Demo Review 44: Urbanix

After some very amateur-looking menus, we get to the game; you control your personal little Cars reject, a brave little tractor who is helping turn a large patch of land into a city! How does he do that? Merely by creating streets. How do you create streets? By moving around. When you create a zone with the tractor, you see it fill up with houses and buildings! Urbanix is based on those early computer games that had similar premises. The goal was, and in Urbanix is, to fill up most of the field with streets and buildings, all while avoiding the enemies who roam the land.

And what enemies! First there are land biters, who can chew through the path you’re making (as the street is only complete once you’ve connected a street to another), and when it does, you lose a life. Whenever those things appear, hurry to the nearest street! After a lot of streets have been made in the game, you can also trap these things in smaller and smaller zones. In later levels, cranes appear to destroy the buildings created by your actions… and even later, shark blimps may chase your tractor. You know, by this point I’d resign from that job. However, the goal remains the same, and you need to go as far as possible by getting the required percentage of city, before the time limit hits zero!

This game has three variations:

-Earth, the regular game;

-North Pole, where you must pass a first time on each zone to turn them to ice, then a second time to make the streets and buildings appear;

-And the Moon, which is locked for this demo, thus I can’t explain it. Still, two out of three isn’t bad.

I didn’t get very far when I played. Still, it was fun. Although I didn’t like how, by the fourth level, the tractor would spend longer avoiding the multiple hazards that get added than actually connecting streets and making buildings appear. That’s what happens when you saturate the game with enemies and gimmicks at the expense of the gameplay. There’s also the possibility of a 2-Player Mode, which is a neat addition.

The CGI isn’t half bad, the game is challenging, and the full version offers a total of 150 levels. Don’t be fooled by the appearance of the menus, which are very unprofessional. This game is worth trying. I mean, play the demo. As for me, I wouldn’t buy the full version, but if you’re nostalgic for an old computer game given a WiiWare revamp, go ahead. Who knows? You might like it.