SubaraCity (3DS)

 I discovered this game while trying to find a city building game for 3DS. I didn't find one, so if anyone can recommend any, please let me know. Well, it is about building cities in a literal sense, but it's not a city building game like Sim City or something. It's a puzzle game, like Zookeeper or Sega Swirl, that is themed around buidling a city. 

 

How it works is that there are buildings/people/trees/etc. in a few colours on a grid. If they're the same colour and touching, they can be fused together into a higher-quality building. You pick which of the multiple squares the buildings being matched together go into, leaving empty spaces where the rest of them are.Then more buildings fall down to fill the empty spaces. Or, since the game is played looking down from above, the new buildings fall southwardly. It doesn't really make sense either way, so don't worry about it. Once a building reaches level ten, its colour changes to white, and it can only be fused with other level ten buildings. When you do this, the level of the new building is determined by how many level tens are being fused: two of them become level eleven, three become level twelve, and so on. 

 

As you're doing this, two numbers are going up. The first is population, which is your score. It goes up depending on the levels of the buildings you create, and gets a massive boost every time you make a ten plus building. The other number is the year. It starts at the year 2000, and goes up a year for every action you take. You've also got an expendible resource called mayor marks, which let you destroy one building. You start with two mayor marks, and get another every time you pass another century, and every time you make a building that's level fifteen or higher. The game ends when you've got no buildings of the same colour touching each other and you have no mayor marks with which to make space.

 

The presentation is kind of interesting, too. Visually, it's pretty much exactly how you'd expect: cute little buildings and people, all very clean and toy-like in appearance. But the music is completely bizarre. It's good, I'm not denying that, but it's also incredibly ill-fitting. You're playing this cute little puzzle game, all while the 3DS is playing this dramatic, doom-laden apocalyptic score that almost sounds like it could be made up of castoffs from the Akira soundtrack! 

 

This is a fun game, and incredibly addictive. After installing, I immediately played through an entire charge of my 3DS' battery in one sitting. Apparently, it's also available on pretty much every other modern platform, so if you want to give the developers some money (that they definitely deserve, and which I'll be doing as soon as possible), get one of those versions rather than (or in addition to) the 3DS one.