Having the citizens interact with you as both an overseer of the town and also some kind of God really puts things into perspective, but I never wanted to crush them, only help them. What the hell, Buddy, I can’t do everything at once. Then he had the nerve to ask me to build him a brick road leading to his mansion. I honestly though Buddy Prince would be better as a dog groomer than a dancer, and, wouldn’t you know it, I was right. Kairosoft does this fantastic job of making you invested in your little people, and it’s only gotten stronger and better as they continued to make titles. This isn’t like some old school board game: you apply to become a new job, and there’s a chance they won’t get it, which is displayed in a crushing animation of depression. After a certain number of months, you can add more buildings, and you can, potentially, make residents change their jobs if they’re willing to take the risk. If you want citizens to educate themselves and drive up the value of the land around them, you not only need to provide the tools, but actively make sure they’re using them by making them appealing and removing distractions.Īs the town expands and more people come flocking in, the Kairosoft detail really goes into effect and you begin to see the magic of Venture Towns. After five in-game years of building my city, there were still fewer than fifteen people living there, and not all of them were on the ball with helping to make the city great. That’s a big caveat of Venture Towns in comparison to other city simulations: the scale means you’re really dependent on those who live there. There can be libraries, parks, all manner of great, inspiring things, but some people will choose to flock to the casino if you’re foolish enough to build one. You can have a ton of different businesses that will provide jobs and employment, but their inherent nature (which you cannot control) will, initially, bring them to one place as opposed to another. For example, you can build up a thousand Chinese restaurants, but your patrons will decide which ones become successful and which ones fail. This game allows you to have SOME direct impact on your residents, but most of it is tangential. You have a theoretical 20 years to accomplish your goal of hitting a particular size and value, though you can continue to play after you hit this milestone to really see how far you can go. You get dropped into a grid map, you’ve got a couple of inhabitants, and now you’ve got to build and expand your humble burb into something sprawling and terrifying. Venture Towns takes a very recognizable route, especially if you’ve played any of Kairosoft’s other games. Thus, we begin the journey of Venture Towns, the cutest Sim City variant that you could imagine. As much as I love what they do, the core of it is simulation games: they simply need to help capture the idea of some kind of job (game developer, soccer manager, bakery owner) and put their own adorable twist on it. Kairosoft is such a fantastic company that constantly churns out similar ideas over and over again with small twists. Is there anything better than being able to bilk folks out of their hard earned cash through legal extortion, blatant exploitation and otherwise unsavory business practices? Why, yes, there is: doing it in an adorable game, so that way no one really gets hurt and you can be completely insane without worrying about the government trying to jam you up.
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