This game is easy to become lost in, which is a good thing. Takes your mind off of outside troubles, which we all need from time to time. Relaxing music, but things can quickly become complex, and it may be too much trouble to clear out space you need for, say, making your hub more accessible. You can make patterns for more efficient manufacture of course, but you don't even have to. Go ahead and draw art with your conveyor belts if you like. The only thing I still can't wrap my head around, even though I've managed it, is how to stack shapes over empty spaces in the lower layer.
I don't think I've played long enough to get a decent grasp on the difficulty of the game. Playing on Normal difficulty, I get party-wiped by the plant monsters in the beach area at the beginning of the game, which seems too difficult to me. Am I just supposed to wait for turtles to respawn to level up? I do like the character race options, as they're inspired and if kept in this direction, can lead to even greater variety. I wish there were more classes, perhaps.
I am not buying a magic map for every time I want to check the expletive map. Stick to the 3DS version; at least in that one you can take your own pictures for character portraits.
Why are there fifty-seven projectiles on screen? Why are there multiple paintings arcing around at me? How do I traverse a corridor with a low ceiling and a spike trap I can't jump over? Why is there black smoke coming from the character? Why don't the button prompts match up with the controller? How do I get past the second room? Why is everything so expensive? Why do I need to give away all my money to enter? Why are there so many enemies and why do they do so much damage? What does the "Gay" trait actually do? Why did this teleport teleport me in the path of a currently-swinging ball and chain that one-shot me? Why did I purchase this game? Why are there only four basic appearances for characters?
Recently, I had the urge to play a Sim City-like game that wouldn't be too demanding. I needed a very calm game of building, and because I still crave that, I think this game succeeded. I love how simplified this is. There are a lot of elements to incorporate into a city, but they haven't overwhelmed me yet. I think the design of this game has placed less emphasis on convoluted micromanaging of tedious bureaucratic minutiae, and gained a subtle emphasis on creativity for that. My first city looks just a major gridlock of five-by-five zones like the tutorial taught me, but that title screen hints that you can really make things look much more interesting than my first outing. This is my main goal--and it's not to have to concern myself over the utmost efficiency. That said, I did have some difficulty with constant traffic congestion. No matter what I tried, plunking down buses and tram stations and tracks didn't seem effective. Hopefully my next city will do better. Now, that said, the following are perhaps the most important paragraphs of this review: There are still some kinks this game really ought to work out. First is the control scheme. The only way I could steer the camera with the mouse was to push up against the sides of the window, and if you use a dual-monitor setup, this becomes a grave nuisance. I was surprised that I couldn't click and drag, say with the middle mouse button or something. I really, really hope this gets patched in. I genuinely feel it should've been a default behavior. The other issue was visibility. While you get cool options for seeing the needs of your city and how they fluctuate from location to location, I had to somewhat juggle these when trying to decide where to bulldoze and build. I think my main concern is being able to see buildings that are behind other buildings. I had to bulldoze a couple of times like this. I also wish I could bulldoze only certain structures on a tile--my tube was a mistake, but it crushed the road.
This game was listed as free this morning until I logged in.
