It lays the groundwork for a perfect tower simulation and lets you take control. Its game systems are incredible, even if its art can be off-putting. It’s a modern Yoot Tower and that is one of the biggest compliments a genre fan can give. However, ultimately it went a little too far and stripped a lot of its personality along with it which may make it less memorable to newcomers of the genre.įor strategy fans, however, Project Highrise is a real treat.
By going as far away as possible from its competitor’s pixels and pastels, Highrise’s developers were probably hoping to leave a more serious impression that’s more in line with its detailed strategy and complex macro game while keeping its familiarity of large scaled denizens and interactive rooms to draw in Tiny Tower’s former fans. Project Highrise likely adopted a more conservative art direction in an attempt to distinguish itself from the taste Tiny Tower left in many gamer’s mouths. This call was likely due to the success of Tiny Tower-a mobile strategy game that garnered a lot of interest before petering out as players realized its lack of depth. The style itself is a personal preference to some degree, but it simply doesn’t contain much to look at and lacks a memorable style. Where titles like Yoot Tower filled their elevators with dozens of silhouettes, showing hundreds of characters making their way through a tower through the day, only a handful will walk through Highrise’s halls on an average day. Single characters represent an entire office and it doesn’t leave the impression of a bustling, hectic tower. A large part of this is due to the art style which feels cold and detached-as well as simply on too big of a scale. The tower you build will feel sterile at times and lackluster at others, an expanding mass of grey and hard lines. For those more into getting their hands dirty, Project Highrise is so in-depth that the game’s residential living spaces deteriorate, causing maintenance workers to have to come clean up the place so that its inhabitants are happy.īut for all of its aces with strategy, on the flipside, Project Highrise simply lacks charm. Aesthetic features unlock through various goals being met allowing players to change the decoration of an office or the lobby’s wallpaper. There are countless ways to manage your tower to the minutest of details. There’s an added difficulty of meeting the city’s requests, too, such as population goals to be met and diversity in office fronts.Īnd that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Even storefronts need to be varied to meet different requests, like preferring to be in a busy area or having waste removal services. Tenants have demands as well, wanting everything from copy machines to courier services.
Power, phone, and plumbing lines have to be placed to keep certain tenants happy and that means building them in the proper places while building locations that need them on the same floor. Its construction sequences are very meticulous and unforgiving creating room for everything and laying it out in an orderly, intuitive way is a difficult and rewarding task. This investment to your tower’s success comes from how incredibly well Project Highrise succeeds at the core game mechanics. It’s even more devastating to watch it slowly burn, with angry tenants leaving and profits falling. It’s satisfying to erect a skyscraper and grow it, watching it eventually tower over the city. Highrise is everything a simulation game should be-a very solid entry to management simulators. It does an amazing job at replicating the gameplay of those two titles. It’s very much a stylized attempt to rebirth a 1990s classic Sim Tower and its successor Yoot Tower with more modern systems and technology. In it, players build a singular tower and populate it with offices, storefronts, apartments, and more spaces to keep their tenants and visitors happy while managing the day-to-day upkeep of the tower and profit margins. Project Highrise then is latest entry to the tycoon line of games from another indie developer. No better example was when Cities: Skylines showed up SimCity and its sprawling team with a significantly smaller budget and a tiny team. Between the tycoon titles and the city builders, this narrow niche of the strategy genre is built for smaller studios and tightknit teams. In an epoch where indie titles are often outdoing mainstream games in success and sales, simulation games have finally found their stride after a decade of dormancy in the aughts.
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