Big City Stories (PS4) Review

 

The Playstation 4 exclusive game 'Big City Stories' often gets described as a mix of GTA and Sim City. This comparison isn't totally inaccurate, but probably makes the game sound cooler than it actually is.

The players take the role of a newly elected mayor, who has to manage his city, by constructing buildings, upgrading them and completing missions for the local citizens. The big difference to other city building simulators is that the game is to a large degree being played in the third person perspective as the mayor.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, neither gameplay aspect is strong enough to convince players to stick with the game. The GTA inspired gameplay is in the best case a cheap knockoff. The missions are pretty repetitive and neither exciting nor very engaging. You must simply collect stuff, drive around and upgrade buildings. This form of gameplay gets boring after a few hours at most. There are also some minor framerate issues. Nothing too big, but also not really justified by the underwhelming visuals. Additionally there were some AI, Physics and visual Glitches. Again nothing game-breaking, but these do eventually add up as well.

At least the dialogues and quest texts are a bit funny. The police for example orders you to build a donut shop and you can negotiate with a bunch of Zombies, who took over the local mall.

The City Builder aspect is probably the stronger part of the game, but even that one can’t compete with dedicated City Building Simulations like Sim City, Cities Skylines or the Anno games.

A cool idea is the option to visit the cities of other players or a common Hub area in the form of a train station. Unfortunately there isn’t really anything to do there. You can simply chat with other players or show them your emotes/skins in the train station, which isn’t overly exciting and I didn’t experience any other meaningful interaction elements, when visiting other cities. A lot of potential was wasted in that regard.

Big City Stories also has two other major flaws. For one, it has a very restrictive region lock, which prevents players with Non North-American Playstation Accounts from playing this game. It is common for some games to not release in all playstation store regions, but usually you can still play all of them regardless of your account region, once you downloaded them. Big City Stories on the other hand excludes you from playing it on a different account for no reason at all. I don't want to call it racism, but it is needlessly restrictive and discriminatory.

The other really big flaw are the P2W aspects in this game. Big City Stories isn’t really P2W since you are not directly competing with other players, unless you are simply comparing your city to theirs. Nonetheless, it is extremely frustrating that you will run out of labour very quickly, which is needed to construct buildings or buy improvements for them. Your available labour points will reset after a day, but you can also simply buy as much labour as you want from the cash shop. Furthermore there are some buildings, which happen to be very useful, which can only be bought with real life money. This stinks!

Another weird aspect of Big City Stories is its obscure shutdown announcement. The game was scheduled to shut down on the 1^st of April 2023. In May however the game is still being playable, which leaves a couple of possible explanations. Either the shutdown got indefinitely postponed due to new found success of the game, the devs simply forgot about the game and its servers, or the shutdown date of the first of April was some kind of Aprils Fools joke to have some free marketing for the game. In this case I could just say: What a sick joke! In any case the developers should stop ghosting the players and make some kind of official statement in regard to the servers and the future of the game.

 

Result:

Big City Stories has a cool concept as a third person city building game with GTA inspired gameplay elements. Sadly the game is less fun than it sounds. The on-foot/driving as well as the city building gameplay are too shallow and, in combination with strong Paying Incentives and plenty of Glitches, leave too much to be desired. Before the novelty wears off and the flaws off the game become too apparent, players might nonetheless find some enjoyment or amusement in Big City Stories.

 

5/10