City Builder Review

I am an avid Sim City fan. I have accumulated the equivalent of countless weeks of my life playing them all, from the original versions for the PC, Mac and the Super Nintendo, right up through the most recent reincarnations. The name City Builder implied for me that this was city-building simulation. Someone else had (finally) picked up the torch on this genre. But, going in to playing City Builder, published by Virtual Play Games, I had to throw out all of my preconceived notions of what a city simulation should be. No easy task given the depth of the Sim City franchise. I’m a Sim City snob. (That’s why I HATED Sim City: Societies, as this was a complete 180 from the prior versions.)

Throwing out my bias, I set forth.

“What’s that you say? This ISN’T Sim City, incarnate?”

“Nope.”

This is not a city building simulation at all. Right here is proof that you can never judge a book… err a video game.. by the front cover. This is a one-person puzzle game. I even read it on the back of the box, which says that City Builder is “Puzzle Fun for all Ages!”

True.

This being a puzzle game caught me completely caught off guard. Sorry to say, this is not my cup of tea. I tried to remain objective in testing out City Builder. Not everyone likes every sort of game, and I have kept that in mind in going through all of this.

So how does this work? Well, basically I was given a board with a grid and then I had to lay roads, water pipes and power lines on the board, in order to encourage the growth of homes, shops and factories. I was challenged to do this by being given a set entry and exit point from the board which I had to then snake the roads, pipes, and electrical around, bypassing objects and obstacles (such as Bigfoot and alien invaders, rocks, trees and rivers) in order to get from start to finish. In addition, I had goals set forth to build certain sizes, types and numbers of buildings, ranging in size from 1x1 – 3x3.

I had to figure out the best strategy to lay out a single continuous path of  roads/pipes/wires in order to squeeze as much building density out of a uniform plot of land. It is a multi-layered puzzle in that sense, and required a fair amount of strategy on how best to achieve this. The publishers did not include a lot of hints in the manual, just gave the basic tools of how to play, and let me try to figure out the puzzle on my own.

I was given five “continents” to play on. Each continent is a level of difficulty ranging from very easy/tutorial (“Noobland”) to very hard (“Nightmare”). For each continent, there are preset goals: build a certain number of cities of “Homes”, “Shops” and “Factories.” I had to start at the Noobland level, as the only way to move up is to finish each consecutive continent to unlock the next one.

On each continent, I had to build a set number of cities following a preset order. For Noobland, I had to complete 15 cities in order to open up the next level, Midland. I then had to decide what type of building I wanted to propagate in the city I would be working on. I could only build the one type per city. I could not just build all the cities as one type or another, as to move on to the next continent I had to fulfill a goal of a certain number of each type of city.

At the city level, I had certain requirements to fulfill to complete it successfully. I had to lay out the roads, pipes, and wires in such a way to achieve a required number of 1x1, 2x2 and 3x3 size buildings. As gameplay progressed, the requirements become more and more difficult. I had to play around with things to discover the best way to layout these three layers so that each would affect the other most productively in order to generate the buildings required by the city level I was trying to complete.

As I built on, I earned points for building, and greater point values for larger size buildings. I didn’t find there to be any significance to the accumulation of points beyond it simply being a metric for how well I had done. I didn’t need the points in order to build roads, etc.

Within each city level, I could also pickup bonus gift boxes. Points and other items (like the dynamite and cameras, which I will bring up in a second), were earned and lost by capturing the randomly placed gift boxes throughout each city board, as well as in the special bonus cities I mentioned earlier. This meant navigating my road to intersect these gift boxes, and sometimes meant deciding when or when not to go for it.

As gameplay progressed, I encountered obstacles, such as trees, rocks, mountains, Bigfoot, aliens, and rivers. Some of these I could destroy or remove, some had to be circumnavigated. Tools are provided to deal with some from the aforementioned gift boxes. Explosives allowing the destruction of rocks. A camera to scare away Bigfoot and the Aliens. (They are apparently camera shy.)  Bridges to overpass a river. All are earned item which come from completing the successively more difficult levels. Some objects were permanent, and had to be played around.

I had to work against the clock, as once the city building round began, I had a limited amount of time before the “flow” began The “flow” was traffic on the road, water through the pipes and electricity through the wires. The speed also got progressively faster with each of these “flow” types. When I failed to keep ahead of it, I had to start the city over. (I did this a few times and I was ready to throw the remote.) I also had to make sure I did not build myself into a corner or place a tile that was incompatible with my next logical space (i.e. building a bend in the path that placed my next move on a blocked tile) as this would also result in having to restart.

As if this wasn’t enough, to challenge even further, I had only five pieces to chose from on a spinner bar, aka “The Dispensary” at the bottom of the screen, and the pieces available to me were randomly chosen by the game. I did have the option to spin the spinner for new pieces, but I could only do this so many times before the spinner “overheated” and I was locked out of doing this for some time. This meant that there were times I had to build with what I had, and it was not necessarily what I wanted.

From a purely mechanical, control standpoint, I found that the gameplay was fairly simple to learn and understand as there is not much to it. City Builder only uses the Wii remote, turned on its side like the old-school NES controller, and uses virtually none of the motion sensing capability of the Wii remote. There was a couple of novel exceptions to this, like my having to use the Wii remote to detonate dynamite by using it like a detonation “plunger”, or focus a camera by rotating the remote like I was using a camera. Overall, the gameplay could be easily learned by anyone 8 to 80 years old. (Except for my father… who is an engineer, and yet is more inept with computers and video games than I am with understanding 9th grade algebra.)

Graphics are nothing to get excited about. City Builder is not trying to be a life-like game… The graphics are cartoonish. The buildings dance, so do the cars. (My 4 year old was very amused by this.) It is a Wii game, and though I am an avid Wiier (if that term has not been invented, I just did and I just claimed the rights to it,) the honest truth is that the Wii is not a graphics-experience oriented console, and I’m ok with admitting it, even if Nintendo is not. City Builder is not a graphics-intensive experience, and it needn’t be. It’s a puzzle, not Medal of Honor.

As far as the game sounds, music is a little cheesy… Nay, a lot cheesy. I got annoyed of listening to the cheesy soundtrack over and over and over, and muted the TV. There are only a couple of sound-queues of any importance and only gave a warning that the “flow” was about to start. Again, it’s a puzzle, so the lack of an immersive soundtrack doesn’t kill the game.

Personally, I was bored very fast with City Builder. I mentioned earlier, not all game types are for everyone, and puzzle games are not, by a long shot, the sort of thing I get excited about. Objectively speaking, as far as puzzles go, City Builder has a great deal of complexity, and there is a good bit of challenge presented here. If you really like puzzles, you’d probably like this. It is exercise for the mind. Nintendo is no stranger to mind exercising games, and City Builder fits right into that niche market.
Because this is a puzzle game and not a story-driven game, it can be played over and over without quickly wearing it out. I can equate it to this: how many times have you played board-games, solitaire or done crosswords, only to continue to play them or do them over and over again? Even if you go months, it is always there, calling you back. If you like that sort of thing, you don’t get bored of it for long. It is never the same twice. This is no different.

The final verdict is this. I’m not big on puzzles, and so this was not very gratifying for me. However, being objective, if you like puzzles, you will love this game, and you will play it over and over.