I started playing a Demo of this game made by National Geographic a fortnight ago. Its a surprisingly simple game where the object of the game is to transform "Greenville" from Smog Central to a plush energy efficient green town. It goes through some town planning and infrastructure upgrading campaigns where you're liaising with consultants and pouring money into research. There's also the need to raise funds for building materials and the cost of building and upgrading old and new buildings. To do this you can try and get tax funds up or sell renewable energy credits.
In campaign mode there are 45 levels, each has a time limit of a certain number of days before you lose your "Star ratings", but no such limit where you have to restart the level, and each level has 4 or 5 tasks which include building and upgrading new structures, getting the happiness level to a certain percentage, getting taxes to a certain level per day and raising environmental health to a certain percentage as well. Those 45 levels can go for 5 to 10 minutes or an hour depending on how hard and how many goals there are. I got about 6 hours of game play out of campaign mode, I started playing on Sunday morning and finished on Wednesday night the same week, I was playing for about an hour to three hours each day.
Once you've finished campaign mode you can go into free play mode, where you have no goals or rules and you can if you like, start levels from scratch. However this is really boring as the levels give you 1,000,000 in cash and about 500,000 in building materials to start with and it takes a lot of building to chew through that. I'm still currently playing this though as it is really a free for all I am really just building up each area with Eco -Apartments and Zero energy houses and piling on upgrades until I run out of money and materials. While this might be hard if you're a 10 year old or slightly mentally impaired for me, and my giant brain it poses no challenge whatsoever and causes me to lose interest within 15 minutes and go back to watching television and using face book.
Lastly there's the price, depending on where you buy this game you can pay anything from 14.99 US or 26.95AU and whilst its been a while since I actually bought a game, the last time I did, I kind of expected to get more than 5 days enjoyment from it. Fine if you're a kid, you might play it on and off in campaign mode for a month depending on how much TV you're allowed to watch and how much homework you have. I suppose if it keeps you off the internet and out of reach of paedophiles that's probably a good thing. But I'm living in the land of adult, and while I have housework, work, and social life to juggle I don't have homework and I have mastered the art of watching TV whilst playing computer games and I am great at procrastination as well, so the housework can wait til the weekend. Sure I can play it over and over and over again, but chances are that I probably wont, there's only so many ways a level with 10 vacant lots can be modelled before it all becomes samey samey and all a bit of a yawn. I suppose I could think of it as a donation to National Geographic's gaming development, but I'm not sure the tax man will agree with me when I put it on my tax return.
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