The city-building genre is grossly overpopulated. Competing Simvilles predicated on wholly opposed theories about plumbing and traffic wardens stretch as far as the eye can see. As such, the genre must imitate real-life urban centres of the 20th century, and begin expanding vertically. Enter Stario: Haven Tower, the new strategy management sim from Chinese developers Stargate Games, in which you build upward through the realms of Sand, Mist, Rain, Frost, and Clear Skies until finally, your city stands among the Stars.
Accomplishing this will require a fair amount of faith, but above all – yes, literally above all, ha ha – it will require a mastery of resourcing and logistics. You will need to stretch water pipelines between city layers, set up balloon deliveries, and engage in shrewd bartering with the flying turtles that, for some reason, keep showing up at your window. You will also need to think about reinforcing the foundations and/or managing the city’s mass with “lattice-like aerial platforms” and so forth.
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Stario enters early access today, and I’ve just procured a code from one of the flying turtles that periodically appears at my window, asking me to write about a videogame. As such, I can’t give you much sense of how it plays, but I like the concept’s blend of mysticism and heavy engineering, though I have reservations about the in-game vocabulary. You can build sacred beacons to raise the morale of your, ugh, “Towertizens”, together with ritual platforms that can be used to meddle with the weather.
If nothing else, it cuts an intriguing figure. The architecture is ornate and colourful but also, curiously muted in places, almost a little spreadsheety. There’s a flat interface that floats next to your tower and drifts about when you rotate the camera, not quite ruining the view.
Anyway, I hope to fit in some time with this over the coming weeks, but given the abundance of town-tenders round these parts, I figured you’d like to hear about it now. Food for discussion about this very busy genre, if not a thing to immediately purchase. Stario: Haven Tower will remain in early access for 6-12 months, according to the developers – you can read more on Steam.
