If this sounds complicated and frenetic, it's really not. Luxury apartments whose inhabitants will only stay if certain services are provided for, almost floor-wide offices which require elaborate networks of diners and shops and basement support services before they'll deign to move in, and around all this you're forever ensuring that there are powerlines everywhere, easy access to elevators, that filth is cleaned regularly. The very visible growth, as a stump becomes a tower becomes a skyscraper becomes an oddly placid Mega-City One superstructure, is pull enough, but on top of that you've got high-end room types to strive for. This ties 'progress' to cash very directly, and very limited scope to adjust existent floors means that focus is almost entirely on what you can build next rather than improving what you've already got. Though there is a small amount of horizontal flex (which more or less boils down to 'do you want to make your tower unhelpfully skinny or not?), really all you're doing is building ever-upwards, not creating a bespoke grand design. Cash has always been the primary constraint to building in these games, but Project Highrise offers a particularly condensed take on it. I suppose it's not enormously dissimilar to how a Sim City-like does it, in a way. Highrise is strictly about the hunger to build more. If you squint a bit, you can probably tell yourself it's a Trump Tower, but don't go in expecting Ballardian commentary about what happens when too much humanity is squeezed into one place and expected to make nice. Layer upon layer of offices and apartments, and all the facilities said offices and apartments need: power and water and phones and cable TV, launderettes and copy services and janitors and, as the tower becomes a monster, grocery shops and clothes shops and vast diners and art galleries and, well, a functioning city all under one roof. It's about waiting for cash to accumulate in sufficient quantities that you can build One More Floor. ![]() ![]() But this is not truly a game of strategy, despite appearances and despite the inclusion of water pipes. (In fact, Highrise even makes a point of freezing itself with a pop-up message at the end of every in-game day in order that it can't be gamed this way). In fairness, you tend to be busy dragging powerlines or placing offices most of the time - it's not a matter of leaving the game to play itself for a while then coming back to reap the rewards a few hours later. I know the words 'Sim Tower' are flickering hungrily across the hind brains of readers Of A Certain Age, but I should say off the bat that Highrise has the mentality of an idle or clicker game as much as it does a sim. Building skyscrapers is compulsive work, or at least that's how building sim Project Highrise pitches it. ![]() Perhaps the Bhurj Khalifa and and Shanghai Tower were not, after all, overblown acts of inter-continental willy-waving, but instead the result of builders and architects who could not resist the temptation of another neatly-wired layer of offices.
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