I had a little surprise while laying out a cluster of cottages in the Early Access Strategy City Builder terrace cape (opens in new tab)— One of several new city builders to arrive This week on Steam (opens in new tab)When I build my fourth cottage, some small buildings suddenly turn into giant wooden longhouses, making other houses around them look tiny. I just merged my first building, but now that I’ve learned how to do it, I want to do it again.
TerraScape displays these combined buildings when certain structures are placed in a certain arrangement. Not only can cottages become longhouses, chapels and churches can be grouped together into gigantic cathedrals, and several large houses can be combined into stately villas. Careful placement of buildings is already important in TerraScape, but this integrated building feature not only makes my already beautiful city even more visible, but also gives me extra points. And it gives me something even more important. It’s a bomb that I can use to blow up structures I’m not happy with, so I can build another one.
terracescape is strong dol romantic (opens in new tab) Instead of building a map with hexagonal tiles, a hexagonal map is generated and you play a deck of cards to fill your buildings. Each building card can be placed to score points based on where you choose to play it. The logic of its placement will be readily understood by anyone who has played City Builder before.
Lumberjack buildings score more points the more adjacent forest hexes they have. Your cottage can benefit from being near the city center, market or church. Iron and stone mines also, of course, score more points on rocky peaks. the following fields. There’s also a negative placement to avoid: If you put two fishing boats too close together, you’ll catch less. Also, if your windmill is surrounded by forest tiles instead of wheat fields, it won’t grind as much grain. It’s all about using cards wisely in combination with other cards you have placed.
As you play cards in categories such as forestry and farming, you earn points to unlock new buildings in that category. For example, lumber mills and hunting lodges join lumberjacks. After that, new decks will start appearing, such as the city deck that allows you to add bigger houses and taverns to your map. You can also periodically upgrade your city center as you play, growing it from a small cluster of wooden buildings to a towering stone fortress. As your city begins to sprawl, gardens, monasteries, blacksmiths, and everything else found in traditional city-building are unlocked. It’s really satisfying to sit and watch it grow.
There’s no ticking time or real pressure in single player (TerraScape has PvP multiplayer, which tries to outmaneuver opponents, but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet), and where You have plenty of time to choose to build and enjoy Zoom in and admire the city as it grows. The animation has a lot of nice details: fishing boats throwing nets into the lake, smoke rising from the chimneys of cottages and longhouses, eagles flying overhead, deer in the meadows. Next to the small fishing facility is a barrel filled with water where you can watch the little fish jumping and bouncing. Adorable.
The only thing the city lacks is, well, people. It’s nice to see your little little citizens walking around, working in the fields, enjoying the garden, visiting the market, but even without them, it’s lovely to watch the game.
Either puzzle mode where you use new decks and try to get enough points to advance to new maps, or free play which is much more fun for my money. I hate leaving maps behind to start a new map in puzzle mode. I want to spend my time filling out as large a map as possible before I eventually run out of new cards to play with. It took me about 45 minutes to play the largest procedurally generated map, but I enjoyed it all.
TerraScape developer Bitfall Studios has added new integrated buildings, new card decks, additional map biomes, and Co-op multiplayer mode (opens in new tab)But it already feels like a pretty fun game to me, relaxing to play and very satisfying to watch. vapor (opens in new tab)and get 25% off the $13 price through April 12th.
