All the money is collected at midnight, point blank. That means that specially at first you'll run out of money and will need to wait forever for the game to give you a bit of money. There are only two speeds: Slow as molasses, and slow as slightly faster molasses, so it can get really boring! There are no really useful lobbies or sky lobbies, so that is a disappointment... But what drives me more nuts than anything is the fact that tenants will get upset and move out too quickly, before you noticing anything was wrong. And they destroy their building too! Where you had some nice office or restaurant, now you are left with a hole and it is up to you to remember what was in there so you can rebuild it manually. Lame! Other better tower games just have the tenant leaving the space empty, which makes much more sense and is less frustrating to deal with.

I loved SimTower back in the day and had many hopes for this game but like other reviewers, I'm a little disappointed. This might sound weird, but it's hard to keep organized in Project Highrise. In SimTower, it was easy to group types of tenants together and to space things out. But in this game, as you progress you unlock different upgrades and it's hard to plan ahead and allocate enough space for future tenants and I just ended up putting tenants where I had space and it made it very jumbled and non-coherent. I also didn't like the micromanagement you have to do to keep tenants happy. Hooking up electrical, phone, gas, etc. was all incredibly tedious. And then making sure there was a amenities box on each floor! And sometimes when hooking up different things, it's easy to forget which tenants need which.