Highrisers

Review

A mysterious disease has crippled the world once again, but this time around, it is impossible to walk in the streets as they are crowded by Dreamers (Zombies). If you live in regional areas or in the suburbs on the outskirts of a city full of skyscrapers, you pretty much have to kiss your butt goodbye. On the other hand, if you live in a city of high-rise buildings, own a helicopter which you can fly or know someone who can, you might have a chance to survive by moving from one building to the next and scavenging anything you can get your hands on. This is exactly what a group of four survivors managed to do. However, on their last flight, the helicopter malfunctioned, and they were just able to crash land on the top of a 36 floors building. If they want to survive another day, they have to find food, craft weapons, defences and items to repair their chopper. It’s a tough life in HighRisers!

HighRisers is a pixelated survival/strategy game developed by Solar Powered Games and published by Assemble Entertainment on the 15^th of July 2021 on the Steam platform.

I personally love the concept of playing a survivor game that takes place in a high-rise. I think it Is innovative and, in the world we live in right now, one of the best ways to have a large number of people that co-habit on a specific surface together is to have them in high rises, which we have been doing for several decades in our largest cities.

In HighRisers, you’ll be in control of a party of four people, of which are two men and two women, and your main goal is to survive as long as you can, repair the chopper and escape.  Mo is an astute builder who can efficiently build, repair, and dismantle any construction, while Ike is the man for all mechanical issues. Jess is tech-savvy, and Ann is the scientist of the group. Now, all these characters can perform any tasks in this game, which I like, but it would take Ann more time to build or dismantle a structure than Mo, for example.

Each time you start a new game, which I have done several times due to specific game issues, which I will cover below, the 36-floor building will randomly generate itself. What I mean this is that each time you start a new game, all the floors will be laid out differently, which is super fun and gives the game more replayability.  Essentially, you have to scavenge each floor that is free of Dreamers and gather foods and items you need to repair your helicopter or craft weapons, as well as all different types of goods.   Bear in mind that everything you do is in real-time as there is no pause button in this game. I don’t mind a lot of micromanaging, but if you don’t like it, it will be a challenging game for you.

You can select any of the four characters with the 1 to 4 keyboard keys, or click on their avatar which is located on the left side of your screen.  With your middle mouse button, you can scroll up and down the building. Click on the item and the selected character will go and pick it up. Don’t forget that each individual can only pick up 8 different types of items to add to their inventories at the start of the game. However, it seems that they can pick up has many of these 8 different items as they want. Yes, it will fill an inventory square, but they can pick up as many cans of foods as they want, which is a bit odd. Picking up items is straightforward, but dismantling structures such as bars, chairs, blenders etc. and will take time. When dissembling a table, for example, you’ll get wood and screws etc.

So essentially, during the day, you scavenge the building to find items that you can use to repair the chopper, craft weapons at the workbench as well as other goods at the lab table, build barricades, etc. But when the night comes, the Dreamers will start to move up the floors and attack the survivors on sight. And by the way, it is an automatic combat system, and you have nothing to do. Make sure you have adequate defences and weapons to survive the night. If you do, you’ll receive a skill point that you can use to upgrade your character skills. Each character has 21 upgradeable skills. 1 point per night is a bit slim, and I suppose you’ll need to survive 84 nights to upgrade all your character’s skills.

The major issue is that the game keeps crashing, left, right and centre. One out of three times that you build a barricade, the game crashes. Same with some items you craft at the lab table. It crashes when the dreamers attack a barricade or when you load a saved game, and you also get random crashes. I know the Devs are working hard on updates, but these issues were supposed to be rectified in the previous updates. Well, I am running version 1.0.4.c, and I am still having the same issues. On top of that, there is no autosaving. You can only save the game if you decide to quit.

I spent 10+ hours on this game because I am genuinely interested in it and want to discover more about it. But right now, I can’t pass the 4th night. Not because I don’t survive but because the game keeps crashing.

The graphics are good, and I like the concept. There are stacks of objects to scavenge, and it seems that you can craft a lot of stuff too. No autosaving and constant crashing! I have faith in you, devs, and I look forward to seeing these significant issues resolved asap so we can all discover and have fun playing HighRisers.   

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Highrisers Steam Store Page