Okay, more impressions on the current $1 IndieGamestand deal on
1849:
Played it some more and it is baffling how such a neat game is held back by some... platform specific constraints. The game is developed for mobile platforms and PC and is a peculiar mixture of both worlds. On one hand, the game has 50 resources, so there is a ton of building options in the later levels that you need to balance and fit into the limited terrain layout. Additionally, there is also a trading element, which allows you to buy resources from other cities, which is especially important because the campaign levels are structured around limited building options and the resources that you need to buy to mitigate the missing build options. It is highly enjoyable to work on these objectives for every level, which usually tasks you with exporting X resources and reaching a certain population. In comparison to other city builders, the several resource queues arent deep, with the sole exception of the living quarters which require a constant stream of a steadily rising amount of different resources to be happy (stone, lumber, clothing, furniture, food, booze, vicinity of school, religion and fun avenues), but the game still gets depth from creating a city layout that is balanced around not wasting money, still producing enough to keep the city running and mostly keeping the ever increasing demand of the population satisfied. I declared bancruptcy quite a few times already, so it seems challenging enough.
However on the other hand, its controls and overall features seem to be inspired too much by mobile development and the game would benefit a lot of asynchronous development for the PC version. Nothing about the general gameplay, because the gameplay works with its challenge focus, but the controls...Here are a few issues:
- building requires you to go through the menu every time instead of offering a key shortcut to build multiple buildings
- No stats at all, which hurts the game in my opinion since its never easily visible which resources are plentiful and which are needed
- Huge UI items, which makes scrolling through the building list a pain for example
- very simple graphical structure, no turning of buildings, very similar level layouts
This isnt a game to build huge and sprawling million population cities and more about building and managing the resource in- and output micromanagement of a small city and I really like it. I wish it looked a bit less like an iOS game, but I'll definitely write the devs and hope they add some convenience features, at least stats. I want stats, I NEED stats.
For $1? Recommended.
