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7.9 excellent
I always thought towns in the olden days just kind of built up naturally around resources, travel routes, etc. Maybe that's true but it turns out that at least in fantasy worlds brimming with kings, orchards, cow farms, and adventure... city planners were (and are) hard at work. If you have happy memories of playing Sim City or Populous or even the Civilization series, you might feel right at home in the world of Zellians, a game that lets you build towns in a fantasy setting. These kind of world-building, city-planning games are second only to RPGs in suitability for installing on a laptop in preparation for a trip on the Orient Express... perhaps via sleeper car from Strasbourg to Istanbul.
In World of Zellians: Kingdom Builder, from Game Invest, you play as the student of the kingdom's top city planner, wizardly old Zorm. Zorm is the guy who decides where to build the roads and houses and cow pastures and fire stations in the small country hamlets of Zellian. Under his tutelage (unless you click the "skip tutorial" button) you'll soon be laying out hamlets of your own. It seems that the nine kingdoms of the land are all upset with one another and that coincidentally, all their problems can be solved by careful city planning. If your house was in the center of a ring of pig farms with no road leading anywhere (meaning you had to climb through pig manure every morning to get anywhere) you'd be upset, too! I know I used to walk past a pig farm underneath the bullet train on my nightly walks around Kumagaya/Kagohara and the smell alone was unpleasant.
Using a simple enough drag and drop interface, you select roads and buildings from the menu at the bottom of the screen and click on the map to build them. Unlike Sim City, roads are free. Buildings have two costs associated with them: the actual cost in gold and cost in the materials needed for the construction. Plonk a building down and - after a short bit of progess bar action - it will be up and running. If you place a building or road or bridge in the wrong spot, you can use a giant stone hammer to smash it to bits. Luckily, every time you demolish a building, you get all the gold and materials used to construct it returned to your stockpile. Zellian truly is a marvel of efficiency!
For any building to work, it needs to be connected to the road. (Arrows indicate where the road must connect to the building - a road along the back of a family home doesn't count.) And the road must be connected to the town spring or fountain. No one in Zellian gets their water from the rivers or lakes - those are too polluted with fish!
You can't rotate buildings! No matter how hard you try!
If your town has almost any sort of working building at all, it will earn a constant supply of gold and materials, which is immediately sent to the town stockpile. Cow farms may produce 50 materials every few seconds. Grocery stores may produce 10 gold every few seconds. And so on. For every level you'll have a required number of goals to accomplish. You may have to reach a population level of 40 people, for example. Or you may have to build a university. Or reach a materials income of 700. As you get further into the game, you'll find that a chain of buildings are required to reach your goal. Like my grandfather always said, you can't build a juice stand without first planting an orchard!
When World of Zellians becomes difficult it's mainly due to the small amount of space you have available with which to encompass your fantasy town hamlet. Cow pastures are quite large and squeezing them into small spaces becomes difficult. For me, it became a bit tiring. Your mileage may vary. The isometric 2.5D POV and using the mouse to draw roads and place bridges does take some time to get used to. Often you'll want to place a building where there appears to be plenty of space, but the plot is too near the edge of the map and the game won't let you start construction. That's more than a bit frustrating, and it happens often. You'll find yourself building, demolishing, building, demolishing, building... until finally you get everything to fit. (The Zellians forbid getting out an axe and cutting down trees, so those, bodies of water, and the map edges will be frequent causes for frustration.) Secret tip: there is a restart option. Use it! Especially when you're stuck trying to build in the volcano area.
The best thing about the game is that there is no timer - you can take as long as you want to plonk down buildings at random or think about your strategy. (However some special bonus levels are timed - and believe me you will not finish them easily!) Lack of pressure along with the busy animations of townspeople walking around and wheat fields growing and noseless pigs oinking make World of Zellians a very kid-friendly casual game. The story is simple with large, brightly-colored cartoon characters and a "free mode" is available to be unlocked, so you can build your own town without having to muck about with goals and obstacles.
Anyone looking for building games like Wonderburg could do worse than World of Zellians.
Hint the first: If you've got a building on fire (like in Stonemoon Ruins), townspeople will continue to use it up until it's a pile of charred rubble, so let them risk their lives while you concentrate on building up your resources by constructing orchards or wood mills so you can get enough materials to build a fire station in time to put out the fire.
Hint the second: If you're having trouble with the Snowstorm Peak bonus level with the madmen destroying your roads... and not having enough room to build 12 schools or hospitals... start by demolishing the roads on both sides. Remember that you can destroy almost anything already built (roads especially) if it doesn't look like it complements your plans.
Download World of Zellians: Kingdom Builder