Firstly, I would like to point out that I know I am being quite critical. These are FREE games (sometimes prototypes), and you might as well still check them out. These are made by (hopefully) nice people, they certainly are not cash grabs or troll games, and my criticisms are mostly for fun.

This blog post features Cubeland, Memory Leak, and Pixel Town.

Any feedback for the developers is useful! So take what I say with a pinch of salt, a sprinkling of vinegar… and now I fancy fish and chips. I enjoy writing about how developers can improve their games, and so here I go!

This is a clicker-style game without the clicking. You have two types of buildings and two variables. Houses use food to generate electricity, and farms use electricity to generate food, and that’s really it. These are the only two variables in the game (the third counter you see just shows how many simulation ticks have passed), and you will spend the entire game building houses and farms to increment these two variables.

You do unlock more shaped buildings, but from what I can gather they simply are more expensive, higher capacity houses and farms. The screenshots from the website do imply something more complex, just look at the number of different buildings in the background to the right of the tutorial image below. Nonetheless, I got bored before I could unlock them, and if my prediction is accurate, they simply increase the same two variables.

I will admit that at first, part of the fun was to try and figure out how the game works. The game is abstract, and that made it fun to tinker with, briefly. Unfortunately, you had better enjoy working abstract things out because the tutorial is not very helpful:

But that fun wears out once you work out the simple rules of farms and houses. The green cubes were something I never figured out- you hover over them to remove them, but they remove themselves if they hit your buildings anyway. No idea if it was a good or bad thing that they hit my buildings, but no damage was shown.

I appreciate that they avoided having pages of text, but some extra text would have been helpful. In particular, the green cubes should have been explained!

A fire happened in my city, but there was nothing that I could do about it (from what I could gather). Later in a bigger city, crop fields started to burn down to ash, and I couldn’t figure out how to replace them (there is a solution written later).

The game does not even tell you how much the buildings cost to place- this is usually standard in clicker (or in this case, non-clicker*) games. For me to figure it out, I had to keep trying to place the building over and over until I had enough power that it let me place it down. There is no feedback that the building is too expensive, or how much I have to save up for; you just have to memorize how much the buildings cost. It would have been nice for the game just to say “houses cost 100, and farms cost 250”.

*Clicker-lite?

I did watch the trailer for the game, which has this really bad black-flicker at the beginning. But I learnt something: you eventually unlock fire trucks that (I assume) get rid of fires! But it looks like you need to play the game for a LONG time to reach that. I stopped caring by this point.

When you zoom in or out the camera towards or away from the city, the game flickers and then you’ll notice that the graphical user interface (GUI) has also either shrunk or enlarged!

I don’t know if the flickering and GUI size change is a “feature”, or if the entire game’s screen resolution is actually being changed between zooming in and out, but it’s very weird.

A city builder set inside a RAM chip… even by the end of the game this concept did not make sense to me.

The goal is to fill all of the squares with buildings, as shown below there is one empty square in level one:

On the top left of the user interface is gold, the number of squares filled, and the population. When I first played this level, without thinking I quickly added a building and the game immediately showed me a Victory message! It was over too quickly for me to take in what had happened, and it was only after going back a second time did I realise that my goal was to fill in all the squares.

On its own the level does not communicate that goal very well. At first I wasn’t sure if it was due to me reaching a certain population, earning enough gold, or filling in the squares. The game did not even tell me what the objective was at the start or at the end! So yes, goal = fill the squares.

Level 2 has a similar problem. I was asked to build a factory, and the moment I built it I was greeted with another Victory message. I had no chance to learn what the factory did, nor what the house did in level 1. There’s a way to fix both levels: require the building to function a little in order to progress.

For example, in level 2 let’s say that there’s 2 empty squares instead of 1. Now the player builds the first factory, but now they can’t afford factory 2. So now they wait for gold to increase, giving the player a chance to learn that the factories produce gold, give them chance to take in the game itself for a few seconds (such as the UI), and when they build factory 2 they will know that the goal must have been to fill all squares.

Obviously, this cannot take too long; I’d hate a timer simulator. But it’s better than 2 levels in a row that can be completed instantly without the player having the chance to learn anything- what’s even the point of them levels if the player doesn’t learn anything?

Level 3 is much bigger, and so I took the time to think carefully trying to work out what to do. This was looking good so far, as it was fun to ponder my options, and not have a level that would immediately end. Next moment, the white guy stood in the city square started to disappear slowly. I hadn’t done anything yet! Then that city square burned down. Then…

And I had no idea what I did wrong.

So the next time I quickly added some more squares, but still the same problem. I then noticed there was a new button, and it seemed to add more people to each city square. So before they ran out, I needed to replace the people with new ones or else the square would burn down and the whole level would fail. No idea why this happened, and why it was not introduced earlier. Remember: people never used to randomly die in earlier levels, and the game had no warning that this rule had changed!

So the next turn, I alternated between rushing down loads of buildings while spamming out new people to replace the old ones. It worked… I apparently was victorious on that level.

By the way, has anyone figured out what these cities have to do with RAM yet?

Next comes level 4. You build a campus on the square and… oh the level is over. I restart it, to discover that over time the campuses are slowly filling up a research bar. When this research bar fills up, you unlock a new technology. Good thing I decided not rush the level the second time, or I would not have learnt this!

Level 5: here are were alters become unlocked. In my first attempt, I built two alters. I had no idea what they did, but I beat the level immediately. So next time I decided not to do anything, so I could take in the level. Next moment, half the level burns down. I realise that alters auto-refill nearby populations, so that they don’t rapidly die like in level 3.

Level 6: this took a few attempts due to how confusing it was! One thing I did not learn in any of the earlier levels was that houses cost maintenance, rather than produce gold! When I went back to an earlier level to investigate this, I realised that the developer set the maintenance charge to zero, so there was no way of learning this earlier. This is something that I did not learn until this point. This highlights how important it is to teach the player important concepts early on.

My buildings also kept losing population and dying, so I built alters- but these also drained money. In the end, I realised it wasn’t worth trying to take my time. At the start of the next go, I rushed down a couple of factories (that produced gold), then filled all the remaining squares with cheap houses as quickly as possible without worrying about alters and refilling the population. In between, I just had to spam fill squares with extra people. Victory message again.

Level 7 finally came along, and it looked too big and complicated for me to rush. I wasn’t really sure of what strategies I could use, what buildings did what, and after a couple of quick attempts I gave up.

I saved the best until last! I enjoyed this game quite a bit.

As you can see above, you start with a town hall. Your goal is to defend it (and future buildings) from the enemies that will crawl along from the pit above. I am on easy mode here, but more pits appear on harder levels.

Firstly, I played the tutorial. And yes it does teach you how to play the game! Hurray! Unfortunately, it is a bit delayed. It explained to me what people were, and told me to get 10. I completed the first objective, but nothing happened. So I added some more, to see if it needed to be higher than 10. Nope.

So then I just kept playing the level – the tooltips are clear in this game and made it easy to figure out what was going on without the tutorial hints. While I was a little confused at first what the terrain icons meant (the brown is forest, blue/green is fertile land for farms, and the grey is for ore mines) I did figure it out. Eventually, at about 30 people, the game congratulated me on reaching the 10 people and moved onto the roads tutorial after I had already built mostly everything!

The game is fun because you get to upgrade the houses with markets and wells, food does not immediately run out if you don’t have enough production (giving you chance to react and not have to keep restarting the game), and the game does not feel like a sluggish grind. It’s fast enough paced to keep your attention, and you can even speed the game up!

Building a town and defending it from enemies in a simplified simulation and short timespan is fun. It’s not too complicated, and it does give you freedom to experiment with different layouts.

The only problem I had (at least in easy mode) was the enemies. Because it is an open field, it is hard to predict how the enemies will attack you. As you can see above, the tower is bright green because I have not placed it yet- I am waiting for the monster to decide how it’s going to reach my base before I build it.

Afterwards, most of the enemies followed the same arbitrary path to my city. I had no idea when one of them would turn off and attack in another direction so that I would need to build another tower. This flaw is quite frustrating, because it’s difficult to know which part of your city needs defending.

Still, archers are very quick to place, so you can just watch the enemies and wait for them to approach you before building defences- it’s just not as fun as knowing where they will go and needing to build more elaborate traps (without making the game over complicated).

Maybe they could be replace with monsters that swim up the water, and there’s always a river leading to your town hall? Maybe multiple rivers in harder levels? Or at least use natural obstacles like forests and mountains to make these paths? It would have been nice to have a variety of towers which would make sense to add to the game when you know how the enemies are going to approach you.

Finally, just some minor things. The detection of the road button is off, as I kept clicking the button next to it! The other buttons seem to work fine.

Houses can be upgraded to have increased population by building multiple, nearby wells. Rather than 1 well increasing a house to level 2, and a market increasing them to 3/4, you can just build 3 wells. It somewhat spoilt it for me, I feel it is strange you can just either ignore the market or the well.

Other than that, it’s a fun little game.