Posted on: March 19, 2020
yanamal
Verified ownerGames: 429 Reviews: 6
It's alright, but it's no SimTower
Meh. I went straight from playing YootTower (semi-official sequel to SimTower) to this, and the comparison is not flattering. (By the way, if you are wondering where all the reviews are, they are in the normal edittion, and I wish I saw them before I purchased this edition with all the expansions) This game is somewhat smaller-scale and slower-paced than SimTower (which is actually what I wanted) and also throws a bunch of complexity at you from the get-go (which is not what I wanted). Now, I love a good complex simulation with lots of systems and interesting interplay between them; as long as it introduces the elements in a learnable way, gives me a way to understand what is happening and why, and the resulting system has space for *creative* play/optimization/customizations/etc. Or at least a strong 2 out of those 3. This game has maybe 0.5 out of those 3 - the systems can be slightly interesting to play around with, once you get the hang of them. The number of systems that you have to plan for RIGHT AWAY is too much - the simplest tenants have 2-3 infrastructure requirements each, so you need to be able to balance carefully which ones will work with each other before you even had any hands-on experience with said infrastructure systems. The interface is super obfuscated, there are 2-3 different ways of displaying how much money you made/lost today alone! I'm not actually sure which ones are different and which ones are the same, which is a bad sign. The data that is present is not very helpful in understanding *why* things are going wrong: why is this place not profitable? where do visitors tend to go (or not go)? which things add/don't add noise? (in YootTower, at least, I can figure this out by trial and error) The balance is not very forgiving at all, especially at the beginning, so trial and error is bound to make you go bankrupt. that is frustrating to me in a not-fun way. Especially when I don't know WHY I went bankrupt and WHAT to do differently.
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