Powercity 9000, the moment I laid eyes on you my whole spirit tingled. This is how I knew it was gonna be great, we got a good thing goin on. At first glance, yes it looks like the old SimCity, and that’s the beauty of it, because it does a great job of emulating the same atmosphere. This isn’t what Powercity 9000 is banking on however, the game will be bringing its own special features to town, and there’s even mod support in the current alpha, weird huh? I smiled, with my heart because I know I’m going to be making some custom tile sets in photoshop tonight. I’ll make sure to create one tile that has a heart on it, so I can paint it all over my town of Hell to show my love.
The game is in an early alpha state currently, so there actually aren’t a boatload of available structures in the game. There are houses, rocks, walls and nature objects, but there aren’t any actual game mechanics that come into play here. Right now, you can design your city in creative mode, and check out all the features currently implemented. The game forms a solid foundation to really grow into a wicked modern city builder that feels like an old school title. There are supposedly some bugs, but I didn’t see any, although I did find an interesting option to test out in the main menu. There’s one option called “spawn people” and if you mouse over it, there’s a warning that it’s glitchy. Well I started a cute town, named it Hell, and built a street with a few houses. The people poured out of the dwellings like ants and literally walked over everything. Their draw order is high on the rendering heirarchy because they’re always visible even when they should be obscured by their environment, like walking behind buildings. There’s a little people counter on the left side of the screen, and I decided that I was going to see how far I could push this game before it threw in the towel. My people counter reached somewhere between 8,000-10,000 people skittering across the screen before it CTD’d. Have fun with your new town and make sure to keep up with the dev updates for new versions!
Download the alpha build on indiedb or on itch.io.
Here’s gameplay footage from @RobotTodd
Played it? We’d love to know what you thought about it.
