Review: City Builder (Wii)
When I was presented with City Builder as my next review game, I was excited to play it. Looking at the screenshots and videos, City Builder reminded me of the old puzzle game Pipe Dream if someone combined it with the look of Sim City 2000.
Your job in City Builder is to, well, build cities. In the first phase of each level, you’re presented with a square of land on which you need to build roads. Each level has a requirement that needs to be met; early on, it’s simply a set number of buildings you need to build in that first phase. Buildings will pop up (one of the game’s cooler effects) on either side of the road you lay down from randomly selected pieces that are displayed at the bottom of the screen.
Very quickly, you’re introduced to the two other layers of the game. Once you have the roads down and basic houses have popped up, your next task is to go underground to build water pipes (with a requirement of number of buildings upgraded by bringing them water). The third phase in each level takes you to the skies above your houses to arrange power lines to upgrade buildings to a third level.
To place the infrastructure, you’ll need to select one piece from the five pieces randomly placed at the bottom of the screen. If you don’t like the five pieces that have been selected, hit the A button and you’ll get five new ones. To prevent you from mashing the A button until you get the piece you want, you have a meter at the bottom that ‘heats up’ the more you randomize the pieces at the bottom, eventually stopping you from shuffling pieces if it ‘overheats.’ As with anything that features randomization, I did face a few failures (especially in the game’s difficult later levels) because I couldn’t get the piece I needed. While that’s the fault of randomization and not the game, I would have liked an option to pull the camera back from the level to plan the route in the middle of the level.
Keeping you on your toes while you’re placing your city’s infrastructure are each phase’s creeping challenge: a car when you’re building roads, the water flowing behind you in the underground pipes, and power lines being electrified in the sky. City Builder does a great job communicating how much time you have to start building before you need to get moving with a timer in the middle of the top of the screen accompanied by an alarm when the time is low. The difficulty curve on these is fantastic, with each phase getting faster over the game without any unusual or extreme jumps in difficulty.
There are a few obstacles in your way, though. Bigfoot joins underground moles and flying UFOs as they take up a three by three grid to block your path. To scare them off, you need to pick up cameras from gift boxes lying around the level. Unfortunately, on the Wii version that I reviewed (it’s also available for PC), the camera relied on turning the Wii remote to line up with an erratically moving target area. The TNT pickups give you the ability of clearing out boulders by holding the 2 button and pushing the remote down like a plunger on a TNT box, which turned out to be really satisfying. Thankfully the rest of the game controls with the controller “classic style” with no motion controls.
My biggest problem with City Builder is that there isn’t enough variety to make the game compelling over the long run. Very early on, you’re introduced to all game’s features and nothing gets changed up from there. With 100 levels across five continents, there’s a ton of game here, but with each level consisting of three phases of ever-increasing difficulty, I quickly got fatigued during my time with the game. As I got towards the end of the game and needed to build 60+ houses per level, along with laying water pipes and power lines, and the car/water/electricity moving faster and faster, the later areas were an exercise in patience.
City Builder overall is a solid game, especially considering the sheer amount of gameplay you get for the low price. I’d recommend the game if you’re looking for a solid puzzle game that combines well-executed core gameplay with a great, fun style. After all, these cities aren’t going to build themselves, y’know.
