Video by Matt S. Welcome to 2020! I hope you all had the most wonderful break. And now it’s time to get back into the video game criticismsssss… and first up I wanted to chat about a little city builder that caught my attention over the Christmas break. Dawn of…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I have one issue with Transport Fever 2, which I’m going to throw into the introduction, so I can then talk about everything that I love about this game: unlike most other transport business simulators there are no rivals, AI or player. In Transport Fever 2…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. City builders – or similarly-themed “builder” simulators – are a favourite genre of mine, but only when a developer gets them right. Entries into this genre feature a great deal of number crunching, and require that players have a good nose for design, balancing, statistics, and…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. To celebrate 25 years of Atelier, the teams at Gust and Koei Tecmo decided to do something very different with Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists, and eschew the series traditional JRPG structure and design for a light-hearted city building simulation instead. Talk about a dramatic change!…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Kairosoft simulators are really hard to put down. There has been a lot of them now, and every single time they’ve offered the lightest of simulation gameplay coupled with adorable pixel graphics that are so charming that once you start playing, it’s easy to be swept…
Read MoreReview by Lee F. Kingdom: Two Crowns is a 2D rogue-like base-building and defense game with quaint, well-animated pixel art and an overall minimalist presentation. It’s a sequel, and as the title alludes to, one of the biggest new features is that it includes cooperative multiplayer functionality. It looked very…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Of all the games that I’ve played on my iPad, Project Highrise is one that has really stuck. In my review I gave it “only” 3.5/5 stars, and that’s perhaps a bit unfair to the game, given how much time I’ve spent with it since. It’s…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. There’s a natural synergy between the city builder, and space colonisation. The entire appeal of a city builder is taking a wide, empty space of land and then building it up by adding buildings and people so that it that nothingness can become a thriving metropolis.…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. The classical city building simulator is an approach to game design that I’m quite convinced will never die. Decades down the track there will still be developers making games that are, simply, about building a balance of different types of buildings and structures that can handle…
Read MorePreview by Matt S. One of the lesser-known things about me is that I love city builders almost as much as I love JRPGs. I don’t get to talk about the games as much, as I generally play games on console these days, and it’s rare for city builders to…
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