Balancing Buildings and Resources in Balancity - [INDIEGAMING]

Have you ever wanted to play a city builder in which your city might teeter off into nothingness if you aren't careful? If so, then Argentinian developer Fernando Cordoba's Balancity might be for you.

It's a wacky concept. You have to build up a city, balancing the needs of power, housing, and jobs while also balancing the weight of everything to keep the whole thing from falling over. It's as goofy as it sounds.

Unfortunately, the game isn't as polished as one might wish. For example, clusters of similar blocks are supposed to clump together into a larger, more advanced block with improved properties, but you're lucky if it works the way the tutorial implies that it will. It's a neat feature that would add depth to the game if it could be relied upon to work.

Then there are some design choices that seem like they could have been handled better. You can only build one each of police station, hospital, fire department, and military base, each of which comes with one vehicle for dealing with disasters. It's in your best interest to build them sooner than later, but that means that all of your services' headquarters, where the vehicles like to rest, are at the base of your city and can end up being far away from the problems they are meant to deal with. Whenever you reach a population target, the game requires you to build a special building immediately, even if a disaster starts as soon as it unlocks.

The missions are the weakest part of the game. They seem intended to teach the player the game, but I feel permanently stuck on one particular mission that requires the player to build a tall tower on a narrow platform with limited build options. The problems with megablock creation combined with the fact that the inspector is disabled so that the player has no way of knowing how well their offices and homes are balanced in number make it very difficult to gauge progress.

Where the game shines brightest is in the free build mode. Everything is unlocked, which makes it easier to figure out the relationships between the different buildings and come up with strategies to allow for a bigger, wider city-tower. It still has its issues and annoyances, but it's far more fun than the post-tutorial missions. The scenarios based on real-world cities are also pretty neat, adding some variety to the starting platforms and different special buildings for the player to work with.

For all its flaws, Balancity is a pretty good game. It's definitely unique. If you like wacky games and aren't turned off by akward interfaces, it might be something you'd enjoy.

You can get Balancity on Steam. Its regular price is $9.99, with a 20% discount for its launch. It's available for the Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux operating systems.

from IndieGames.com http://ift.tt/2csKF5h
via IndieGaming, visit and read the original first posting to get complete and more detail about this article, support the independence Gaming , Enjoy