City Rain Game Review by Tim Peters
Game Rating = 2/5
What do you get when you cross SimCity with Tetris? Mother Gaia Studio provides an intriguing answer in City Rain. With a disappointingly limited demo, it’s difficult to tell exactly what to expect out of the full version. What you can expect, however, is an unusual mix of city planning and split-second decision-making that makes the demo at least worth a look.
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As mayor, your goal is to create a thriving city. The usual city-building conventions apply: Supply power, meet your citizens’ needs, manage your budget. What’s different is that all the buildings fall from the sky. Your citizens don’t mind this for some reason, as long as you don’t destroy existing buildings with the new ones. This is generally an easy task until curveballs get thrown your way. Trash is the most common adversary, often appearing just when your last landfill (the only place you can drop trash without penalty) is full. The unexpected appearance of city blocks (shaped like Tetris blocks) also complicates things, as well as the occasional tornado.
Unfortunately, after twenty minutes of play, City Rain completely runs out of steam.
With three difficulty settings that only adjust the speed at which everything falls, there’s very little to keep you playing City Rain once you’ve figured out how to make a city that doesn’t implode upon itself. The videos on Mother Gaia Studio’s website for the game promise petitions and a larger playing field. But since the demo is available only in Flash and not as a standalone file (as the full version would be), there’s no way to tell what’s included or even how it runs other than by its list of features. City Rain’s demo is so limited that it doesn’t offer a clear picture of what the full version is like.
What can be determined from the demo is that there are some nice visuals. The buildings tend to look a bit too similar to each other, but other than that, there’s not much to fault in the art department. The sound is a little too bland, however. The one musical track is generic easy listening, while the audio is little more than two or three sound effects and the advisors’ messages in accented English. The Brazilian developers don’t quite have a proper grasp of the English language – which is worst of all in the endings, which include such mangled messages as, “The people disapproves your administration.” None of these make the game any more tempting to buy.
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Buy The Game Now $9.99
With a selling price of only $9.95, City Rain might be worth buying. It’s a good concept with an acceptable presentation. The big problem is that the demo only demonstrates a concept, with only the vaguest example of how it’ll be presented in the full version. Without any sort of baseline to judge exactly how the final version plays, buying this game is totally a gamble. For that reason, City Rain gets a 2 out of 5.
