New York City. Capitalism at its finest. It’s a place where nearly every street is iconic for some reason or another. However, since each and every one of those streets features wall-to-wall buildings (literally) it doesn’t seem like an ideal place for a city building sim. But, what if all but the buildings had been magically removed? What if you got to mold the city again however you wanted and build the NYC of your dreams? That would be pretty cool, and while you can’t do that in Tycoon City: New York, it isn’t an entirely bad game in its own right.

Fill In the Blanks

In Tycoon City you’re presented with a grid of streets that go nowhere; the basic framework of NYC is laid out before you, and it’s up to you to drop in coffee shops, comedy clubs, office complexes, and just about whatever else you like to turn those empty streets into a proper city. You’ll start off with some cash that can be spent to purchase buildings to plop down into some empty lot or another.

If you build an apartment complex you’ll need to build some food places nearby to feed them, a club or two to entertain them, a coffee shop to wake them up, and a tourist information center to tell them where the heck they’re going. There are dozens and dozens of types of buildings that can be built here, each meeting a need, and each having a set of upgrades available to it.

At first your buildings will be rather nondescript, kind of rectangularish and made of bricks or metal. But, with a few upgrades you can add on flashing neon signs, billboards, skylights, or perhaps a nice shrubbery or three. All these upgrades add on to the appeal of your building, making whatever business is inside more popular and, ultimately, more profitable.

However, the set enhancements here frequently make no sense. It’s rare that a glow-stick wielding raver will be more attracted to a techno club if it has a few pretty trees outside, for example, and the success of a coffee shop was rarely decided by the number of neon glaring out front.

See Most of the Sites

While you’re free to drop your clubs and apartment buildings just about wherever you please, the main attractions in the city, places like Madison Square Garden and the Flatiron Building are where they are in real life and there’s no moving them. They’ve also been unfortunately re-named, purportedly to avoid any sort of trademark issues. So you can hang giant banners on New York Arena downtown, but you won’t find Madison Square Garden, and while you can hire a girl to hand out pamphlets at the Empire Department Store, Macy’s is nowhere to be found.

Even with their generic names these buildings are easily recognizable as what they’re supposed to be. Unfortunately, all the other buildings are awfully generic looking, even when upgraded with a giant 3-D billboard and flashing fairy lights. This can make it awfully difficult to find that little coffee shop you dropped down in Manhattan, as it’s most likely shoulder to shoulder with nearly identical looking buildings.

That’s not to say the graphics are bad, because while they’re simple they do a respectable job. When you zoom in you can see people walking about, and while their walk animations are a bit stiff and the individual character models look rather dated, it’s a reasonably good looking game. It also features a good complement of sound effects, from a blustery wind noise when you’re viewing from high above to the idle chatter of your customers when you zoom right in. You can overhear them commenting about your business, which can be useful. However, it’s a bit odd to hear a female college student in hip-hugger jeans walking out of the church you just upgraded saying “That was the bomb!”

See, Conquer, Yawn

The game’s inconsistencies are somewhat annoying, but by far the biggest problem here is a distinct lack of challenge. Unlike SimCity where you constantly have natural disasters to worry about or citizens angry about tax rates, here you just basically fill in the blanks with buildings, upgrade them as much as you can, wait for the money to roll in, then rinse and repeat.

There are some challenges that will pop up from time to time that will, for example, encourage you to build a certain set of buildings to charm students or create some attractions to make a set of tourists happy. These are almost universally completed easily and there’s never any rush to do so. As you play the game you are pitted against some other virtual tycoons who are also buying up land and building, but so long as you keep buying and upgrading they’re easily dispatched. With no multiplayer, the game sadly has little to offer in the way of lasting appeal.

Nice Place to Visit

With its distinct lack of challenge and constricting city blocks to fit within, Tycoon City: New York leaves you feeling somewhat aimless and bored rather than challenged and excited like many other empire-building games. It’s nice enough looking, has some solid features, and is actually a reasonably good learning tool for those who want to figure out the general layout of the city. However, it’s just not a terribly compelling game in any way.