Buildings Have Feelings Too!
The city sure is fussy
Toy Story taught us that toys want to be played with. Similarly, Buildings Have Feelings Too! asserts that buildings need inhabitants to be truly happy. You play a cute little warehouse with a pep in its step and a balcony reminiscent of a little moustache,1 out to rejuvenate the city. In each neighbourhood, there’s a row of buildings with needs and requests to fulfil. Residential buildings, for example, will never feel good next to a factory, but a pub might. You need to consider each building’s position and walk it to a new spot in the row if need be.2
BHFT isn’t a city builder. It’s a puzzle, one in which you swap buildings around and check their attribute cards to see what’s required to upgrade them. Since you have only a limited number of buildings at a time and short rows to build on, combined with fiddly movement controls, the unique idea loses its lustre pretty quickly. This is a game that, while conceptually interesting, mostly involves looking at menus.
Once you’ve met every request, you switch neighbourhoods, making BHFT feel like a long tutorial in which you have nothing to do but the task at hand, and the lack of variety in building types leads to repeating loops in which you construct the same buildings, place the same buildings beside them and then wait until you’ve upgraded everything enough to unlock something new. Ultimately this lacks variety and depth, despite the cute idea.
Malindy Hetfeld