When people buy a product, they usually want a finished product (would you want to buy a computer without a hard drive?) So, when I first heard that Introversian Sofware would be releasing it’s new management game Prison Architect in its alpha stage, I was extremely doubtful that it would succeed. Well, I’m wrong. Completely wrong. The game is still in its alpha stage, and has almost 100,000 downloads. In a way, this early success is reminiscent of Minecraft’s early attraction to gamers which has made it an extremely successful game. Upon finding this discovery, I immediately bought the game in order to find out what the obsessions was about.

After playing through a level that doubled as both a well written introduction and an easy to follow tutorial, I found myself in front of an open plot of land, with one goal: to build a jail in 24 hours game time (≈10-20 minutes depending on speed of game) Off I was, creating a foundation for the jail, adding in the doors, putting in some electricity, and voila I have a holding cell! After toying around with the menus, I got a kitchen and a shower area, the bare basics of my prison. After taking out a government issued grant, I hired a warden and some guards and in no time the prisoners arrived.

I ordered my well paid guards to put them in the holding cells until their private cells were ready, and planned out the cell area with the extremely efficient planning tool. To make a long story short, my jail failed when my showers were too small, causing some chaos, but resulted in my guards getting stabbed, and my prison getting breached. If only I had put in a metal detector!

Prison Architect is bound to set a lot of standards in the management simulator genre, and is only in its alpha stage. Personally, I loved the uniqueness of this game. In what other game should you be worried about a prisoner smuggling a knife out of the kitchen to start a riot? I have played a lot of simulator games too, and Prison Architect by far gives me the most freedom to do what I want. Usually, this freedom comes with limitations, the most common being the AI not going to certain places to do certain things, but I haven’t run into that problem yet. While I am talking about all the positive things about this game, I must, in order to write a fair review, talk about the bad things. The first being the fact that it is still in its alpha stage. Even though it is well polished and bugs are kept to a minimum, the game needs more content. Nonetheless, this purchase was extremely worth it and this game has been one of the most entertaining simulator games I have played yet.

The Rundown:

Game- Prison Architect

Genre- Simulator

Tags- Strategy, indie

Price: $30

Where can I buy it?

http://www.introversion.co.uk/prisonarchitect/

http://store.steampowered.com/app/233450/

Helpful Links:

Subreddit

Official Forums