I have always had a soft spot for city builders, through the years I've been surprised, pleased and disappointed with the entries that have released in the decades since SimCity. Sphere - Flying Cities manages to evoke all of these feelings.
The premise of Sphere - Flying Cities is similar to many city builders i.e. to build cities, but with a survival twist, instead of mining and harvesting resources like other city builders you need to explore the globe and find resources before you can harvest them. Sphere - Flying Cities takes place on a post apocalyptic earth and in the not-so-distant future, Earth’s moon has been struck by a massive asteroid. With the fallout rendering the terrestrial surface uninhabitable, the ecosystem of the planet collapses. Facing complete annihilation, humanity makes one final and desperate attempt to survive — thanks to newly-created anti-gravity technology, the first flying city ascends as the ultimate bastion of the human race.
You take command of one of these cities and take to the skies. The main feature of the city is the anti-gravity and deflector shield tower in the middle of the city. This tower is your most important building. This building keeps your city afloat, lets you fly around the globe looking for resources and manpower, and keeps your building safe from the hazardous winds, this is where the survival element comes into play.
Some areas will have hazards that will drain your shield but usually have good resources and/or escape pods full of potential citizens. Sometimes you'll need to make a decision about the escape pods, are you going to leave it? Take on all of them or only a portion? It all depends on the status of your flying city. Do you have enough resources to support so many people or for you have enough housing? All of this creates a pretty unique experience in the city building genre and I am all for it.
The bigger your city gets, the more power you need to power your tower so you can increase the field of the shield to protect the buildings from the hazardous winds, any building outside the shield will slowly break down. You can always send in drones to repair the buildings, which costs resources as well. This will keep you on your toes. You'll have to make decisions like: should I stay here in this storm to harvest these resources and eat the repair/energy cost or should I cut my losses and move to the next area which could be less hazardous with resources. To minimize the uncertainty you can send a drone out to scan an area to get an idea what is there before you commit the resources to the flight to get there. Do you have enough food and other resources to survive the flight?
These and many other questions will pop up over the duration of the game. Now some of you might be asking why I mentioned being disappointed earlier in the review and that comes down to user interface and the way the tutorial is absolutely non existent.
The game never teaches you anything, it only asks you to make something but never highlights or explains how to do the thing the game wants.
For example, the first thing the game tells you to do is: Build 2 Aid Houses. That's it. Nothing else, no explanation or highlighting the build button and which building it is. The whole tutorial is like this. Every single step is just a statement of what you have to do with no explanation on how to do it, which gets very frustrating fast.
I've had to restart the game about 8 times so far because failing to the survival aspects. With other city builders, you could always get out of a slump with some planning and it wouldn't actually end the game. But I guess it wouldn't be a survival game without a possibility of game over.
In conclusion: If you enjoy city builders and survival mechanics, and do not mind a frustrating (oh so very, very frustrating) tutorial then Sphere Flying Cities is the game for you. It is still in early access and who knows maybe they will fix the tutorial and flesh it out.
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