Parkasaurus
Okay, so I’m a huge fan of zoo-based park management games, right? I’ve spent a good portion of my childhood pretty much wasting away on them. Zoo Tycoon, Wildlife Park, Jurassic World Genesis, Zoo Empire, you name it. But I’ll be honest, when I first saw Parkasaurus, I really did not think I would enjoy this game all that much. Probably because it’s been so long since we’ve had a really good zoo management game (ZT2 Ultimate Collection is still considered the best by many zoo management fans, myself included, and that was released in ’08, so 10-11 years ago now), coupled with my own initial dislike for the ridiculously huge-eyed goofy art style and the fact that it’s solely focused on dinosaurs. Personally, I just didn’t have high expectations here.
– Real player with 319.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder Building Games.
☆The Old(est) Fashioned ‘Zoo Tycoon'☆
Parkasaurus has been on my wishlist for I dont know how long.
Right now, it’s the steam summer sale and I’ve been looking at games to distract me during the long heated summer hours.
I’ve been interested but I never really wanted to put £20 on it, like, it looked fun, but it’s…isometric? …Ehhh….
What I hadn’t realised was that the game is actually full on, low-poly style 3D! It’s not completely isometric art, and I appreciate that so much for a reason I’ll explain down below. I have played 4.5 hours so far, definitely going back for more, and this has let me play through two campaign levels (there’s loads left to do!) and the tutorial level.
– Real player with 25.6 hrs in game
Academia : School Simulator
I am a huge fan of Rimworld, I really enjoyed Prison Architect and plus, I’m a teacher. So I was pretty excited about this game.
I’m giving it a hesitant thumbs up on the premise that it will deliver on its promises as it progresses through EA. It’s very bare bones at the moment but I’m hopeful that it will live up to its potential as its exactly the kind of game that I would love if it were much, much bigger.
As a teacher, I do have some feedback on the academic side of things for the developers:
– Real player with 163.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder Colony Sim Games.
TL;DR
It’s fine, but not worth $20 because it has very little replay value.
Overview
Academia: School Simulator is a game. It’s challenging to call it a good game, but it certainly isn’t a bad one. I originally purchased this game after seeing it on youtube and being interesting in a school sandbox game, in which I could do a variety of things from build the best school, to making a living hellscape. Academia: School Simulator, did not meet those expectations.
Story
I don’t truly demand story in every game I play, but I feel like this could use a little… anything? I dunno even just a: Gramps left me his inheritance and I was told to spend it on his dying wish: building a school. Whatever, moving on.
– Real player with 98.7 hrs in game
Advancity
hi there
congratulations on the game, im loving it. for people who like build an empire and have to think strategically to defeat the monster i really recomend this game.
– Real player with 25.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best City Builder Resource Management Games.
I’ve been playing the game for about 14 hours now and while it was fun at start, some things started to annoy me:
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First off, a dev who claimed (in discord) this game is worthy of a full release, which obviously is not the case).
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Too many plots are taken by bandit camps and mining plots
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Boats are buggy and can break sometimes (not allowing you to load resources on it)
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It needs more optimization, i have a great pc but even for me the game started stuttering (ingame and sound)
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Bandit camps need balancing. I have them with only kings, which requires a max level training field. By the time i can defeat them i have no more need for such resources you can get from them.
– Real player with 15.0 hrs in game
City Block Builder
The 1950s. The start of the quintessential American Dream is here. Los Angeles is in the midst of a cultural revolution and is bustling with immense amounts of growth throughout the city. Skyscrapers are being built. Tentwood is taking the city by storm and a utopia is on the rise with beaches, warm weather and palm trees. Los Angeles has become a real estate paradise with millions migrating from all over the world.
Follow the life of Joey, a returning war veteran that has just received a plot of land, as he weaves through his personal life and financial struggles with street smart and innovative decisions. Help him fight his struggles and discover the true face of LA. The time to build and invest is now! City Block Builder will be out for Windows on launch and will release shortly later on the Linux and Mac OS platforms!
City Block Builder is a genre-blending tycoon game with city-building elements. Build your own Business Empire through an immersive game with easy to learn, but hard to master mechanics. Inspired by tycoon games of yesteryear, experience a tycoon tribute to the 50s. Build Cinemas, Restaurants, Bowling Alleys, Shops, News Stands, Drive-Ins, Jazz Clubs and more!
Each business will have its own extensive research system with different nuances. Unlocking different parts of the research tree is based on their opportunity costs. Higher points unlock better rewards but you can adjust your goals for short term solutions. With the research approach in your hand, you are completely in charge.
Explore the game and harness your creative juices into building an engine of a business. Manage, and micromanage every single detail of your empire and aim for the stars. The perfect blend of gameplay with freedom, City Block Builder is surely up to the task of quenching your thirst for curiosity!
Right from the furniture to the lights, from posters to advertisements, feel what it was like to live in that era of America. With the signature style of 1950s LA, experience the art and aesthetic of downtown LA. Interact with, build and place items that once were the staple of that era. Movie posters, food, glitz and glamour, immerse yourself with what’s in store for you!
20 Minute Metropolis - The Action City Builder
I’ll confess I’m biased because a friend that works for me did some of the artwork on this and I’ve long been a fan of Dejobaan.
This is a fun, bite-sized strategy game and less than $3. It’s hard to go wrong. I can’t think of any time I’ve actually regretted spending $3, but this was enjoying to play, and I will keep trying to get my name on the top page.
I would love to see a couple quality of life improvements: namely drag and drop roads, hotkeys or an expanded toolbar so I don’t have to fuss with the selection menus. Daily leaderboards would be nice too, so I have a better chance at the top ten.
– Real player with 4.8 hrs in game
Super fun and hectic. It can become a little easy after you’ve figured out a good strategy but you can always use a different starting perk which adds and takes away some difficulty. The models are really cute, reminds me of a toy town or Lego.
Some improvements I’d make would be, dragging roads to build instead of clicking for each tile. This isn’t a big issue, but could herald RSI if played too often.
I’d like more maps, a random map generation would be cool, it would make each run very different and unique.
– Real player with 3.9 hrs in game
City Country
City Country is a city-building game where you manage resources, population, knowledge. You control various sectors of the city like education, medicine, culture, tourism, trading.
You start at some point into the map. Citizens will equally be separated into Men/Women and Farmers/Workers. The population will be separated into 4 different categories: Farmers, Workers, Engineers, and Academics. Any population category will work on different buildings and will have a unique family house.
You have the option to produce whatever you like, and what You don’t like, you can buy it at any time, or sign a contract for a later system that automatically buys the product from another city immediately. After that, you should sell part of the production so you can take some fresh money into the city.
As a governor of the city, your job is to grow your city, improve your resource incomes, sell your resources and take fresh money, make your city better for life, and manage city sectors as best as you can.
Government Sectors
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Trading: - Sign a contract with other cities (AI) when you have less than N amount of resource, buy M amount of that resource, and vice versa.
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Education: - Decide what to learn, how long, and when to start people’s education.
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Medicine: - Improve the health of the citizens, and their lives.
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Culture: - Improve the knowledge of the citizens. And be a more attractive city for foreign peoples.
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Tourism: - Make money when you attract tourists. Build Hotels. Some of them can decide to continue to live in your city.
Develop Your City
Knowledge (Technology)
Investigate new products for future production and unlock new buildings.
Production (Resource Management)
Choose what to produce from the Factory profile.
Overcrowd: A Commute ‘Em Up
Note that I was a pre-release tester, however aside from the free key I was not paid for my time or under any obligation to play the game.
First thing to say is the art style is fantastic. If you like the screenshots then you won’t be disappointed! Occasionally things can be a bit hard to see due to the isometric viewpoint, however you can rotate the map 4 ways and view each level of your station individually if required.
In its current start of early access state I find the game really fun to play. You design your station as with any other sim type game but then you’ve also got to deal with the running of it. Staff can be equipped with tools and they will deal with problems (litter / crime / repairs etc.) within their area (perception), but if they don’t have the right tool or if the incident is too far away from them you’ll need to get involved. Some people get round this by having lots of staff with varying tools posted around, I personally like to micromanage a bit more and have less staff with better speed stats who I can use to react to problems as they come up. You also have to keep your staff rested so they don’t become useless!
– Real player with 65.6 hrs in game
The short version: this is a great simulation game and it’s definitely worth the price, even as an Early Access game.
Good stuff
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The art is amazing and makes me wish I were back in London. (Would be wonderful to have art variations for certain assets, like billboards and coffee shops.)
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The spatial aspects are satisfying to solve in the long-term — e.g., planning how to connect different subway lines that are perpendicular to one another and separated by three levels, while also incorporating an additional station entrance somewhere in the middle.
– Real player with 32.6 hrs in game
Settlement Survival
The game is very involved and quickly gets you immersed in the construction of your town. The difficulty level is fairly challenging, although it’s hard to see how you can really “fail” at the game. It just slows you down if you mess up. Feels quite enjoyable and even addictive when you are playing, but the game does have a few shortcomings.
First of all, it’s very open ended as in there is nothing to really aim for other than a few achievements, most of which can be gained quite easily. There are other scenarios that will be released later though, so they may address this issue.
– Real player with 78.5 hrs in game
I really like this game - restarted a few times to get used to the disasters, under- and overpopulation crises. I have played Simcity, Cities: Skylines… I highly recommend it :)
A few things to suggest:
- Some quick-upgrade tool - at this point I have over 100 garden villas, luxury boarding houses, and hundreds of production buildings. It would be great if there’s a tool to quickly upgrade them all, because it is painful to add cats, toilets, ovens, tools, scarecrows one building at a time.
– Real player with 43.6 hrs in game
1980
Quite fun, quite well executed, it’s a small game but what it does, it generally does well.
The one criticism I have to make concerns “gentrification”. I know what gentrification is, I’ve spent the last twenty years living in Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle, all cities where gentrification has happened. The issue of poor people being priced out of their city is one that I’m aware of. It’s a complex issue - it’s bad for the working class population, but quite nice for the upper-middle-class upwards, because the whole city is reshaped for them; very often the city as a whole thrives. Forty years ago, Catherine street in Toxteth in Liverpool was the scene of rioting; today you pretty much have to be a millionaire to own a house there. The people who used to live there have been pushed out. As to whether you think that’s fair, that probably depends how wealthy you are, and whether you’re on the left or the right politically. It’s currently a live issue in Manchester; regeneration of the northern English former industrial cities was done by giving developers free rein to gentrify at will. The cities were risen from their ashes, essentially at a cost to their working-class populations.
– Real player with 9.0 hrs in game
This game is not bad, but it’s very unsatisfying.
I understand that you can’t really “win”, that’s the premise of the game.
I started several times and tried almost every possible approach to get all the first missions done, but it seems like that is not possible?! Or there is maybe like one combination/timing, which will make is possible and I wasn’t able to find out how.
If somebody knows, make a comment!
Now it just felt unsatisfying, that I was neither able to finish the missions nor the game in a good way and it was a more frustrating than enjoyable experience. If this is intended due to the urbanization story, okay, but I didn’t liked it.
– Real player with 5.5 hrs in game
A Game of Humans
This is very early in development but has so much promise. I don’t mind paying now and watching it grow as it seems very worth it … how else can the development continue if we don’t support it. I stay in the beta branch and now understand the game mechanics more. One person complained that a toon did not dig a spot out that had been marked for hours and I had the same complaint until I moused over it and found that they won’t dig unless the tree is removed first lol. Not broken, just takes understanding the game mechanics.
– Real player with 19.2 hrs in game
Edit after patch 0.2:
It has now more content and I think it’s time to change my recommendation to positive. You can read the patch notes and figure out if it’s enough for you.
End Edit
Although this game is delightfully different it feels like watching a grass grow. Peasants are moving and socializing and sleeping under the sky. You need a carpenter (of course you do!) to build houses and I think more than two would be insane. So I am in a day 10 and there is only one house build with a bed.
Types of plots are limited to houses, carpenter, bakery and farm, and couple of others where you put wood and other stuff to keep and sell to other peasants
– Real player with 7.3 hrs in game