Kotaku impressions of the block, a small town building game

If 2022 was going to be the year of anything, it was the year of city building, a strategy subgenre that has exploded in popularity lately, especially on PC. While most efforts focus on sprawling urban landscapes and Viking outposts, Others make city builders with more systemsAnd the Bloc Going in the opposite direction.

If you have ever seen or played townscaperor DorfromantikAnd the Bloc He has a similar idea: to rebuild the city to its bare necessities, letting the player do nothing else but drop things on the map and enjoy whatever comes out of it.

Bloc Strip things closer to the bone, though; While these two games simulated a village, or at least the rural surroundings of the village, Bloc Only interested in one block. That’s all you get. There are no guidelines you need to follow, either, you get very little space and can build whatever you want on it.

At the start of each game you are randomly assigned a pattern (eg European and Middle Eastern), you choose the size of your block and then you are given a map with one tile pre-filled with something. From there you get your own tiles and you have to build from the center, placing a new structure (or park, or street) only when one touches the existing one.

That’s the whole experience. No hours, no dead ends, no perfect building paths, no energy needs, no public transportation, and no traffic jams. It’s almost more of a game than a game, like a LEGO engineering set or a box of wooden blocks, because there’s no right or wrong way to build anything here.

I was Criticism to say the least Ixion last week For her frequent involvement with the thing I love most about city builders: the zen-like experience of nurturing something and watching it grow. Here that’s it, and although this is pretty basic (And priced accordingly, at just a few dollars) I like Bloc For clarity.