SCORE:
Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 6
Sound: 5
Overall: 5.5
Pros: Charming, casual and easy to pick up.
Cons: Doesn’t offer much in terms of new gameplay features or innovative aspects.
We’ve lately found some time to check out Bigpoint’s F2P browser MMO Rising Cities which you can imagine as a blend of Farmville and Sim City, creating an easy-to-pick-up, fun and casual city building game that puts players into the shoes of an aspiring mayor of a growing town they are responsible for helping it thrive.
The fact that we were entering the game for the very first time didn’t concern us much due to the rather fundamental character of the MMO as well as its different mechanics and functions, which, on the whole, didn’t reach that far beyond our expectations in terms of what to be faced with, resulting in pretty easy start into the game after the quick registering process via the game’s official webpage was completed.
We were already given something one could actually call the beginning of a town, comprised of a few residential buildings already completely constructed in order to collect rent from, some undeveloped farming areas as well as a town hall. The residential houses’ major function is to provide players with a continuous revenue of coins which can be used to purchase other buildings. It was pretty evident right from the start that 2 major mechanics were in play: time and resources. Everything has certain cost in a combination of building permits (more on these later on), coins and resources with simultaneously requiring a specific amount of time to construct. The actual “strategy to the game, in case one may call it that (to be honest, the setup is quite fundamental), is principally in harmonising your town’s energy and your inhabitants’ happiness as well as generally managing your resources to attempt to evolve your town into the largest and most efficient metropolis possible.
Throughout the game, at least for the early levels, we were continually guided with tasks on where we should go, what we should do and how to use particular features and menus and upon the completion of these tasks we were rewarded with resources XP and coins. Rising Cities is as simple as to almost certainly allow anybody who’s ever played any similar game before to figure out most of all this all by themselves; yet it was still pleasant to have a helping hand at your side to get no less than the primary city foundation up and working.
Those tasks prompted us to mainly focus on constructing new residential homes which additionally tasked us with separate aspects to fulfil for increasing the overall city populous on the one hand and collecting rent a set amount of times on the other, both of which required residential buildings. Other tasks included building a lumber yard, which when activated would produce lumber to be used in various constructions. The resource was produced every few minutes and this process duration could be reduced by upgrading the building (something available to most buildings).
The only time we faced a hiccup was when trying to get more building permits; each time you want to place down a building, it uses up one of your building permits, under your buildings it shows how many permits you have left. Upon using all five of our permits placing down our low level residential homes, we had a bit of a hard time working out how to acquire more. There was an option to spend the premium MetroMoney currency to place an item, but initially this looked like a quick way to place a building instead of acquiring the permits… which we thought was a pretty harsh gateway given that it appeared the game had come to a halt after erecting only five buildings. However, what we came to realise was that each specific building has its own individual building permits, so we were (thankfully) still able to build the other higher class residential homes to complete our tasks. With a little digging on the internet, we found out that players will acquire building permits later in the game or, alternatively, can spend the MetroMoney that they build up.
The game follows a classic build, level up, improve, build, level up, improve circle of progress until after lots of time players are facing a huge city that they then are in control of. There’s elements of strategy in trying to keep your populous happy by placing down decorative elements, also community functions for chatting with other city owners as well as the ability to buy and sell resources on the market.
Overall the graphics are cute and well done, simple but effective for the type of game that Bigpoint have served up, and the game offers a quaint and easy casual game, though delivering very little that is new to, in our opinion, an already oversaturated market. Whilst it has been around a couple of years now, it was probably about 3 years too late to jump on the back of the Farmville craze.
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