Tycoon City: New York Critic Reviews

What's great about Tycoon City: New York is its accessibility. Whether you're a rookie on the bottom rung of the tycoon-gaming ladder or an old hand, friends with Sir Alan Sugar and as proud as can be with your magnificent railroads, rollercoasters, pizza restaurants and intergalactic cityscapes, the game never tries to make you feel unwelcome or try to confuse you.

Even those that aren’t well versed in managing a living, breathing city-scape, will be right at home here, with an easy to navigate interface, and simplified economic models.

A quality building game. Unfortunately there is not much else to do but build, a better business simulation would have been good.

Each district also serves up specific challenges, so that opening a business at a certain time or reaching a profit milestone will unlock reward buildings such as churches and law courts, which please the locals and boost their satisfaction levels.

There's definitely a market for this type of game, it's easy to get into, easy to play and you get a good sense of achievement from it.

Graphically, Tycoon City is gorgeous.

It never really takes the kid gloves off and makes you deal with the realities of running a real estate empire.

Looks great, but not quite as full of variety as you might expect from NYC.

It’s certainly addictive enough to draw in even expert players for a decent number of hours, but where it shines (whether intentionally or otherwise) is as an introduction to the genre for less experienced players.

Immersive, innovative and fun to play.

Dazzles the senses more than it does the mind. The buy-upgrade-buy-upgrade cycle simply becomes tiresome after your first few hours, and there just isn't much relief for veteran tycoons and strategists.

Tycoon City: New York may be big and colourful, but under its ostentatious, shiny surface and character-driven tasks, it's ultimately just another by-the-numbers tycoon game.

It's this basic lack of thrill or challenge which limits Tycoon City's appeal, at least to the gamer audience. It's entirely possible that Tycoon City will find an audience for the more casual player with its less stressful lifestyle, but that's the sort of design decision which gains sales not marks.

The various parts come together to create an entertaining experience, although not quite well enough to create an entirely engrossing one.

The ability to drop seamlessly from a sun-gilded skyscraper-sentinelled skyline to a pedestrian-eye's view of the bustling taxi-clogged street hundreds of feet below is wonderful (SimCity 4 suddenly seems very dry).

While it is no Sim City, the simplified interface and game mechanics will appeal to some, but it also remains the game’s biggest downfall. A little more variety could have had this one a real winner.

For a light session with a favored city, this is a fun enough game for short periods at the computer.

If building a real estate empire were this easy, we’d all be bored millionaires by now.

The interface elements in the game are also fairly well conceived, but the overall package suffers from gameplay that doesn't offer much challenge, eliminating any sense of tension.

Tycoon City might be fun enough if you’re more familiar with New York City (and if you want to, say, place a comedy club where your house is) but otherwise there’s just not enough to it to be any fun.