IGF 09 Student Showcase winner City Rain seemed interesting to me because of its comparison to two other games I love: Tetris and SimCity. While the combination sounded weird, I was curious to see how it would work out.
With the simple premise of dropping buildings on to a piece of land, City Rain’s focus is to build a thriving city while taking care of the environment. At the beginning of every stage, your mission will be stated in a short list of tasks that you must complete before your limited amount of turns runs out.
Individual buildings or composite pieces made out of several buildings in odd shapes will fall down from the sky. You can rotate them and place the same kind of building on top of another, which will “level up” the respective building, creating an upgraded version of it. Buildings come in a few different forms: residential, industrial, commercial, schools, police stations, hospitals and landfills. And yes, you will need the landfills, since you get scolded by dropping garbage onto random squares of land. The game places a lot of focus on being environmentally friendly, and does so by giving you tasks and buildings related to them. For example, a water treatment station to clean that yucky river that crosses town, or an environmental police station that has to be located in the trees.
While you attempt to complete all the given tasks in a level, you must also pay attention to a series of meters on the bottom left portion of the screen, representing availability of jobs, education, leisure, security and health, as well as the overall sustainability of your city.
At first, balancing the needs of your population with accomplishing every goal isn’t too bad, but the stages will gradually become more complicated and the balance will become more difficult to achieve, as special buildings (which you must buy) are added to the mix.
Aside from the Campaign, you can play Quickplay and Blockmania. In Quickplay you are given a random map and a few customizable options (i.e.: time length and turns) and start building. In Blockmania you get a blank map and the point is to survive a certain amount of time while placing down buildings, until an earthquake levels most of your city and you are forced to rebuild. Blockmania is definitely a challenge and a lot of fun.
The three game modes are enough to keep you busy, mission by mission, level by level. While the look of the game is fairly simplistic but with some attention to detail (pile up garbage on top of garbage and the pile becomes larger, level up a building and the aspect will slightly change), what really surprised me was the great soundtrack. The music definitely stands out!
On the downside, and while I enjoy the isometric view, sometimes it’s not easy to judge the height of the falling blocks, which sometimes leads to mistakes in building placement. Some sort of vertical guideline would have been perfect, aside from the existing shadow.
City Rain is an interesting game with some elements of strategy, but don’t think of it as one of those time-consuming strategy games. It’s something that can be played casually and the missions won’t be too lenghty and are fairly fast-paced, which is great for when you only have a little bit of time available.
While it seemed pretty weird for me at first, it turns out that Sim City and Tetris go as well together as peanut butter and chocolate, and City Rain is a lot like a Reese’s chocolate bar.