Buildings Have Feelings Too! Review – Switch/PS4/Xbox One/PC Gameplay
Buildings Have Feelings Too! Review
From the moment I booted up Buildings Have
Feelings Too and started the cute tutorial
directed by crumbling, decrepit buildings,
I knew I was about to find a treasure trove
of fun. 2 hours later, I gave up searching.
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I know I’m late to the party with this one,
but a review key came in while I was out of
town. I have avoided watching other reviews,
so these opinions are purely my own based
off of my gameplay experience. I’ll admit
upfront that I was pretty wrong about this
game. I thought it would be a charming story
of redeeming the remains of elderly, forgotten
buildings with memorable stories and personalities,
but this is very much a puzzle game hidden
behind that facade, and not a good one at
that.
Let’s start with the story, because that’s
what I feel was the primary selling point
of the game. In the trailer, you see these
forgotten buildings bemoaning their status
in the city, and
pumped into them. While that does happen in
the game, it seems to be more of a background
or secondary emphasis to the puzzle mechanics.
Some buildings do have more character than
others.
Literally, some of the buildings are actual
characters that are used to progress the story,
and others that you build personally to reach
goals and objectives do not have a story to
share. The buildings that do talk, though,
felt like they were only sharing with you
in order to get you to achieve the next objective.
The thought of talking with old buildings
is a cool one, hearing their stories, sympathizing
with them in their states of disrepair, but
the story just felt hollow to me, and like
it was just a mechanic to introduce the next
chapter of the game.
Also, the audio cues when the buildings chat
is just the sound of crumbling or crushed
bricks it seems, so I turned that down pretty
quickly and tried to enjoy the music. We’ll
talk more about that in a bit.
So let’s get to the mechanics of the game,
the actual minute to minute gameplay. Actually,
time for a quick story break. After the initial
short discussion and introduction to the game,
you’re placed into the tutorial, which I
did not realize you could not save during,
or rather that there is no autosave during.
This is one of the most boring and confusing
tutorials I have ever had the pleasure of
running into.
So 20 minutes through the tutorial, I closed
out the game and went to bed. Imagine my surprise,
or displeasure rather, when I reloaded the
game the next day and found no save files.
So I had to click back through the tutorial,
which took 9 more minutes. I’m not a game
developer, but maybe someone can give me a
good reason why auto, and turns out manual
saves too, would be disabled during a long
tutorial?
Anyway, back to the general gameplay. You
are given some objectives to meet in order
to make certain buildings happy, sometimes
by having enough people living close by in
residence buildings, or having a pub down
at the corner. These buildings needs have
to be met within a certain distance of the
main building, and this range is displayed
by holding the alt key (I think), the Shift
key also brings up an overall view of each
buildings satisfaction, and you can click
individually or hit spacebar on a building
to see what it offers to other buildings,
as well as how its needs are currently being
met.
Buildings Have Feelings Too is filled with
symbols and colors to interpret, and these
get quite confusing over time. Trying to keep
the buildings straight is probably my biggest
annoyance as well. When you begin the game,
there are two or three building types you
can build, and then you can fill them with
different business, but only specific to that
building type. So when you install a new business,
it changes the color of that building…kind
of. It only changes the appearance of the
entrance, which is quite small and hard to
see most of the time, with the way the camera
moves. I played on my PC, sitting about 2
feet from a 31 inch monitor, and could never
tell which businesses were which without clicking
on them.
A simple fix for this would have been to change
the color or look of the entire building,
and probably would have helped to infuse some
color and life into this game. It definitely
would have made the buildings much easier
to distinguish, and helped to speed up the
gameplay. You can move buildings around to
accommodate others and meet your objectives,
as well as building new buildings and businesses,
as well as replacing businesses in each building.
But what the game didn’t tell me, until
it was too late and I had already done it
twice, is that each building can only change
businesses twice.
So at this point, I was already stuck with
2 buildings which I couldn’t use for any
purpose, and I couldn’t demolish. I just
had to move them to the outskirts of town
to congregate together in uselessness, which
feels quite contrary to the message of the
game. One last thing I’ll mention about
the puzzle-type mechanics of Buildings Have
Feelings Too. There is a lot of building swapping
that happens in the game, and it can be tough
sometimes to find enough room to accommodate
everything you need in one area.
Most map areas have 2-4 chunks of buildable
space, usually separated by a bridge or other
obstruction. But to swap buildings, you have
to walk your character to that building, select
it, walk with it to the new area you want
it, drop it, grab the other building you want,
then walk back. It’s just terribly slow
and arduous. Like putting a puzzle together
in the dining room, but the box of puzzle
pieces is located upstairs…in your neighbor’s
house.
As I mentioned earlier, I think the art could
have been greatly improved by adding more
distinguishable color or decor to the different
buildings, but overall I did enjoy the kind
of smoggy, depressed look the game has going
for it. It reminds me of the depressed downtown
area in my hometown, with the rundown buildings
containing nothing but shattered windows.
The music, on the other hand, was not my cup
of tea. It was very repetitive and almost
grinding on the nerves at times. This does
change between the map areas, which is nice
in that it introduces some variety.
But far and away, the worst part of Buildings
Have Feelings Too, is the downright awful
user interface. I mentioned in the gameplay
section that there are three different buttons
used to bring up different views of the city
and buildings on your screen, then when you
select an individual building, there are 4
different buttons used to interact with it,
some presenting you with more button options
once you’ve chosen from the first set. It
all felt like a jumbled mess, and after 2
hours I still did not have a good handle on
which buttons did which actions, or even what
some of the symbols meant without having to
go to the pause menu.
Heck, I ended up at the pause menu by mistake
probably 50% of the time, because I was trying
just to exit out of my current screen. I hate
to make a complaint without offering an alternative
in my reviews, but this is just too much going
on. This system needs to be simplified down
to be more user friendly, especially as Buildings
Have Feelings Too is not pitched as a deep,
strategy-intensive game. There’s also a
decently extensive “research tree” to
unlock. You can’t see me, but I’m doing
air quotes around “research tree” because
the game never identifies how to unlock the
next stage, besides using more unexplained
symbols. I think that’s enough.
So the question is, should YOU play Buildings
Have Feelings Too? I wouldn’t recommend
it. This is one of the most challenging games
I’ve played recently, and for all the wrong
reasons. A poorly designed user interface,
symbols out the wazoo with little to no explanation,
and a really tiresome way of walking the buildings
to and fro to meet your goals. But let me
know in the comments what you think of Buildings
Have Feelings Too, or if you’ve had a different
experience with it.
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