Wild City

The game scratches the itch of what's next, but I wish it was a bit more balanced. The item descriptions don't always seem to match the effects of each card, meaning you'll place an animal or flower that says +10 if placed next to a card, then you play it and it doesn't work instead it really means if you place a card next to it that the card is worth x amount of additional points. Progression is also somewhat locked to some severe difficulty... needing to beat an entire run just to unlock another character was a huge grind. If this had one more quality of life pass I could see it being gold. For now i'll still give it the thumbs up.

This is such a clever score chasing tile laying game. The gist? Place hexes (often 2 or more linked together like some sort of hex based Tetris) representing animals, plants, and buildings next to one another in a limited space to reach the target score within a limited number of turns. The key to reaching these scores is learning how to maximize the score of your every tile by following their scoring rules. Ants like to link up to one another, spiders like to pounce down on other bugs, humming birds love being next to flowers, etc.

Linear, Repetitive & Stale While I did in fact enjoy the hexegonal strategy, once the first run was over, I realized exactly what the game was. It was an unrewarding time sink, where if you don't succeed on your first run, you get nothing. No new units, no new mayors, no new content, just a slap on the wrist followed by a "Do better next time, for a new mayor." Each path is the same, each run, unless you choose a different bracket of elements, even then being forced to choose a new card after every encounter, quickly bloats your deck, so you aim towards a beetle 200% luck or beetle $100 build to counter the default cards and stack up legendaries and specific structures that have great synergy, even then, unlocking anyone after Micha, is just... It's just such a damn chore, I played for 5 hours (steam offline mode doesn't count) and outside of just never finding a good deck or fun deck, the royalty free music and lack of atmosphere, just slowly drove me insane. Conclusion It wasn't really all that fun. It lacked depth and replay value that rewarded success. Video Review TBD https://youtu.be/MzNE7pqdHVE Please consider following my Curation page. I cover a wide range of genres both paid and unpaid, providing unbiased opinions as well as regular giveaway events.