WILD CITY
- Hubert Spala
- May 5
- 6 min read
I should rename the blog from TINY GAMING to TINY ROGUELIKES or better yet, TINY DECK BUILDERS. What can I say… I am a sucker for that genre. It might be due to my nerdy upbringing. I was a Magic: The Gathering player for half my life, dabbled in plenty of eurogames on the table and in general just enjoy a thrill of assembling my little engine that could. There is simple bliss in the mental exercise of seeing a number go up. And while there are many ways to make a game dedicated to that notion, it is deck builders that tickle my grey matter in the way that makes me feel the good feels.
And so, after a powerful demo, WILD CITY very quickly landed on my plate as a dish to devour. I dived into it completely, submerged myself in the game to squeeze it for everything it can offer. I am happy to say that it is clever, challenging and has a great little system hiding beneath the colorful art. Unfortunately, the game also shows a few weaknesses that cannot be omitted, and I must point them out to be fair in my assessment. But first…
Elections! Ah, the sweet siren call of democracy! And all the animals of all the realm agree that it is time to vote on their next mayor to represent their needs properly. You are that wanna-be-mayor, and your goal is to gather support and funds to win the campaign. What a peculiar choice for a premise for a game about laying down hexagonal tiles with bugs, birds, plants and critters of every kind in order to score big points. It works, somehow, but it is also a very superficial layer on top of the mechanics and doesn’t really contribute much to the variety of play styles. As you win your elections, you unlock new candidates to play with. They do not offer any unique passives or abilities but still play vastly different from each other due to their starting decks focusing on different synergies and habitats. Neat enough, I’d say.
The system is straightforward and nothing we didn’t see before. Each stage has a point goal to reach. You have a limited number of turns to play your blocks with variety of critters assembled from your deck. And you must beat the score before you run out of turns or out of space on the grid. You collect new animals, try to improve your global multiplier by having a variety of habitats in your supporter’s base and pick passive power-ups in form of stickers to improve your chances. All the usual bits and bops of a deck builder roguelike.
However, the system hides some interesting challenges. First, the deck is a little different than a usual one, because you don’t, strictly speaking, collect cards to use on the grid. Your deck consists of all the animals that WILL be randomly generated into blocks – from 1 to 4 connected hexes – in entirely randomized assembly. The more copies of a particular creature you have, the bigger the chance of seeing them, often in multiples on the same block. And so, you need to balance the number of supporters well, to not get constant flow of blocks you will struggle to use well – or barely see the powerful key pieces of your synergies.
At the same time, you cannot really trim your supporter base too thin. It is nigh impossible to win without having the progressive global multiplier going up. And to do that, you need to have variety of animals fitting the same habitats. Aquatic, Temperate, Hot, Cold, Domestic, the list is pretty robust, and you only unlock appropriate multipliers by having 2, 4, 6 and so on number of varied representatives of such habitat in your deck. And so, to have a robust support base is a necessity, that makes for a fine exercise in balancing your deck – just wide enough to empower your score, yet slim enough to not choke your draw with subpar blocks of tiles.
The limited space is also a problem. And the game offers solutions you would be wise not to skip on. You see, consuming your own support base might be looked down upon amongst humans, but chopping heads off seems to be perfectly chill with animals of all kinds, and so, go wild with that! You need in your desk some tools to thin out the throng on the board to never run out of space for laying new blocks down – fortunately eating your neighbors is also a valid tactic and it rewards you with funds anyway, so don’t be shy about employing some voracious political creatures in your arsenal. Eat the Rich or whatnot!
The best and worst part of the game is the supposed depth of its synergistic plays. There are many ways to unleash powerful, high scoring combos. You can rely on animals that score money every few turns. You can score big by lining up huge adjacency bonuses. Can lay down critters to keep spawning stuff that chains off other animals, decimating them, cloning them, buffing them up. Additional buildings and monuments offer extra score multiplier as well as powerful, zoned abilities that help you define your build. Figuring this out is the most thrilling part of WILD CITY, especially because it is not easy and the scores required every stage grow up at a very demanding pace. When you lock down a reliable combo, it is a moment of high elation, and the sweetest morsel this gameplay has to offer.
But it is also here when some glaring issues starts showing up. First, the User Interface… it is a bit lacking. Cards have icons and explanations that, sometimes, aren’t clear. It might take some trial and error to figure out what some cards do, and it never feels good when you expected something to happen and the game is like “actually, no, it’s not like that”. Bummer.
Then, the variety itself is a bit of a nasty illusion. Yes, the game has like 400 different animals, plants and fungi to play with – an impressive number, to be sure! But it is a clever little trick, because a hefty amount of these cards are technically clones. Having the very same ability, just re-coded to work with a different creature tag or habitat. And so, Potato Beetle and Hornet do the exact same thing, but one consume bugs, other eats plants. Or like there are 10 exact same cards that double score if adjacent to a particular type of critter. How about Grizzly bear and Hermit Crab doing the same, but one eats other animals when another consume shells? You get the gist. It’s a big selection, and changing types and habitats IS technically different and offering breadth of synergies to different plays, but you will start seeing those repetitions left and right, slightly diminishing the sense of wonder with new cards… as well as narrowing down overall number of interesting and engaging strategies to figure out.
Still… I would be lying if I said that I did not enjoy the game, even with its shortcomings here and there. Bosses are fun to tackle, each mayor feels different enough to play to feel like a standalone challenge and every time you win you unlock additional difficulty that impairs some sort of general debuff, making subsequent runs so much more demanding. And well, it feels great to play a new run, because – at least early on! – every time you score a win you unlock new stuff, in quite a great plenty, making for an exciting prospect to try out these new critters in search of fresh synergies to flex your thinking muscle.
And so, WILD CITY is a lovely little game. It has some fresh ideas on display, things that I didn’t encounter in similar games. It focuses on balance, on being pre-emptive with your deck. Making sure you aren’t going to create problems for yourself later down the line and that your choices and strategies always keep in mind the ever-growing demands of score, space and time limit. It is also colorful, with vibrant and fun artwork for all the critters. With an energetic bop to bounce in the background as you lay down your tiles. And it’s gorgeously straight to the point – no nonsense, no grand narrative, just you, hexagonal grid, your deck of critters and a goal to beat.
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