by Daniel Sivan

Created on: February 12, 2009   Last Updated: January 26, 2011

Review of City Rain

Platform - PC.

Price - $14.95, Demo available.

.....................

5/5

City Rain, an independent game, that gamers have labeled "Sim City meets tetris", is the cleverly designed and inspired work of mother Gaea studios; a self-proclaimed "insane mix of puzzle and simulation". Replace insane with brilliant to describe what is a distillation of a city building simulator; with gameplay that calls for quick decision making about the needs and layout of the city with in a dynamic and familiar puzzle system .

Amazingly, City Rain was programmed by computer science, and media students at 'Universidade Estadual Paulista' in Brazil, nominated best game in the student category in the Independent Games Festival this year, well deserving of your time and purchase; it is way smarter than peggle and nicer looking than lemonade tycoon; lacking no depth, but featuring a design clearly geared towards the casual gamer, but worth the time of any gamer.

City rain is an excellent, easy to play city building simulator that drops your building units in different patterns from above the isometric play field, where choices in the puzzle mechanic replace sandbox rules and drawn out strategies of games like Sim City and civilization.

In an isometric grid layout, (12x12 to start), buildings, or groups of buildings fall from the sky, each building requiring one square on the grid. The arrows keys let you change the placement of the building as it falls, and space bar, or S key, drops your current building piece. Each piece is also rotatable, and/or selectable in certain cases, using the A, and D keys. for example, a "power plant" piece will let you select between nuclear, wind, solar, etc; while a rotatable piece of four buildings might contain a school, two parks and residence. It is up to the player to place the pieces in such a way that make them function successfully with one another. Buildings of the same class can be dropped on top of each other, upgrading them to meet the expanding six demands of the city; as shown in the bottom left corner in stylish "Will Wrightian" green bars. Popularity, jobs, health, leisure, security and education. Buildings appearing from the sky fill will those needs, forcing the player to make think about city layout in reference to these demands, as well as physical space on the grid to achieve massive pointage.

What City Rain does best is challenge the player to rapidly decide where building are neccesary, changing the typically

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>