There's a lot about Block'hood that I want to like. City builders, resource management, production chains, and tile placement puzzles are all some of my favorite things when it comes to games, and good city builders or tycoon-style games are so rare these days. Plus, Block'hood has an interesting aesthetic, relaxing music, and a lot of creative potential.

Unfortunately, it seems to be one of those games that went off the rails while it was in Early Access, resulting in a lot of strange (and often unfinished) ideas.

For example, the game has a short story mode which acts as a tutorial, a challenge mode with beginner levels that act as a tutorial, and an actual multi-level tutorial. The story mode was particularly strange, as it was incredibly slow-paced and stifling with what you could do (like a tutorial), yet I had to stop and redo the whole thing with the help of the other two tutorials. Additionally, the story mode has no save option, and the game crashed three times while I was on the last level, forcing me to restart.

Even more egregious is a UI scattered with blank and greyed out buttons that appear to be future unlocks, but.. aren't. It appears that there are spots where the developer intended to put a sort button on the resource list (which has several dozen unalphabetized entries), but then decided not to without removing the button, and there are four tabs in each building menu labeled I, II, III, IV (falsely implying tiers), despite there only being two tabs of each tile in the game. There's also things like a sound menu that resets itself every time you start a level, and several tiles with incorrect adjacency labels (meaning you have to build certain things like support structures and parks facing the wrong way to get them to function).

Beyond that, there are just so many half-baked ideas. I remember when this game was in development and everybody complained that it felt lifeless without people and animals wandering around. So they put in people and animals wandering around, with likes and dislikes, names, and moods. A neat idea, but there's no reason to actually pay attention to them, and the mood system might as well not be there as they have no actual impact on the game. There's also an event system that doesn't really seem to be well thought-out, and things like weather and a day/night cycle that don't actually sync up with what you're seeing (it'll be dark while the UI says "day" and raining when there isn't a rain event).

And lastly, something subjective, this game falls victim to the same thing that Project Highrise does for me: It's a game about building something that doesn't make sense. I don't mean that it's about building weird abstract art towers (that part's neat!), I mean things like the "Small Appartment" block not looking like an apartment, and instead consisting of a single empty room with a door and a window in the middle (not the middle of the wall; the middle of the room). Given that so much of the game is based on numbers and balancing things, you end up with a hodgepodge of mismatched rooms that require a TON of imagination to view as the nifty vertical societies the game aims for. It isn't about being realistic, it's about looking like something functional.

Most of my issues with Block'hood could very well be addressed in the coming months, and even more if it did something like adding mod support. However, in its current state, it feels like it falls into that "shouldn't have left Early Access" category. Which is a shame. The world needs more building games, and this one has so much potential.

A promising game that, unfortunately, seems to have been abandoned.

There has been no activity from the developers in many months, and the existing game feels incomplete.

If you're curious, look at the stickied forum post with their Trello roadmap. There were plans to implement bugfixes and - I am not kidding - THE ABILITY TO SAVE YOUR GAME IN STORY MODE - but it looks like those aren't happening now.

Currently, if you play a level in story mode (the levels can take 2+ hours to complete) you have to do it in one shot - no saving. Also, there is an existing bug that results in all of your in-game achievements being reset. Those are serious flaws that are there to stay, now.

It's a shame, because this game was a good look at system input-output inbalances that resulted in particular resources pooling or diminishing. You might still consider picking this up if that's your jam, because there really are very few games that have that focus, but otherwise I really can't recommend it.

You'd imagine the gameplay to be based upon "reaching ballance", you know, carefully managing growth, production & pollution. That's how the store page portrays the game.
But the game simply doesen't work like that, there are no negative effects for excessive production or pollution!
Blocks only deacy when their inputs run out. This seems logical, but this leads to situations where waste products (like sewage, for example) are either being over or under consumed.
Consume too much, and a sewage-processing block decays (once sewage hits 0).
Now you are over producing sewage,
and the only way to fix this is by hitting the exact ratio of sewage-producers to sewage-consumers.
Or..
Don't care... because THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES TO NOT PROCESSING SEWAGE!!!

Aside from that, the gameplay (which boils down to managing an excel spreadsheet) isn't very fufilling.
The game is also plagued by odd bugs & oversights.
For example, you can't change block limits in the "world" mode, in which you can build hoods next to eachother.
(World mode is supposed to have a resoruce exchange system, which might make it interesting, but it hasn't been implemented properly)

If you want an athesticly-pleasing, resource-based citybuilder, go play a game like Anno 2070 (Designed by Game designers, not artists!).

For a 3 dimensional city builder; the game is remarkably devoid of depth. It's very pretty, but as a simulation or a strategy game, Block'hood falls flat where it matters.

I love city builders. Creating a carefully balanced, tightly operating system of checks and balances that eventually bloom into a series of new gameplay mechanics and challenges, is a joy, whether it be Anno, Simtower, or Simcity/Skylines. What Block'hood brings to the genre, is an ingenious sense of 3D verticality. Both Simcity and Simtower were fine games, but in both you were stuck between either the directions of a compass, or to the left side / right side dichotomy of of a vertical slice of your ascending tower. Let's face it; both games pinned you down upon a flat sheet.
Not so with Block'hood. All the towers you see in the storefront pictures, have an inner life. Tell the game to cut your view down onto a specific floor, and you will be able to see and work upon the rooms, units and blocks that lay INSIDE of your building, which are all connected by corridors, steps and elevators.
In theory, Block'hood gives you the posibility to construct a truly teeming, cleverly designed complex of overlapping parts like nothing else in the genre can. In practice however, I cannot recommend Block'hood to anyone who shares my love of city building simulation. The tepid mechanics behind the game make it go stale far too rapidly.

Nearly all other City Builder games, have a carefully balanced ruleset that give them their solid framework for you to drape your creativity across:
- Make of your skyscraper what you want in Simtower... but your elevator system had better be up to snuff to keep tenants happy as you go up.
- Make of your Metropolis what you want in Simcity/Skylines... but balance your budget with your zoning demand and transportation system to get dense cities with highrises.
- Find the perfect island to turn into a floating oasis of stone or steel in Anno... but make sure the outlying systems can supply the goods for your buildings to evolve.
In there lies the challenge of these games: Several overlapping, interconnected systems that each have requirements and drawbacks that need to be sorted into a smooth whole. All of them working together and rewarding you with something new, makes success such a satisfying experience. You know what's difficult about the simulation, strive to overcome it and then proudly exemplify the solution in your creation. You can pat yourself on the shoulder if you manage to build it the way you envisioned it, despite the odds, with just that touch of your own stubborn, creative interpretation of the formula.

In Block'Hood, make the neighbourhood you want... ... and that's it. Sure, there are a handful of needs and requirements, but they never seem to interact in a way that evolves the game beyond its imidiate looks. There are so many different resources and buildings that the game might seem complicated, and block'hood sure is pretty, but this is no substitute for satisfying depth. In fact, the interactions between the individual buildings and blocks is so badly tuned that it often felt to me that it hardly mattered what I was doing. Other than a downpour of numbers, there is nothing to tie the game together.

For example, I could try to set up a sprawling garment industry to make money, by either carefully laying down some pastures for wooly sheep and then the wheat for their fodder, or by growing some cotton fields. However, I could also simply turn the far more easily acquired and ubiquitous waste of any of my other buildings into recycled materials, from which to derive the same fabrics. Even better, community centers can conjur up recycled materials from thin air apparently, which makes obtaining fabric even easier and completely disregards the need for waste, cotton, sheep, or any other clearly relevant input.
And why even create a garment industry to make money, or any other of the easily dismissable production chains, when you can slap down a thousand newspaper stands that have no such complicated sequences and can make money for almost no effort?
And in the end? Why even make money? Nothing in the game costs anything, everything is unlocked from the very start in sandbox, and the only goal is to maintain what you've already build with a certain number of basic resources. This could be a clever take on the genre, but it does lead upon the question what the goal of the game is. Not so cleverly, there is no real answer.

There are too many resources - really just numbers - that can be conjured up using only 40% the game's content and invalidating the rest. None of the buildings really stand out as being an achievement to obtain, or maintain. None of the hard won products of the more complex production lines are ever truly necessary to evolve the game in any way, beyond these buildings just sitting there, looking pretty and adding their own floating numbers to your quickly bloating pools. Your neighbourhood or citizens won't ever complain or improve, or react in any tangible way to your attempts to master Block'hood's systems and make the best of its seemingly complex torrent of statistics. Even negative events, evoked by having too many negative resources, can simply be ignored, as all they do is give you a steady deduction to some other resource, which also has a building somewhere that can produce it for free.

It becomes apparent all too quickly that Block'hood is nothing but a balance of numbers rubbing up against each other, without doing anything to change how the game works. Garments don't matter, and neither does entertainment, tourism, plastics or money. Not even the sheep do - especially the sheep - whom are redundant and an after thought, which is a real shame.

The problem is perhaps best embodied by the "agents", whom are the pixelated people spawned by specific buildings, and who then proceed to walk around your creation. They have moods and desires, but above all; no real impact. They're in the game almost as an illusion of accomplishment and to make you think that they're a goal somehow. In truth, they're so throw away you can literally delete and forget about them by pulling the floor out from under them without penalty.

For all my efforts, I never really felt rewarded by Block'hood, or challenged. The system behind the game, is too shallow for it. Its disperate elements are simply too disjointed and detached from each other to come together and connect in a way that goes anywhere. There is no progress, and for all intents and purposes, it really is just like being ten years old again: Playing with colorful blocks, but with the added detriment of obtuse mathematics.

These problems are less profound in challenge and in storymode, since your choice of buildings here is limited. This presents you with problems that require a specific build order and a solution to be found, which turns Block'hood into a minor puzzle game which can be rather fun. However, these challenges constitute too little of the game to validate it's city building tag, the price, or the dev's efforts into this beautiful product. Block'hood feels like a lot of wasted potential.

In the true meat of the game - sandbox - these problems cripple the game to such a degree that I cannot recommend Block'hood as a competent city builder or simulation. At the end of a good solid Anno, Skylines and Simtower session, I can lean back, peek under the hood of my gleeming metropolis and feel content that it was my mastery of the game that allowed me to succeed in establishing it despite the game's toughness. In Block'hood, no such thing exists.

The game can be gorgeous. There's no doubt about that. If you're simply looking for an aesthetically pleasing puzzle game with no deeper goals, or if you are capable of creating your own fun with maths and legos, I'd recommend it. Personally, I really wish Block'hood was a more accomplished City Builder.

I used to play Simtower for hours while my family watched the Mormon church's “General Conference” on TV semi-annually. “I’m just taking notes over here to stay focused!” I still can’t fathom that they believed me. This isn’t Simtower; I had hoped it was.

Blockhood is a resource management game. Most sims focus on a couple of resources. Perhaps water, power, maybe traffic, tourism. But ultimately, the only resource that matters is money because it can fix any other problem. Blockhood does away with that. Water and power and probably the most important, but money isn’t any more valuable than Fish or waste water. It’s all about balancing resources and using what you have. This is a very “green” game without pushing anything at you.

Pros:

• Unique gameplay
  
• Good challenges
  
• Fun

Cons (and Alpha suggestions):

• Building placement is clumsy. Buildings are often placed accidentally on the floor above.
  
• The initial splash (whiteout) screen is far too long and keeps me pounding my mouse to get in game
  
• The music is so boring, I use it to torture myself for being bad
  
• The advanced building sub-menu should be removed
  
• Not enough animations. I want to see things happening. Buildings should move, people should run. I know this is already present, but I want more of a visual indication when things are working, when life if happening.
  
• Dual monitor users with monitor 2 as their primary display will be discouraged to learn the game will only run on monitor 1. The game ignores windows settings and has no option of it’s own. I have to run the game windowed as a fix.

Don't waste your money. Devs decided to "finish" this game totally unbalanced and actually not finished at all. The game was promising. But there is nothing to do as it's all about the starting point

I like this game. It's aesthetically pleasing and very chill. There is a resource management system in place, but the only consequence to it appears to be that if you don't have enough of a resource in the pool for a given block, it'll decay until it stops producing. It's a shame, because minimizing pollution could have been a neat goal!

More of the challenge to the game (as far as I see it) is managing space access for blocks when you're building up a pretty town. It's very much a game of managing aesthetics more than interconnected ecosystems,

PROS:
+ Pretty visuals and music
+ Calm, relaxing fun
+ Just enough of a challenge to make it a game

CONS:
- Challenge is pretty minimal here (doesn't bother me, I have other citybuilders for that)
- Controlling the block placement and fiddling with the camera can be... well, fiddly

So I have to recommend this game, but only on the condition that you don't mind the lack of challenge or you care more about just having a chill citybuilder.

I've only played this game for 8 hours, and I say only because I've barely scratched the surface. Also, this game needs A TON of updates and yet here I am, giving it a positive rating, which in itself should be an indicator about how much I enjoy it.

Think of this as a combination between Simcity, Minecraft and Mountain.

There are two ways to play this, there are Challenges and a Sandbox mode (Apparently mods are working on a Campaign mode). I've completed about half of the challenges and it's been a fun ride so far. Create more than 200 beer but keep your Wheat under 50, oh yeah, don't care about waste because... Why would I?

Sandbox is, well whatever you want it to be. A metropolis, a skyscraper, a town? Whatever you want. Farms, solar panels and crops? Sure. Oil, generators and lots of consumers? Why not.

That's just my take on what could possibly at the minimum describe this game. But here are some Pros and Cons in case you like lists:

PROS

- Minimalistic yet beautiful design.
- Great relaxing music
- Artistic UI
- Fun challenges
- TONS of different blocks with different inputs and outputs
- Helpful View modes. Accessibility, decay, production, etc.

CONS:

(Fixed) - Camera is very limited
(Fixed) - The tutorial is not the best
(Fixed) - Could use better blocks categories. Maybe a filter to find exactly what you're looking for instead of reading every description trying to get it
(Fixed) - Various types of waste or sickness don't really matter in Sandbox, no consequences
(Fixed) - PLEASE add speed controls. I understand there's no pause while being able to edit the map, although that wouldn't be so bad. But it NEEDS a x2, x4 and even x8 speed control. I once had to wait 25 minutes to complete a challenge because my production rate was pretty slow. It does encourage you to try to get more production going, expanding your creation, but having the option would be nice.

Keep in mind this game is still in early access and I know the development team is working on some of these issues. So please read this with a "That's the way it is RIGHT NOW" mentality and not "This is what it will be"

Great game, love it. 9/10

Fun aesthetic, but the game is incredibly slow and it can be somewhat obtuse with its mechanics and resources until you realize it's just a spreadsheet with pretty graphics. There is no simulation, it's just a matter of balancing the spreadsheet. If you enjoy that, then this is a nice relaxing game. If you want a city builder or simulation, this game is a thumbs down.

The game has potential, yes, but at the moment it just feels extremely tedious. I love games having a lot of things to do and play with, but it just feels overwhelming when you look at it all. The UI is a bit clunky, would like to see that improved in the future. Also the whole vertical building aspect is annoying to work with. Its a great concept that you don't see in many games, but it's just a mess. I always felt I either didn't know where something was built or why it wouldn't build in a certain location. The story mission was cute, couldn't finish it though. I also enjoyed the art style and music, very well done.

For simpler terms,

PROS:
Art Style
Concept
Music

CONS:
UI
Clunky building system
A bit tedious
The tediousness of the game causes it to become boring

Overall, I personally can't reccomend the game. If the things I mentioned were improved upon I would gladly reccomend the game, but seeing as though the game has reached its final as of May 11th it most likely wont be improved. I'd say make your own decision and test out the game, see how you feel about it.