GamesCity BuilderThe best bit of my new favorite city builder is the massive, hulking LEGO towers it lets me buildWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesCity BuilderThe best bit of my new favorite city builder is the massive, hulking LEGO towers it lets me buildWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Tomas Sala)
The Ursee, the maritime setting upon whichBulwark: Falconeer Chronicleshas you create your burgeoning cities, is an unsettling place. Towering cliffs and rolling thunderstorms create a threatening atmosphere, and as your first few buildings cling limpet-like to the rock face, there’s a sense of grit, danger, and a life hard-won.
But for all the ways in which the world of Bulwark - a city building spin off from the developer of aerial combat gameThe Falconeer- makes you feel unwelcome, it offers a surprisingly accommodating twist on city-building convention. Rather than worry too much about whether you have the resources you need to craft new buildings, Bulwark is more interested in whether you can move those resources around. For example, if you’re mining iron at one end of your colony, your workers will only be able to move it through so many different structures before the supply chain collapses.
Thankfully, whether or not I can successfully move my supplies around the city with Bulwark’s 15-building demo limit doesn’t appear to impact my absolute favorite part of this game - its towers. The way that Bulwark’s cities cling to their setting means that you have to spread a lot of building over very little space, which means building up more than building out. To enable that, it’s often Foundations, not actual buildings, that you’ll use to spread across the rock face.
(Image credit: Tomas Sala)
Those Foundations are used to stabilize your vertical expansion, but each part of that equation seems to grow almost at random with each addition. I can pick the direction that I want to build my Foundation in, but not exactly how it manifests. The result is a mystery polygon that seems to grow out of ground before building up around the base of a tower, upon which the cycle repeats - if you want to upgrade the towers that are a crucial part of each city, you’ll use the Foundations to lift them higher, the same almost random process of development unfolding each time. A tower might simply thrust upwards into the sky, a narrow spire pointing upwards, but at the next upgrade it might grow in heft, cylindrical or blocky protuberances filling it out. The higher you go, the more Foundations you need, and the result is an ever-evolving structure that seems to grow almost organically, any surface that can hold up an additional structure helping flesh out the city. It’s almost bacterial, this spreading, evolving system of growth on top of growth, yet strangely brutalist, blocky bastions jutting chaotically out of the rockface.
I’ve definitely not unlocked everything that Bulwark has to offer just yet. In part, that’s because the building limit in the currently-available demo caps at just 15, so my creations couldn’t sprawl quite as much as I’d like. But there’s a puzzle-y element to this city-builder that I was very keen to dig into more, if nothing else than to get the colorful lines depicting my resource allocation a little more uniform. But the two systems at its heart have definitely allowed Bulwark to get its hooks into me, at the start of what could be an intense affinity for the world of the Ursee. You can check out Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles right now thanks to itsSteam demo.
Could this be a new contender for our list of thebest city building games?
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