Highrise City is an impressive first release from Fourexo Entertainment that challenges what is expected from city builders.
Highrise City is a city builder developed by Fourexo Entertainment and published by Deck13. Fourexo Entertainment was founded in 2020. Highrise City is the developer’s first title. The Publishers Deck13 is one of Germany’s leading developers, having worked on games such as Lords of the Fallen, The Surge and Atlas Fallen, an action RPG.
City Builders have been around since the mid to late sixties, although most games were text-based, such as The Sumerian Game. That changed with the introduction of SimCity in the late 80s and the continued development of other games under the city builder simulation genre.
Highrise City is an economic City Builder where you will have to manage your growing city, making use of the many tools available for use. Highrise City combines both city builder mechanics as well as an in-depth economic and resource management simulation to create the bulk of its gameplay.
If you are new to city builders, Highrise City has a definite learning curve as it isn’t just a plain city builder with minimum resource management. However, it does have an extensive tutorial that explains every aspect of the game, from the research to building and managing your city. If you ignore this tutorial, some aspects of the game may not make sense. You are even able to drive around your city in a third-person view and explore the many streets you have created.
Every Building you build in Highrise City has a requirement. Whether that is just money or the different resources depends on the type of building and its tier. For example, the Wind Turbines are needed to produce energy. Of course, some resources cannot be used unless you have upgraded your city to the appropriate tier level in order to unlock.
Your basic resources include wood, which you will have to gather from the forests near your city; Hemp farms, which produce insulation; and clay deposits, which can help you craft clay bricks. These are some of the easiest resources to get early on in the game. As your city grows, you will depend on resources that are much harder to get a hold of.
As your technology increases, you will need to gather more resources. Iron and copper will be important to create electronic components. What is equally important to grab is quartz mines. You will need quartz to create glass and other objects. Although these are some of the resources for creating your city, you will also have to remember to gather items to make your citizens happy.
There are different classes of citizens; for example, craftsmen require more of the basic amenities to be happy, such as electricity, water, health care, a police station that is close by, and a fire station that is also within range. Whereas employees will require the addition of churches and locations where they can relax, such as parks and movie theatres. The higher the class of citizens, the more that is required.
You can mine gold and gems for jewelry stores as well as set up both a tech industry and a motor vehicle industry within your city to create jobs and increase the happiness of higher-class citizens. You can even set up bus stops all over to make transportation easier and upgrade already-built roads. You will need to keep an eye on how much traffic is built up within your city. If it gets too high, you will need to widen the roads and even build highways to help with the flow of traffic.
Of course, you will have to make sure there is a wide array of food and goods to keep them satisfied as well; otherwise, they just might start leaving your city in droves. Building farms is the best way to gather vegetables and fruits while also creating livestock for meat.
There are also fisheries that can be crafted when you start your city off near a large body of water. You will obviously need a place to store these goods and to transport them around the city. To do so, you can build warehouses and transport companies, although these have a range limit that encompasses a certain area, so you will need to build more as your city grows.
All of your buildings will require a source of electricity to run, and unfortunately, as your city grows, so do your city’s needs. A lot of your electrical power comes from more eco-friendly methods such as solar or wind power, but you can also mine coal and use the garbage that gets collected from your citizens to create power. You will then need to create substations to store the power before creating a grid or hooking the power up to an existing grid. This can become more complicated as your city grows.
Another important aspect that is similar is the water grid. Although it isn’t as complicated, you will need to just connect water pipes and either water towers or water pumps to the grid, and you have a working water grid that will just need to expand as you increase population size. If your water doesn’t reach the fire stations, it is far more likely for your city to burn down for no reason.
Although Highrise City has most of the technical aspects of a city builder, a huge part of its management comes from business simulation games, as you will need to maintain a high amount of resources, including money, to keep your city flourishing. Although if you start running out of money, you can take a loan from the bank, but be warned, much like any business simulation that includes being able to take out loans, the interest that you need to pay back can be a bit hefty.
Highrise City has a fun mechanic for those who want to view their cities from a different perspective. You can drive around your city in a vehicle. This can be a fun aspect as you can drive through practically everything, and there are a few fun surprises littered around for accomplishing a few things like that.
The graphics of Highrise City are great whether you are cruising around the town or just moving buildings around; however, it does need a little bit more polish. Although the game does require at least a minimum of 16GB RAM, if you are going to try and build megacities, it can get a little heavy on your hardware.
The sound engineering of Highrise City is incredibly immersive, especially the closer you are to the many activities around the city if you are in a third-person view. The music is soothing, but because there isn’t a large variety in the music, it can become repetitive, making it more tedious to work on your city for hours on end.
Overall, Highrise City is an incredibly immersive city builder with a sharp learning curve for those who expect it to just be a normal city builder, as a lot of the mechanics come from economic and resource management simulators. If you are familiar with typical city builders and are thinking Highrise City might be the same, you may just be biting off more than you can chew if you ignore the tutorials.
