Highrisers vs Sphere - Flying Cities
Highrisers
Highrisers is an “escape from the tower”-style survival-slash-resource management game that’s fairly similar to the first Skyhill game, except that instead of traveling to the lobby, your end goal here is to scavenge the resources you need from the lower floors to fix the helicopter on the rooftop so your team of 4 survivors (if none of them died, that is) can escape the tower. It’s basically a quarter of the plot of Zack Synder’s most recent and relatively controversial zombie flick, Army of the Dead, really… and like the film, the game is fun but it has its own caveats.And of course, there are the zombies… ahem… I mean, mutants that will attack your team and any fortifications you’ve put up if they spot you… so there’s that.
For what it’s worth, I really liked resource management-based survival games like Highrisers and I have had a pretty good experience with the game myself, minus all the issues I’ve pointed out. The game definitely has some good stuff going for it, but the dev team really needs to work on the game more to revamp some of the gameplay designs and also to fix the game-breaking bugs reported by their players. Only then I would be comfortable recommending the game. For now though, it’s probably wise to keep it in your wishlist.
Sphere - Flying Cities
Sphere - Flying Cities is a city-building game that’s somewhat similar to Frostpunk except that it has a sci-fi theme, and allows for more exploration. Set in a world devastated by an asteroid, the remnants of humanity has managed to invent an anti-gravity machine which allows them to levitate a chunk of earth’s surface and move that piece of floating island around a world enveloped by debris and other dangers.Unfortunately, Sphere – Flying Cities falls short of what it aspires to be. The bugs and glitches aside, the gameplay here feels slow – very unlike the kind of urgency that Frostpunk offers, and the amount of player control over how many workers to assign to a facility is oddly restrictive for a city-builder. Personally, I would recommend keeping this game on your wishlist first and let the devs work on improving their game.