I have always been a huge fan of city builders, but I had to give them up recently. Not because I no longer enjoy them, but because they are such a humongous time sink. They usually demand dozens of hours to be able to see some valid progress, a single session can last you a week of playtime - easily. Some games escape that fate by bringing a strong narrative focus, like the astonishing FROSTPUNK series. But such titles are rare in this genre. But there's another way of tackling this problem, and indie space offers a handy solution - tiny city-builders! Some time ago I got my hands on TOWNSCAPER, a lovely little toybox about raising a city - it is, however, a toybox game, with no goals, no rush, no stress... More a creative painter of colorful and cozy urban landscapes.
MINI CITY: MAYHEM, however, brings with it a whole bag of goodies to play with. It is an arcade city builder, limited in scope, and demand for your time and attention, with each session lasting from just a couple of minutes to maybe half an hour. You might be asking, how can this be? It's pretty widespread between playtime, after all. The answer comes from the fact that the canny devs of this little title decided to spoil the players by bringing not one, not two, but five game modes to enjoy the game - each quite different from the other!
The primary mode is the titular Mayhem - this is where the game packs all of its mechanics to shine and offer a fun challenge with controlled difficulty. On tiny islands of square grids, you'll be tasked to develop a city by dropping tetris-like shapes of buildings to construct homes for the growing population. You are limited not only by space but access to roads - which you must build! - and funds that will limit your speed and ask you for wiser spending on sensible blocks. The buildings are color-coded, and matching the color to expand any construction is the best way of getting extra cash and housing. Some extra rules come with placing each shape - some can only be landed on ground level, others are roofings that will stop you from easier expansion upwards. As the levels progress in challenge and difficulty, more complex and demanding shapes will come.
But you're not alone on this journey! As you level up, and keep the city from overpopulation, various specialists and advisors will join your effort, giving strong passive bonuses to your strategy. And every now and then a choice between a special building will grant you a nice upgrade as well as some much-needed variety for the landscape of your town. Now, depending on the difficulty level you picked it can be a rather relaxing experience... Or a real rush, a relentless chase that will make you place new bits as fast as possible as the population growth will do its best to outpace your planning. It all gels together superbly well, giving me almost roguelike vibes for a city-builder, a pretty unique combination.
The second mode, Zen, goes for a different vibe. As you can guess from the name this one gives a very chill experience - no time limit, no population, no funds to watch over, just you, a map, and the limited number of blocks you must put down before you run out of space. It still requires some planning, but with no time pressure and a clear goal, it's a more relaxed way to enjoy raising your urban sprawl. The third mode, Sandbox, is an even more lax offshoot of Zen - a toybox to the fullest, a mode in which you have no rules, no limitations, and can just play with your blocks and buildings to your heart's content to create a pretty little city island of your dreams. I'll admit that it's a mode I played the least, because, well... The game's visual fidelity doesn't make me want to build cities in it to look at. It ain't TINY GLADE, that's for sure.
Then there are two arcade modes - Crane and Square Stack. Crane is pretty much a mobile game, feels like it was cooked as some sort of funny offshoot. You drop squares of buildings from a swinging rope to raise a tall tower, ending with a famous monument to wrap it up. It's rudimentary as heck, the physics of dropping the bricks are a bit... wonky... but it is a fun little intermission, a rapid mode to burn a few minutes in. Square Stack, on the other hand, sucked me in hard - reached floor 34 before I finally humbuged myself. With a tiny square, you need to fill up the entire floor to grow your build space by another floor. The time limit for placing each element is pretty tight - not punitive, but hardly lax. It's a dynamic arcade mode with a real sense of rush behind it, but it has a tiny downfall - the difficulty doesn't really grow as you raise your tower. If anything, simple tiredness and slipping focus might be the real challenge as you raise your tower, by doing the same thing over and over again. Still - had a blast with it, feels good to raise the tower high and mighty.
A small but notable addition - there are Leaderboards for everything! A small touch, but a welcome one for the more competitive-driven players who want to see their name on top of the charts, pushing the game levels and modes to their limits. Of course, the game just released, but yours truly is the king of Istanbul map, so, that's that. Feels good, not gonna lie. I am sure it wont last though, but I cherish my moment of glory!
MINI CITY: MAYHEM audiovisual are... servicable. It's not an ugly game by any stretch of the imagination. The tunes are jaunty, and a little energetic, and the clickiness of elements landing on their spots has that nice crunch to them. The visuals are colorful and vibrant, aiding the clarity of what's going on, but even here there are some minor issues. For example, some special buildings roofs look the same as regular buildings' roofings, often sparking a little frustration of 'why I can't place it here' before I realize my error. It would also be nice if the big constructions we create by stacking lots of shapes together had some fun little generations to them. Perhaps I am spoiled by other games here, but having a huge moloch of the same windows and the same cubes doesn't look great - some interactivity here would be good to have, like merging some windows into different visuals if a certain size is reached. Making different roofs if they are big enough in space? Some visual spice. But I understand why, perhaps, such an option wasn't added - it could potentially steal away visual clarity needed for fast decision-making.
There was also some technical buggery. Zen mode still likes to brick up a bit, suddenly stopping counting down placed buildings or replacing used cards. Sometimes a monument fails to be placed. Some other times a road piece will just disappear from the map, despite being placed - it still works, but makes an ugly little empty square in your city. Nothing serious, nothing completely game-breaking, but a final sweep of bug-fixing could be of benefit to smoothen the experience.
And finally, a very important bit that normally I don't mention in my reviews, but here it feels like a crucial bit. The game is almost comically cheap. Ridiculously low price for what you're getting in the bundle - five game modes, 9 levels, open sandbox to play with... A fantastic package, a great deal for these few bucks you can spend on a game. MINI CITY: MAYHEM is surely not a gaming revolution, not some giant invention in the genre. Sure, the rush mode has a creative spark and feels pretty damn great to play, but its small scope will run dry after a few hours. Other modes are a great touch of variety, some of them might even keep you rolling for a couple of hours more, but the game never feels like its aim is to be your 'forever title'. It's not CITIES: SKYLINES, that's for sure. But you will, absolutely, and without a doubt get a good bang for your buck here. If you like a city-builder and desire a quick jaunt into a fun puzzler with some fun ideas, you won't go wrong with this title. Simply put? It's a good one.
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