City RAIN is a cross between a city simulator and a puzzle game in which the player is recruited to be an officer of RAIN (Rescue And Intervention Non-profit), an organization committed to raising environmental awareness, and fighting the corruption of politicians and big business. Small towns all over the world are being taken advantage of by a large corporation that bribes the local politicians to let them do their harmful business in town. RAIN travels from town to town and, with your help, strives to get the city off of the WEPA blacklist.
Pursuit
There are three game modes, each of which offer a completely different way to play the basic mechanics. In all of them, the core play is the same—buildings fall from the sky Tetris-style, and the player must make quick descisions about which buildings are needed in which parts of town. Dropping buildings on top of the same type of building upgrade the building, and dropping it on a different type destroys the old one. Some of the drops are garbage, which must be dropped into a landfill, so that it doesn’t overflow into the city. Occasionally a “block” of buildings will fall together, and the player must find a way to fit them into the city without tearing too many other buildings down. Overall, it’s an interesting and fun puzzle mechanic that isn’t too fast, but still imparts a sense of urgency, since the livelihoods of the citizens depend on the decisions (and those decisions require more tactical thought than a straight puzzle game).
The level select screen shows how the city will look at the beginning.
In the main campaign mode, the player goes from city to city, in a series of increasingly difficult quests. Each city has different problems, and most levels introduce a new building type to the Special builds menu (where the player finds the buildings which are limited to one per city). Each city has a series of goals which must be completed in a certain number of turns. The first few missions are broken down into easy teaching chunks, as a tutorial, while later quests require the player to figure out how to get to certain goals on their own. This is the most fun mode—being the focus of the game—and this is where the story of RAIN comes out. The learning curve is just right, showing the player new buildings and techniques fast enough to feel fresh, but slowly enough not to overwhelm. The player has to keep an eye on a series of bars on the HUD which show how the city is doing—similar to other city simulators. Each residential zone needs access to Police, Schools, Shopping, and jobs in order to keep the scores high, and the city needs to have enough power to keep everything running. Once the goals for each city are resolved, play moves to the next city.
The special buildings menu
The Quickplay mode allows the player to start from scratch and build their own city on a blank map. Play is just as in the campaign mode, except there are no goals to accomplish, the objective is just to keep the city working for as long as possible without destroying too many buildings.
Bars in the HUD show the player how the city is doing from moment to moment
Blockmania mode is a more classic puzzle experience. The player is given a blank map to start, and every drop is a differently shaped “block” of buildings. In this mode, locations of each building are irrelevant—all the player needs to worry about it getting all the blocks to fit on the grid without destroying too many buildings.
Panorama
The game looks good, but not spectacular. There aren’t any particle effects or eye-candy, nor is there even any real 3D—just isometric sprites on a grid. It looks sort of like SimCity 3000. It also sat inside a bit of a black border on my screen. This isn’t in any of the promotional screens, so it’s likely an issue unique to my monitor’s resolution.
Gimmicks
The quests are centered around improving the environment or destroying big business interests.
The big idea here is Environmentalism. The plot of the campaign mode is based around RAIN’s fight with a specific major corporation which seems to have a stranglehold on all these poor cities. Every quest is sheathed in diatribe that basically boils down to: “Big company bad. Big corporation bad. Forests good.” The fault is always placed with the corporation and the politicians, and if you can only make the people in the town aware of what’s going on, they won’t stand for it. Sometimes it feels a bit preachy, but after awhile, it became easy to ignore, and start to think of the goals in terms of just improving the city, rather than fighting the corporation. For the most part this focus on environmentalism doesn’t effect the actal mechanics of the game. In fact, there is only one aspect of the mechanics that made me consistently remember that this was about environmentalism, and that was the garbage. As I mentioned, garbage falls throughout the game, and must be collected in landfills. At the beginning of each map, the garbage is about one in every four drops, which wastes turns, and quickly fills the landfill squares. If the player builds the Recycling Center from the special builds menu, that decrease by 95%, and without it, the city is much more difficult to manage. I’m not saying I expected realism in this game, but that aspect of the strategy seems a bit contrived.
Destroy too many buildings or take too many turns to complete objective, and you'll have to try the city again from the beginning.
Reigns
Getting the pieces where you want them is fairly straightforward, intuitive, and entirely mouse-based. Most drops consist of 3 – 6 buildings in a ring. The ring can be moved around the map with the mouse, and rotated with the mouse wheel. Whichever building is in the front of the ring when it hits the ground gets built on that spot (or upgrades an existing building). Blocks can be rotated and placed the same way. The left button drops the piece more quickly, and the left button opens the special build menu, which can also be navigated with the mouse.
Noise
The music is the only complete failure in this game. The puzzle music is a short loop of up-tempo jazz which gets old pretty fast. I had to turn off the music, and turn on Pandora in the background. There is no voice acting.
Encoding
A few of the quests are broken in that they sometimes don’t recognize that something has already been built. Thisis fine when it’s asking for a level two shop—you can just build a new one—but some goals include the need to build special buildings which are all limited to one per city. For example in Level 12, the second set of goals include a requirement to build a Recycling center, but if you’ve gotten into the habit of putting that in right away to keep the trash down, you already have one—making the quest impossible. Luckily each town can be completed in less than ten minutes, so starting it over is not a big loss.
Some of the story text contains obvious grammatical errors.
Last Word
All the goals for a city can be finished in just a few minutes.
City RAIN is a fun puzzle game with multiple modes and one toe in the city sim genre, making for an engaging and fast-paced urban planner experience—if you can look past its attempt to push a bit of environmentalism. For only ten bucks (on Gamersgate or Olovo Games website), there is no reason for any puzzle gamer not to give this one a try, especially if one also enjoys city sims.
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