All city-builders hearken back to the basics of Sim City, but Resort World hearkens more closely than usual. While the disasters don’t seem to be included, the interface and open-ended goals of Resort World are right out of the older Sim City titles. Resort World asks you to do nothing more specific than build up a resort town that attracts lots of visitors from the ocean liners that pass through from time to time. You can’t build a very wide variety of buildings at first, but you’ve got incredibly powerful customization and design tools right from the start. You can build little stone paths between buildings, upgrade your buildings, purchase fairly cheap flowers and trees for decoration, and even change your buildings’ colors.
All city-builders hearken back to the basics of Sim City, but Resort World hearkens more closely than usual. While the disasters don’t seem to be included, the interface and open-ended goals of Resort World are right out of the older Sim City titles. Resort World asks you to do nothing more specific than build up a resort town that attracts lots of visitors from the ocean liners that pass through from time to time. You can’t build a very wide variety of buildings at first, but you’ve got incredibly powerful customization and design tools right from the start. You can build little stone paths between buildings, upgrade your buildings, purchase fairly cheap flowers and trees for decoration, and even change your buildings’ colors.
Resort World‘s gameplay extremely simple and open-ended. Your goal is to earn money, which you use to make your resort better, which lets you earn more money… you get the drift. This is both good and bad, really. On the good side, players who like to pursue their own plans in city-builders will find Resort World absolutely ideal for building their own carefully-designed layouts. The game offers no structure whatsoever beyond the initial tutorial. On the bad side, players used to games like Hello City and Millionaire City that offer very clear goals may find themselves unengaged by Resort World‘s utterly easy-going gameplay. How much you enjoy this game will really depend on how self-motivated you are.
Social features in Resort World feel a little half-baked right now. You can view you friends’ towns as you play, but you don’t seem able to interact with them in any way. You can send and receive gifts, but there’s no gift that seems to be a got-to-have-it item the way particular gifts in Zynga games work. Since you can visit other player’s towns at all, it seems likely some form of interaction is going to be implemented in future revisions to the game.
Resort World is a really good-looking game. The building designs are extremely detailed and grow more interesting as you level them up. The variety of plants and flowers for decorating your space makes building an attractive town easy. Even the animations of people walking to and fro are pleasant. If Resort World has any true weak point, it’s that the localization of the in-game text is still fairly bad. Your leveling-up text reads, “Transition to a new level” and there’s lots of similarly strange writing in the game’s explanatory text and tutorials. It’s not so bad as to make the game unplayable, but with so many Western-developed city-builders out there, it could be a turn-off to someone who would just as well go play My Empire.
