Imagine a vertically aligned Sim City 2000 where, due to a lack of space, you have to build everything on top of each other... and it feels like a mobile game... and it plays like a mobile game.
In a nutshell, BalanCity is a simple city management game with a twist. The twist is that you always find yourself building on a shaky piece of earth that's balancing on a thin pillar. Your job is to provide for your people, grow your population, build monuments and most important, keep the balance. The primary goal is to get your population as high as possible. A simple enough task, in theory. Plopping down your first apartment blocks, you immediately see the first problem, your citizens have no power. Despite protests by Greenpeace, you fuel your city with coal power and do your part to melt the polar ice caps. And suddenly physics kick in and remind you that a coal power plant is much heavier than a couple of apartments. If you're quick enough you can deploy a few more living spaces to even things out. If not then your 15 seconds of hard work will be waiting for you at the bottom of the ocean. Everything is really simple, and that's my problem with it. I don't really hate the game, but I couldn't play it for long, just because of the simplicity. Nothing made me go forward, you simply build your town up. Sometimes, a meteor can strike your town, or a godzilla looking monster, or an earthquake just to shake things up a bit (pun intended) but you just fix everything in a few seconds and you're back at doing the same things over and over again. So, the game is simple, but a little bit too simple.
You start with a few training missions that introduce the mechanics and give you some simple goals to complete. I finished training in less than an hour.
Further, you have scenarios that mimic well known cities like New York, Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai. Each of these scenarios have their own unique set of civic buildings, such as the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Your goal here will be to construct the full set of unique civic buildings which are only unlocked once you reach a certain population. They also try to mimic the actual cities like having Rio de Janeiro spawn two islands around your main platform where you can expand to or having Berlin crawling with muggings and riots. Of course the American cities have frequent alien invasions, because as Hollywood has taught us, that's the only country worth invading.
Finally, there's free play, which as you may have guessed, let's you build freely until you grow tired or a meteor kills everyone. And that's about it. Scenarios were the most fun to me, but still get stale real quick.
STORY
RATING: 0/10
Don't really think there's a story, but hey, maybe there is but I just thought that "you're the mayor, keep this city balanced" isn't much of a storyline.
VISUAL PRESENTATION
RATING: 3/10
Too simplistic, looks like they couldn't decide between pixel and 2d graphics. As I said before looks too much like a mobile game.
AUDIO PRESENTATION
RATING 5/10
It's meh. I mean I'm nitpicking here, but come on, a few sounds, some generic music... you can do better.
FINAL SCORE: 5/10
I originally wanted to give it 2 or 3, but I decided to go with a 5/10 just because someone might like these kind of games, because it's not bad, it's just too simple for me, not really keeping me at the edge of my seat or giving me rewards for progressing. It's a game you can start just to chill and relax after a hard day. If you like it, give it a shot it's not too expensive.
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