Virtual City 2: Paradise Resort Game Review

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Plan and manage townships, and watch them grow into prosperous cities in Virtual City 2: Paradise Resort, the city management simulation game. Direct each city’s complex transportation network and construct crucial buildings to support your supply chain strategy. Increase their desirability in jobs, environment and tourism, and turn them into profitable holiday destinations!

The first Virtual City game was a breath of fresh air in the city-level time management game genre. Rather than the more common game style based on constructing buildings, Virtual City instead focused on managing the complex transportation and supply chain networks that keeps a city running smoothly. Virtual City 2: Paradise Resort brings us a welcome sequel to this great game, adding better graphics as well as introducing new game concepts such as the transportation of workers and tourists.

As the name suggests, the focus of the game is on transforming towns and cities into vacation destinations with booming tourism and retail industries. You will travel across the continent and visit townships in all kinds of climates and environments, doing your best to accomplish the many goals set by the local councils. Each scenario or level will challenge you with tough objectives, and there are also tight time limits for those who want to complete them at expert level.

You control a transportation business, and will start each level with a garage that can build a limited fleet of trucks and buses. Some levels are supply chain levels, requiring you to connect the various stages of a supply network in order to meet the objectives. An example would be a baked goods scenario where a mill continually produces flour, and a bakery can process that flour into baked goods to be sold at the supermarket. You job would be to hire and assign a truck to deliver flour from the mill to the bakery, and another truck to deliver baked goods to the supermarket.

You will also be running a commuting service, such as transporting residents to their jobs or entertainment venues. Since this game focuses on vacations, you will also be transporting newly-arrived tourists to the local attractions. Doing all this successfully will require you to build bus terminals at strategic spots and supply a large enough bus fleet to cater to the people’s needs.

In both the supply chain and people-moving scenarios, you will get paid for each delivery/commute. You will need to wisely spend this hard-earned cash in order to grow your business. You can buy more trucks/buses or upgrade them to move things more quickly. You can upgrade the processing businesses (such as the bakery) so that incoming flour will be converted into baked goods more quickly. Or you can upgrade the homes surrounding your bus terminals so that more people will relocate there and subsequently increase the number of people using your buses. In some scenarios, you might even need to build all the key buildings such as terminals and supermarkets from the ground up. You will need to decide which is the best way to invest your money in order to achieve the objectives within the set time limits.

The game can get pretty complex, requiring you to manage a fleet of more than a dozen trucks. You may need to manage the export and import of goods with neighboring cities, and also ensure that all the trash from various industrial buildings are collected and properly disposed of or recycled.

As if all that wasn’t enough, you will also need to manage each city’s environmental, job and tourism ratings. Level objectives may include achieving and maintaining high scores in each rating. Moving more people to their workplaces will increase the job rating, but negatively affect the environmental rating. Similarly, creating more entertainment venues will boost tourism but cause the environment to suffer as well. You will need to skillfully manage the many facets of city planning and transportation in order to create a successful and thriving city.

There are a lot of things going on in the game. This means that the learning curve is pretty steep, and the game is more complex and challenging than the typical time management games with frenzied clicking. Other than the slightly outdated-looking graphics, it is a very high quality SimCity-esque strategy game that will provide you with hours of hair-pulling entertainment.

You will like Virtual City 2: Paradise Resort if you like more complex strategy games, or other town management games such as the Build-a-Lot series.

Check out the other games in this series!

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