Tinytopia exam - The perfect Starter Citybuilder

I really like city builders. This probably comes from my debut to play strategy games like Starcraft, Age of Empires, and hero of power and magic. Balancing resources and expenses, trying to earn efficiency is an endless task that is surprisingly fun because you feel that you can still do better.

But at the same time, I understand that many people are very interested in cities builders for their aesthetics. Design beautiful streets and dispose of the architecture is satisfactory in itself. The problem is that many people are shown by the spreadsheets and the economy too complicated behind all this. It is here that inytopia arrives, a game where creativity is privileged on the strategy, making it the perfect introductory title for the Citybuilder.

The thing that really defines tinytopia except visually is that everything is a toy! Buildings, trees, environment and even people are small toy blocks you have on your tray. It really takes this childhood fantasy to create your Lego city (which, in all honesty, are the city's sims) and transform it into a full game!

The playfulness of it even has an impact on the gameplay. Just as you did with your legos, you can stack buildings on each other, creating monstrous custom buildings to which you alone could have thought. But be careful! There is physics in play, and if you do not use your structures or do not provide them with sufficient support, it will collapse dramatically. This aspect is, in my opinion, the best part of INYTOPIA. From the artistic freedom to build the craziest tower possible, it offers the game so much pleasure and player expression. There are even levels of challenge on crazy structures, such as trying to build a city on a rocking swing, ensuring balancing both sides of the ladder.

We can not forget everything to overthrow everything, which was probably the only good thing to have to store my toys. There are so many ways to sow chaos in your city too! Meteors, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc., you can even use them to see if your city could withstand these natural disasters. Or even more fun, you can invoke Godzilla or extraterrestrials to wreak havoc, where you can even place defenses to see your toys try to fight the invasion. At the end of the day, you can simply push on a building to see it so collapse like dominoes.

The economy and logistics of tinytopia is, as I mentioned, very easy to understand. Working mainly from a check-out system, you only need to provide all your citizens with jobs, electricity, health care and security by placing the respective buildings around their homes. On the resource side, all you need to worry about is the money, and make sure you win more thanks to the tax (which is your only income) that you do not spend to operate your facilities.

It feels like the game has been really designed for new citybuilders players. He teaches some of the basic principles, such as checking thermal cards and make sure you press as many people as possible within your facilities. For experienced players, it's quite easy to do, and once your city is on foot, you will have money that will flow faster than you could never spend. Sometimes it looks like a busy job because it does not really take a lot of reflection or planning, but you have the opportunity to disable it if you play in sandbox mode.

I have the impression that there is a little missed opportunity here however. I was a little disappointed that emergency buildings did not have a higher range because you could have a massive tower and a small doctor's office on the first floor could take care of everyone above. As it is so much fun to stack structures in this game, it would be interesting to have to handle the needs of citizens at a hundred floors. I just wanted to create my own dystopic mega structure and simulate it, is it too much to ask? Probably.

As for the ease of all this, even balance the numbers to be more difficult as you play subsequent scenarios could have add a certain challenge. It also paves the way for new actors to improve in the most complex parts of urban planning. Or even a good old difficulty setting to keep it interesting for older players.

I think Tinytopia is an excellent game for the young audience, especially for those who want to dive their toes in cities building games. Fun, creative and full of destruction! However, for veteran players looking for a new complex system in which to dive, I would certainly look elsewhere. __