Project Highrise is a simulation game, one where a person takes over a tower and builds it. If that sounds a bit like SimTower, there’s an obvious reason for that. Project Highrise is one of many examples of new developers taking an idea from the 90s in gaming and modernizing it.
There are good examples, and bad example, but to me, I wasn’t sure until I rewatched someone playing the original SimTower, and I realized how much better Project Highrise was than the game that inspired it.
SimTower for those who never played it or don’t remember it is a game where a player built a tower with a ton of money and tried to get the highest rating. There was really one issue with the game and it is I told you the entire game in one sentence. While there are little things that happened, SimTower was like the original SimCities and was all about building a tower (or city). However, where SimCity also had scenarios, Simtower didn’t have much outside of a single mode where you build a tower and random things happened. The wasn’t a win or a goal and it was all about the simulation of the tower.
Project Highrise, on the other hand, was made in 2016, and while they could have made that same game, as a great many numbers of simulation games (farming, truck driving for example) have shown us. They also added Scenarios to the game, and this is where Project Highrise gets more interesting but also more troublesome.
To start with this is a game that really could use scenarios and the first scenario I played was great. After a failed start I actually put in about six hours straight and finally beat the first scenario with all three medals, (in fact I got the gold medal first). There was a great point in the game where I felt a tipping point and I just started destroying the economy, getting entirely too much money and was able to build almost at will.
Then the next day I came home and to unwind I started the second scenario. Here’s where the trouble began. The second scenario is different. It has different little contracts (mini-missions for decent money.) It has different rules (no offices in the second mission). And likely a higher difficulty (at least it’s marked as medium difficulty). Rather than making a large ecosystem, it seems I mostly built residencies and no one seemed to mind a lack of diversity.
It was slim pickings for a while but after I got over a small early deficit I started to make a decent some and then more and more money until I was building multiple floors a day. But this all took a VERY long time. At least three hours of scraping by, many days I would run on the faster time mode and by 6 am (one minute), I was done with the building, and then it was waiting for the full day to finish. In fact, I’m typing this up between days because there’s literally nothing to do when you run out of money. There’s not “Skip to next day” you’re just expected to wait and even at the highest speed, there’s a lot of waiting.
So you are getting a different experience from a new scenario but you again start from near scratch. After 6 hours starting from scratch does suck even with the new challenge. But that is the nature of simulation games.
I do however like the game, and the big piece is the gameplay and the “mood” of the people in the game. The experience of building a working building is good. There are really four types of buildings. A Residency that doesn’t require much. A restaurant that needs traffic. An office that usually requires other places to be built before it, and stores that need storage space.
Each of these are actually quite interesting and require some planning. There are noise and smell factors that can annoy residents or office workers. But you often need those things creating the noise and smells. You need to renovate locations to make it look better for the employees (if the employees get upset, businesses move rather than hire new employees). There’s a great deal of strategy in the building, but eventually, you’ll get a good cash flow going and it becomes routine, then you get to build the tower you want to make.
However there will be roadblocks, there’s a number of minor nitpicks that annoy me. When building infrastructure like electrical wires, you have the choice of filling a floor (expensive) or laying wire after wire (time-consuming.) You can’t just build to a specific point on the floor like you probably should be able to. When something is smelling or problematic most of the time there’s nothing you can do. If something is VERY bad, it’s sometimes (but not always) too late to resolve it, I’d love to say to someone “give me 24 hours to fix this.” Even when you do fix the problems, and the mood of the place is improving, it still can be too late and the tenant will be happy but move out anyways.
Those are most nitpicks, but the one thing I can say I really hate is the help text is often unhelpful. A good example is large office can’t be built as a tech office until other tech offices are built. However, it’s not clear what that is but there is a “creative and tech office” in the middle tier. But it doesn’t seem to work… because you need 13 of them. The game doesn’t hint if you make a right move, it only changes when you make all the right moves. Put down twelve of these offices and nothing changes, and thirteen is a LOT higher than I would have expected (usually you need 3 or four medium-sized places when it says something vague like that) Now there are guides to solve these problems, but I think forcing a player to use a guide for non secret information is a bad experience.
There are just a few micromanagement features like that which really needs an upgrade, and of course, a faster speed (or skip to next day) which the developers (who are very active on the steam forums, a good point) say cause too many problems. That’s unfortunate because if there’s one thing that really holds this game back it’s the very slow days after you’ve finished what you’re supposed to do.
A day takes 24 minutes, I believe the speedup is at a factor of 6, so a speed up day takes about 4 minutes. But often for three of those minutes especially during early days, I was waiting around.
But even with the slow start, and the monotonous gameplay loop, I have to be honest. I like this game. It’s not just Sim Tower, it’s Sim Tower as it always should have been. This is more like Sim City in a tower setting, different rules, and different challenges, not just a similar look, and I like a lot and to be honest, SimTower is far weaker than this.
I had a great six hours on the first game, where even when the game's economy “broke” and I was flush with cash and prestige, I was having a ball, I loved the building, and while the maintenance people could be faster, I loved the challenge of getting everything working. Even with tenants moving out, I still enjoyed trying to keep up with them. The second game/day’s six hours were still pretty good after the initial hour or two. I was having the same fun I was having in the first game.
So I’ll recommend this game. In fact, if you like the idea of a SimTower type game, 20 dollars is a good price especially if you plan on very long play sessions. There’s a lot of Scenarios, and a sandbox mode so there’s something for everyone, and it’s really fun to design towers. There’s a lot of nitpicks but for a first game and the first game in this genre for over 15 years, I can’t really complain too much. The devs are still active, making DLC and talking to fans, so I give this game a thumbs up. I’d be more excited to see what they can fix in a sequel but I can still enjoy myself with this game.
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4.0