Project Highrise Critic Reviews

For the curious and the creative, brimming with replay value, and fairly priced, Project Highrise is the game that SimTower should’ve been.

If you’re not very into management games, I could definitely see Project Highrise being an absolute bore as you wait for earnings to come in. I mean, you’re building a tower, not saving the world from aliens. But for fans of the genre or curious gamers, whether you’re playing through the games scenarios or in sandbox mode, this is one of the best management games to come out this year.

The great art of Project Highrise is that you can foresee the needs of the people and their impact on your overall project. It’s great little sim game, and well worth picking up.

Project Highrise is the kind of game that grabs a hold of players and doesn’t let go. Only once you’re in deep with a massive building do you begin to notice the cracks. There are undoubtedly numerous improvements that should be made — and likely will be in the coming weeks via patches — but even with some niggling complaints, it’s still incredibly challenging to put the darn thing down.

Given an empty block and the freedom to do what you please, Project Highrise doesn’t quite reach the heights of SimTower.

Looking beyond the aesthetics, fans of the genre will find a pretty deep business simulation that is worth exploring. The challenge increases along with the height of your tower and stays challenging right until the very end, though there will be some quiet, less exciting times somewhere along the way.

Throughout the early levels and into the more advanced stages, this fun, occasionally frustrating strategy game continues to offer plenty of reward for your time and effort, but lacks the character to make the spirit of the simulation as enticing as its systems.

Project Highrise offers a user-friendly environment and many hours of fun with the content-rich skyscraper construction and management simulation.

A fun, varied and relaxing skyscraper sim. It can be a little bit formal at times, and there are some glaring deficiencies, but it is a welcome return to this theme nonetheless.

Project Highrise takes obvious inspiration from a cult classic, but struggles to build compelling mechanics around a proven concept. Constructing a tower still offers its own simple pleasure, but there’s not enough depth here to keep you building a skyline’s worth of high-rises.

It’s a competent, accessible sim, but there is nothing special about it, so I didn’t miss it after I stopped playing it for the sake of this review.

I played for about 10 hours total, and it was a chore. The game doesn’t look good, nothing interesting happens while you’re playing, and the strategic elements are minimal.

People are going to like it, because it achieves what it sets out to do and because it can yet be mined for greater efficiency of construction and weirder or more specialist designs, but right now I’m not expecting the break-out mega-success of a Factorio or Rimworld. It just doesn’t have the flex. Not yet, anyway, but the slick, compulsive, ever so slightly bland Project Highrise is certainly a strong foundation for the community to take it somewhere weirder and wilder.