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(More customer reviews)If you've played a tycoon simulation before, you'll find Tycoon City: New York vaguely familiar. You know, you're the boss, and you'll be fully responsible for how your business grows. In Tycoon City: New York, the business is to build an empire in the city of New York. And to a certain extent, it provides quite an entertaining experience of doing so, even though the effect isn't quite as lasting as it could've been.
Before you begin, you'll be asked to choose a mode of play. Seasoned tycoon gamers, or those who simply want a more open-ended quest, can choose the "Sandbox" mode, which basically gives you the entire island of Manhattan, and the freedom to do almost everything with it. Almost, because some of the famous landmarks can only be built if you manage to achieve certain status. The Sandbox also allow you to turn off competition completely, but that's hardly what you want to play a game for, is it?
The "Build New York" mode is more structured, since it's actually the main campaign mode of the game. This offers tutorials on the various aspects of the game as you progress, as well as some missions along the way to keep the interest going. Missions come in the form of "opportunities", and fulfilling them will help improve your standing as a tycoon. An opportunity, for example, could be the influx of students into your district. To satisfy these students, you'll need to build street fashion retail shops, internet cafes, burger joints, and so on. Doing so will rake in the profits, which will in turn allow you to build more businesses. To fully complete an opportunity mission, however, you'd still need to achieve the objectives given by the game, which usually require you to hit a certain percentage of certain ratings. These are not difficult to achieve, but some level of multi-tasking is required to truly excel.
The rewards of completing a mission could be new items in your Build menu, or even Landmark Points, which you can use to build prominent landmarks. At the time of writing, I've built the Greenwich Church and the Greenwich Courthouse Library, which is not too bad for a few hours of play, I guess. Having landmarks in a district greatly increases its rating, and soon after you build them, you'll find yourself unlocking new districts where you can further strengthen your empire.
The strength of your empire is measured by your total earnings. It's therefore important to identify the needs of the people in the districts, and build businesses to satisfy them. Each business has a sphere of influence, which basically shows you how far its reaches in terms of fulfilling needs. You can also upgrade a business by improving its appeal and satisfaction level, but you'd need to accumulate upgrade credits to do so. Each business also has a fixed amount of upgrade limits, so you'd need to juggle between your resources, as well as each business' limitations. This could turn out to be quite a challenge. Also, if you fancy a competitor's business, you can always buy it over. It's usually expensive to do so, but the takeover could still proved to be fruitful if it's raking in profits by the truckload daily.
Tycoon City: New York is primarily focused on business, rather than infrastructural expansions. Sure, you create buildings all the time, but they only take a few seconds to be completed, letting you go straight into enhancing the businesses right away. Unfortunately, the game gives very little control over your finances. Apart from earning profits, and the odd sale of existing businesses, you won't get much opportunities to further your earnings. The game would have appeal better if it allows some level of business micromanagement. For example, after adding an advertising billboard to increase an appeal of a building, it'd be more fun if you can actually sell the advertising space for cash. Nonethelss, this is not a major issue.
The main issue for Tycoon City: New York is the limited gameplay. You'll find yourself clicking on empty plots of land, and creating new businesses. And that's basically it. Even with opportunities and expansions, what you'll effectively do over the course of the game is to click on empty plots of land, and create new businesses. This is exactly why the game gets old very quickly, even though it has the potential to be highly addictive.
Presentation wise, Tycoon City: New York is definitely a looker. The infrastructural models look solid, with great details on each type of building. A sense of appropriateness also comes into play for the upgrades, since you can add display items for your shops so that they look better. So, a restaurant may have an additional seating area outside the shop, a retail shop may have a bargain bin, and a night club may have a bouncer. All these add to the variety of graphics, and you can't help but stop and admire at these additional details from time to time.
The audio presentation is a little weak by comparison. The music is rather boring, and the voice-overs (yes, you do get to see people talking) are bland. But at least Deep Red included a nice little identification jingle for each type of building. This is seldom seen in games of this genre, and is quite a pleasant touch to accommodate the slow gameplay.
Overall, Tycoon City: New York is an enjoyable game. It's straight to the point, it's visually beautiful, and to a certain extent, it may even have mass appeal - who doesn't like making money? What drags it down is its overly mundane gameplay, and the lack of a real challenge. If you're simply looking to enjoy a tycoon game without ever risking the chance of losing the game, Tycoon City: New York should just do the trick.
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