City Rain is a Sim City style management game, your job is to rescue failing cities by rebuilding required services set by your assistant. Does it get a bankers bonus or leave the country in recession? Read on to find out.
[singlepic id=610 w=320 h=240 float=center]
City Rain is a round based game with a time limit where instead of choosing which buildings to build at your leisure, you have a building ring which falls to the ground which you can rotate to locate the building and place it before it reaches the ground where it is then built. It has a feel of Tetris to it which is an interesting idea and works well in general. Levels are played on a 9×9 grid representing the city, with a basic set of buildings such has houses, schools, stores, factories and hospitals at your disposal. As you progress through the game you unlock more buildings such as a variety of power generating buildings, recycling centers, fire stations, statues and many more. They all have their uses and while they do cost more money they are vital on some levels to keep the residents happy and to complete the task.
The Campaign is level based and you start with a good tutorial to introduce you to how the game plays. You work for an organisation called Rescue and Intervention Non Profit, R.A.I.N. for short, whose job it is to rebuild failing cities on the WEPA blacklist. The levels are task based and start off very easy and continue to do so for some time, they are usually tasks such as build X building and make X cash to complete the level. Further into game is where the difficulty ramps up and requires some thought and repeated attempts to complete with more challenging scenarios.
[singlepic id=611 w=320 h=240 float=center]
To help keep your city under control, an Agent Status guide is displayed in the corner which gives a brief overview of your city. A simple bar representing the requirements for building demand such as jobs, health, leisure and education are shown and should be fulfilled if you want to run a happy city. In addition your assistant gives you regular updates on your progress in the game. The Agent Status is not essential in the starting levels but becomes very useful further into the game.
The second game mode is a Quick Game where you are able to create your own game with a good variety of options including the number of rounds, time, speed of the falling blocks and size of the level. This is like a free play mode and while it is fun to play I found the Campaign more interesting as you had goals to reach which gives a challenge. The third mode is called Blockmania which plays like a game of Tetris, blocks of buildings drop and you must build them on either empty squares or if possible match them to existing buildings to increase their level which gives you more score. This is a real fun game which plays well and provides a nice distraction from a challenging level on the Campaign 🙂
[singlepic id=612 w=320 h=240 float=center]
The presentation of the game is done well and graphically there is nothing to complain about, one minor observation is this is a port of the PC version which had 4:3 display and if you have a widescreen TV you will have black borders on the side. The music is not too bad although it does get a little repetitive if playing a level for a length of time. The controls work well but if you have played isometric games in the past you may have an issue with the direction the cursor moves, pressing Up will move the cursor to the ‘North East’ on the grid, I am more used to the cursor moving ‘North West’ in isometric games, it is tricky to explain but I would have liked to see an alternative control option added as it sometimes got confusing when placing buildings quickly.
City Rain is a fun game although it does take a while to get to the more challenging levels, if you have the patience to stick with it you have a great game which is perfect for a quick five minute game due to the games design. There is plenty to keep you occupied for several hours, the Campaign mode will provide most of this but the extra Blockmania game is almost a game in its own right and has enough to keep you playing for a while. Sim City management style sims are a rare genre on indie games and City Rain fills the gap nicely, it gets a thumbs up from me.
City Rain costs 400 :MSPoints: and more information can be found on the Marketplace.
Competition Time!
We have one code for the full version of City Rain to give away courtesy of the developers. To enter all you have to do is answer the following Question:
If you could build your own city what would you call it and why?
Reply in the comments below with your answer, or you can follow me on Twitter (@emuholic) and @ me if you can manage it in 140 characters.
Rules and Information
– The deadline to submit your entry is Sunday 20th December at 23:59:59 GMT. The winner will be picked at random from all eligible entries and will be notified within 24 hours.
– Include your correct email address in the field if entering the comment giveaway as this will be used to contact you if you win, the email address is not shown to the public.
– Please only enter once, choose either the comment or twitter, multiple entries may be banned from this and future competitions. Retweeting my announcement does not count as an entry.
– You MUST be following me (@emuholic) if you are entering by Twitter, your entry will be disqualified if you are not following me.
– Anyone may enter but please remember that the token may not be redeemable if Indie Games are not available in your country. No alternatives will be offered, you can either give the code back to us and we will pick another winner or you can give it to someone else.
0
