My experience of simulation games started with Theme Park back in the early nineties, stretching along similar titles like Theme Hospital and Rollercoaster Tycoon. I never got into the Sim City world, as it looked far too big to just jump right in and get involved without ruining the lives of several thousand virtual folk. Luckily, in TCNY you can build you own version of the most famous city in the world without the help of a hundred-page instruction manual.
Being used to managing smaller projects such as mis-managed theme parks and inefficient hospitals it is quite daunting to load up TCNY, as a plethora of menus and tabs run down all sides of the screen, each one filled with all the information you could possibly want. Luckily when you click on any tab for the first time it tells you what information is in each tab, and you’ll only need to check a few of them every so often anyway. Getting around the city is pretty simple too, and after a quick tutorial you’ll be flying over and between your buildings pretty easily.
Deep Red has done an excellent job of recreating New York in an attention to detail not seen since The Getaway. Each district is teeming with different types of citizen, all of which you can zoom in on and find out what makes them tick. The streets are crammed, the roads are gridlocked and skyscrapers rise high into the sky, looking huge even in the zoomed-out blimp view. The city hums, beeps and buzzes like a real city should and when you zoom in you’re disoriented by the murmurs of the dull chatter of your virtual populace.
After the tutorial you’re subjected to a really long cut scene with the very perky student residents of Greenwich Village, your first district and thus begins your first challenge. As simply building shop after shop followed by a couple of hotels can get stale very quickly, you’re given challenges along the way. These have a couple of variations but 90% of them require you to build several types of entertainment or services to satisfy the population of your current district. This, for example, would mean building more coffee houses and bars in the student-y Greenwich and more fashionable stores in the upmarket SoHo.
The main aim of the game is to see what your population want (via happy smiley faces in the menus) and then build things accordingly. Unfortunately that’s about it, and even making a profit isn’t particularly tough. It helps to build the same types of shops together but if you accidentally stick a supermarket in the nightlife area you won’t go bankrupt because of it. Eventually the building will break-even, which just seems to make me question the point in any kind of marketing strategy in this game…
In order to make your buildings more profitable (basically faster, you can’t make a loss) you have points available to upgrade each building. These vary on the type of building (accommodation, café, museum), and are little things like neon signs, extra chairs and benches, trees and shrubs and satellite dishes. There are literally hundreds of add-ons you can plaster your buildings with that make them more desirable, each statistically adding appeal. This is where the problems arise, as a few items for each building typically offer the best appeal increase for the least points and you’ll end up filling your shops with the same three items across the board. This means that instead of creating a city where no two buildings are the same you’ve got the same flags running down your hotels and benches outside all of your shops (benches are the best upgrade item for some reason). Some of the upgrade items don’t make any sense either; apparently in order to make my trendy Dance Club more appealing I needed to stick bloody great Water Towers on the top of it!
Now I know I didn’t want to run the whole city when I came into the game but after about twenty minutes I reached the peak of control for the whole game and I wanted more. After buildings have been built and “upgraded” they pretty much never need to be looked at again, except for curiosity in seeing how much money they’ve made. You have very little control in the buildings themselves, which never need renovations or repairs. You don’t have control over utilities construction, policing or anything quite essential that you’d associate with running a whole city either.
There are no fires, riots, fines, planning restrictions or anything controversial or challenging at all in the game. There is no real way to lose money in the game and as mentioned earlier any business mistake can be recuperated in a matter of minutes. Your apparent “competition” is in the form of several electronic entrepreneurs, all of whom have the financial savvy of Michael Carroll (a persistent offender and moron of some repute who won £9.7 million on the national lottery). If a competition building does happen to crop up next to one of yours you’ll have so much money you simply buy them out as soon as it’s built.
Tycoon City: New York is a very pretty game with an engrossing walking, talking city. It just lacks any kind of challenge whatsoever, making it more a computer model of New York rather than an actual game.
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