While many city-building technique games have rivalry between builders, it’s not often as specific–or as foolish–as calling in a mafia favour to whack a gaffer, sending a ghost to hang-out an property, or unleashing yobs to terrorise residents by belching and tossing bins. Constructor earned a particular place in my coronary heart in 1997 with its eclectic tackle city-building, and now it’s fancier than ever within the newly-released Constructor Plus. Following 2017’s straight remake, Constructor HD, Plus is now out as an expanded semi-sequel sorta factor. Yes, I feel I wish to ship large mutant cockroaches to raid a rival’s Martian domehomes.
Rather than sprawling cities, Constructor takes a more in-depth view of constructing estates and maintaining particular person tenants completely happy. Upgrade and enhance houses, fiddle with lease, unlock tiers of higher homes, whack down parks and hospitals… however all on a neighbourhood scale. At occasions I’ve gone to absurd lengths to maintain wealthy and productive households completely happy, blowing up their neighbour’s gnomes and shifting necessary industries far-off. Or one explicit home could be a thorn in my facet, its unruly residents upsetting the remainder of the block. It’s a scale the place a game-winning play could be sending a dodgy plumber to trash the toilet of a rival’s prized tenants at simply the suitable time to flood and spoil a significant block. Good, that.
Constructor is fighty too. Your builders can tough up their lads and perhaps take over properties, particular “undesirable” people together with a fence-chainsawing psycho and a fire-starting clown mess with their properties and residents, and a few will simply straight-up homicide people.
It is: bizarre. 22 years after first enjoying Constructor, I nonetheless wrestle to concisely clarify what it’s. “It’s a real-time strategy game about building English estates about keeping tenants content while fighting rival builders?” I don’t know. That is: good.
Constructor Plus is that plus newness. It brings new buildings together with skyscrapers and casinos, new undesirables, maps set in new places together with the Moon and Mars, new monuments, new gadgets, and so forth. Along with ye olde sandboxe mode, it additionally packs sixty-odd eventualities beginning us with existent cities and distinct objectives, so we don’t at all times have to start out from scratch.
Made by System 3, Constructor Plus is out now on Steam for £19.49/€19.99/$19.99 (oof, tough change charges). Folks who personal Constructor HD can get Constructor Plus half-price through this Loyalty Discount bundle thing.
I… shall be shopping for this and muttering the Thief’s traces to myself as soon as extra. His mockney “Awright my son, yeahhh” is etched into my mind.
Here’s a trailer from Constructor Plus’s Switch launch earlier this yr:
