[typing]
After the Sims and SimCity games,
SimTower is the Maxis Sim game that's given me the most satisfaction
over the years.
And it's spiritual successor, Yoot Tower, was also amazing
but it's been almost two decades since that game
and I've been longing for a proper new tower simulation ever since.
Now you might be thinking, what about those games like
Tiny Tower or even Fallout Shelter or things like that?
Well, no, not really.
Those kinds of games can provide some simple fun in their own way.
And on the surface they share a similar theme,
but they're more about idly passing time by
than simulating a balance of
edifice construction, microeconomics, efficient design,
and business management like a proper tower sim does.
Enter Project Highrise,
developed by SomaSim
and published by Kasedo Games on September 8, 2016.
I'd heard precious little about the people behind it,
or the game itself, until very recently
when they got in touch with me and asked
if I wanted some pre-release code to review.
Obviously, I said yes,
so let's see how it stacks up to the old-school tower games.
Project Highrise begins with a basic menu and a few options to choose from,
like playing a tutorial, starting a new sandbox mode game
and some scenarios.
The tutorial is nice but not really necessary
if you've played these sim tower games, in my opinion,
especially since it gives you instructions and pointers during normal gameplay anyway.
The scenarios are what you would expect.
You have a selection of pre-made of towers
that are provided in various states of disregard
that have to be fixed up or maintained
to a certain level of success.
And that's nice,
but I really play these kind of games for the sandbox mode.
You just name your tower, select a difficulty level
and map size, and off you go!
Total freedom.
Now let's go ahead and get this out of the way:
Project Highrise is not a SimTower or Yoot Tower clone,
so much as it is a twist on the formula.
If the tower games were classic lemonade,
the Project Highrise is pink lemonade with a sprig of mint.
There are some key differences,
but the basic concept is still the same.
You're the owner, operator and architect
for a building and everything contained within it.
But there's a clear shift in focus,
where instead of paying so much attention
to angry individuals and elevator optimization,
it's much more into exploring the intricacies of resource allocation for construction
and broader tenant management.
You could think of this is as a vertical version of SimCity,
even more so than SimTower ever was.
For instance, when you want to place some units for rent,
like offices or apartments or whatever,
you can't just plop them down and expect people to move in.
First you have to wait for your construction workers
to arrive and complete the unit,
which takes a bit of time, but you can speed this up later on
by bringing in more workers.
Then you have to string utility generators
and lines up to each unit.
Things like power, water, gas,
phone lines and cable TV.
After that, you may need more services
and tertiary units to keep each tenant happy.
One early example is offices that might need
a copy and printing center,
a courier service and janitorial staff
to keep things going smoothly.
Otherwise, they might move out.
Later on, they might demand catering,
bottled water, an IT department
and even legal services,
as the offices get bigger and more complex.
The same goes for the other types of units,
such as apartments and retail,
which will require their own utilities,
services and related businesses
that cater to their needs.
And of course, most everything deteriorates over time,
so a maintenance crew on staff
is a must.
This has a delightful and carefully-planned snowball effect,
slowly and surely having you seek out higher-tiered tenants
in order to maintain the status quo,
while also increasing your revenue and status.
You'll have to build more units to attract these tenants,
and with each new one you unlock,
you'll have a new set of challenges to overcome
and more things to build.
Doctor's offices may not want to move in without a pharmacy unit
and larger apartments might require a grocery store in the building.
Retail stores require more store rooms
and might do better with a metro station,
and the highest-end companies sometimes demand
limousine and helicopter services.
And placement of this stuff is all quite important,
as some units will compete with others for profits and traffic.
So you might end up causing yourself grief
if they're unable to compete
or they're too far away from elevators or things like that.
Combine this with the constant need
to stay on top of basic utilities,
and this gets exponentially more complex
the longer you play
in a way that I absolutely dig.
Not only that, but you've got a selection
of extra stuff on top of this
that will guide your activities using the invisible hand
of virtual capitalism.
Signing contracts with the local city hall
will act as side quests, so to speak,
with things like placing a certain number of low-income housing units in your building
in exchange for an up-front cash bonus
with a larger payout once you meet their requirements.
Completing tasks and building new stuff
can not only earn you money
but also influence buzz and prestige.
Influence can be used to sign on consultants
which provide various bonuses, depending on who they are.
Like interior designers that will let you place more elaborate decorations
and open up art galleries,
politicians that will pull strings to get you mass transit
and lift building restrictions,
and operations managers
increase your workers' productivity overall.
Buzz can be spent on things like construction discounts,
ad campaigns and other temporary abilties,
which will improve your businesses in a broad sense.
And finally, prestige is basically like SimTower's star rating,
where the more stars you have in prestige,
the more people will want to visit your tower and move in.
If you pull this stuff off correctly,
everything comes together like clockwork.
Both figuratively and literally,
since time plays a factor
in how you get paid and when it's best
to send certain workers to do their thing.
It's also wise to let time not get away from you
because I found myself quite often
letting the speed go to quickly for too long
and not realizing there were some major problems
in my building going on,
causing a mass exodus of visitors
when I wasn't looking closely enough.
That brings me to some of my complaints about the game,
and the biggest one is that
there's a lack of precise information.
In the beginning hours, it's not so bad,
since you can mostly tell what's up
by glancing at your building and the information overlays.
My problem is mostly in the later parts of the game,
once you reach prestige level 15 or so.
At this point, the requirements of each unit
become incredibly picky and while that can be fun,
I think it takes far too much trial and error
to figure them out.
As an example, a financial headquarters says
they need more finance offices to open up.
Well, how many do they need? It doesn't say.
Then they end up complaining because it's too loud.
Well, again, how quiet does it need to be?
It doesn't say that either.
And there's a vague overlay for noise,
but because of how soft the color is around the edges
and there's no real meters going on,
and they never even said how quiet it needs to be to begin with,
I don't know what to do.
It can also be really hard to diagnose things
like the happiness levels of individuals
because it doesn't tell you
what exactly is making them unhappy.
Like some person will say that a line is too long.
Okay, where? What line?
Again, it doesn't say.
And for that matter, who is this person?
While you can read through the feedback in this list,
you can't expand it to click and see who is thinking what
or even what part of the building it pertains to.
And it'd be great if there was some way
to quickly evaluate some pockets of unhappiness,
like how people glowed shades of red in SimTower.
And I know this game is more about
the building itself than the people but
they're also pretty important to keep track of,
which makes the extra steps to do so
rather annoying.
There's also not enough variety in the look of the units
themselves in my opinion,
as it all ends up mashing together and kind of looking the same.
For that matter, the decorative and customization options
are surprisingly limited.
Other than renaming people and units, the only customization
is placing a handful of wallpapers and windows
and some background objects nobody will use.
And you can only place these down in certain areas,
and only one of them per tile.
So you can't, for instance, place a ceiling light
above a chair, which makes no sense.
I don't know, it's little things like this
that really stand out to me
because the rest of Project Highrise
is just so completely captivating.
Even if my issues with the game somehow aren't
addressed in future patches,
I expect that several of them could be fixed by the community.
This is a Unity-engine game, for one thing,
and it has Steam Workshop support on top of that,
making it very mod-friendly.
And hey, if I could whip up a Duke Nukem statue mod in five minutes,
I can only imagine what people with actual commitment will be able to do.
Either way, though, Project Highrise has really impressed me,
especially at its asking price of $20.
For me, it's worth all of that.
It's just one of those games that I really go for.
One of those that I can sit down and play
for what I swear is only fifteen minutes
and I look at the clock and two hours have passed
like it's nothing.
Enjoyably intricate tower management simulations like this
are far too infrequent nowadays.
And I am stoked
that Project Highrise has come along to fill in that gap.
[jazz music plays]
And if you enjoyed this video, perhaps you would like my older video on SimTower.
Actually, that's really old at this point,
but hopefully it's still entertaining.
And I've also covered Cities: Skylines,
which is another similar independently-made game that is
trying to fill in a gap left by Maxis games of the past
that didn't quite go so well.
But yeah, that's what these are for. So click those if you'd like.
Or come back and watch videos every Monday and Friday here on LGR.
And as always, thank you very much for watching.