Deck The City Halls: Concrete Jungle Out Now
Deck the malls
We talk a lot about spiritual successors to beloved games. "Cities Skylines," you might say to a friend, "is a spiritual successor to SimCity." If that's the case, you might also say that city management deck-builder Concrete Jungle [official site] is a spiritual predecessor. It was released this past Thursday and there's a launch trailer below.
Concrete Jungle swaps out most of the simulation and micro-management found in your average city developing game and replaces it with deck building. It's in many ways a simpler metaphor for a city, but it adds an "extra serving of strategy," according to last year's successful Kickstarter campaign video. The building-as-card metaphor facilitates puzzle-oriented city planning as, as each police station, home or factory you place comes with allotted points which affect its surrounding neighbouring tiles.
The aim, then, is to 'clear' city blocks, gathering enough points along each vertical row of the game world in order to cause it to vanish, the map to scroll, and for new development opportunities to become available. As you expand, so too does your architectural arsenal, but success is governed by how your new patch fits alongside your old one as you wind up fighting against your ten-minutes-ago self. And it turns he/she was an idiot.
You can check out the tourist board-inspired launch trailer below, but I'd recommend the Kickstarter video for a better sense of how it all works. Oh, and Graham checked out an in-development version earlier this year. He liked it.
Concrete Jungle costs £11.99/$15.99 on Steam with a 10% launch discount, $14.40 via Itch.io and £10.79 via Humble.