Buildings Have Feelings Too!

The fun curve on this one starts low, then soars for perhaps an hour or two before dipping back down again. Buildings Have Feelings Too! gets off to a rocky start thanks to a deluge of slightly murky tutorials and unhelpful menu descriptions that make it tricky to figure out how things work. Once you clear this hurdle and get a sense of what you need to do, things get fun for a while. The buildings, with their quirky personalities expressed through brief conversations, help to create cute and enjoyable play that's augmented by the visual changes we see in each building as you install new businesses within them. And a pleasant sense of satisfaction begins to creep in as you upgrade buildings and unlock new areas, structures, and types of enterprises. It's like a digital puzzle composed of cleverly interlocking pieces that have to be shuffled around and put together just the right way.

Unfortunately, it eventually grows overly complex, which is where the fun curve starts to dip again. Moving the wrong building or upgrading at the wrong time can result in a red countdown timer appearing above a structure. If you can't figure out what's gone wrong and make the appropriate changes in time, the enterprise within will go out of business. You can start over from scratch, but you'll need to pay bricks to repair structural damages from the closure. And there are some circumstances under which a building might be demolished altogether. If you're having a hard time figuring out what you're doing wrong, the timer element can become very demoralizing. The really frustrating part is that it feels as though this issue could have been avoided altogether by eliminating the timer and simply suspending a building's operation until whatever problem it has is fixed. No timer stress, no wasted bricks, no lost progress. Buildings Have Feelings Too! isn't the sort of game that was ever going to be a runaway hit, but it still could have managed to serve its niche audience a bit better.