Who doesn’t like a good city builder? While no expert, I like to put on my mayor and civil engineer hat from time to time. I was a big fan of Anno Dawn of Discovery on the Wii, put a dozen hours into Funky Barn on the Wii U at launch, and have a back catalog of city builders I’m looking forward to getting to (not to mention the new Anno later this year). Indeed, the city builder/micro manager genre is a compelling and potentially addictive one, but like running a real city, it’s rife with potential pitfalls and it takes quite a good design to execute properly.
Last May, SomaSim released their first game, 1849. It’s a city builder that takes place just before, during, and after the California Gold Rush. Not surprisingly, it was first released on iOS and was generally well received, but got a cooler reception on PC for being too casual and not deep enough. While the core game has not changed with 1849: Gold Edition, players do get the Nevada Silver DLC and the Epilogue DLC included, giving a total of twenty-eight playable levels that can be played both in Story mode (with clear, rigid objectives) or in Sandbox mode that leaves the door wide open for players to take their settlements as far as they want to.
1849 certainly has its limitations and it would not be even really apples-to-apples to compare it to genre juggernauts like SimCity, Cities XL, or the Civ series. But, it does scratch an itch in that it helps fill a void in the genre, it just does so on a (understandably) small scale. One of the first things I noticed was how small the playable area was, for example. In each mission, you’re provided a plot of land and a storage depot to get you started. It’s disappointing that you cannot expand this area, and as you’ll soon discover you’ll have to get a bit creative with your roadways to ensure each building has access to it. Moreover, the end result is usually a very closely packed in city that cannot expand and it felt too constricted. You’ll always have enough space to complete your objectives, but it’s like your surrounded by these nearby invisible walls.
The start of each mission also provides you a choice between one of three perks to get you going, such as a $3000 advance or a certain quantity of a particular resource like meat or lumber, and then it’s up to you. The objectives, if you’re playing the story mode, are clearly defined and there are three per mission. The tutorial mode is nicely integrated into the story and shows you the ropes, which are not hard to learn, but it’s easy to get yourself into a jam if you aren’t a little bit careful. That said, once you figure out the core mechanics, you can start to get ahead of the financial curve rapidly.
1849 has a lot of good mechanics built-in, but anyone looking for a good challenge or a more serious builder will notice its limitations and formula before long. Again, for a casual market, this is ok because it takes away a lot of the complexity and variables of deeper sims, while also providing clear objectives and good advisors to help steer you in the right direction. You can complete missions fairly quickly too, so these bite-sized endeavors aren’t too bad. It’s worth noting that you cannot save your game and the game also does not Alt+Tab very well (it did not crash for me, but it also did not minimize). In the HUD, you can pause time, or fast forward it, the latter is helpful to help stockpile your resources which is a very common objective to have. Your Distillerys, Bakerys, Orchards, and so forth are fairly slow (but can be upgraded somewhat) to churn out stock so it’s nice to be able to speed things up from time to time.
In terms of presentation, I appreciated the light, twangy music that was fitting for the time period, and in none of my sessions did it get too repetitive. Sound effects are few, but get the job done. Graphically, yeah it looks like a mobile platform game as it originally was, but it’s serviceable. I would have preferred a way to change up the layout of the HUD though as playing on a 29″, 21:9 screen required a lot of extra mouse-travel to select the different options that were tucked away in the far corners of the HUD. HUD aside, the buildings look nice although the characters standout from the background in a noticeable, not-so-good yet not-too-bad way. The game is limited to a single screen, single plot of land with little visual diversions outside of that.
For my other points, I can inject those into the summary, let’s head to that now…