City Limits Review: Building a High Score (Xbox X|S)

City Limits is a puzzle-strategy game where you decide if you want to chill or be challenged. Its colorful setting and fun music mix well with its simple yet deep gameplay. Overall, City Limits provides a fun and rewarding time to puzzle away on your own private island.

City Limits is available on Steam, Xbox One/Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4 & 5 and Nintendo Switch for $4.99

Story – You Are an Island

There is no story in City Limits, but there is a simple premise. You play on a barren island of tiles that you can place buildings or patches of grass on while thorns spread over it. Beyond that, there is a frog head that pops up every once in a while to hang out in the waters. My headcanon is that I am the god of this island fighting a thorny virus using my powers of urbanization.

Gameplay – Building on the Grid

The gameplay of City Limits is rather simple on the surface, yet can be fun and rewarding to play. The basics involve placing buildings on your island’s tiles to form combos and score points. However, as you place buildings, thorns cover tiles on your island. These thorns will destroy vacant tiles and lone buildings. The trick, then, is to make combos that cannot be overtaken by the thorns and to cover the island strategically for the most points. Once the island is filled, your points are tallied and you start again.

Combos are formed by placing two of the same building directly beside each other or under and over each other. There are no combos activated by diagonal placements. When placed together in those ways, the buildings are thorn-proof and also create a new and different building, one that can be used in further combos. Some buildings are created only by blocks produced from combos. Creating these high scoring buildings is very exciting as you strategize around the decreasing space of the island.

The difficulty lies in the fact you only get four random blocks at a time, similar to Tetris. There are, of course, buildings you can activate to change your block options, but these are also challenging to place. It was only in a thorn-free game mode where I was able to place a powerful building that wiped my island clean allowing me to continue fresh and reach a higher score. The moment I placed the last building in the combo and saw my island reset was exhilarating. 

My island mixed with buildings, combos, and thorns.

There are several gameplay options you can mix and match: a basic or advanced mode (4 buildings or 12 buildings), various island shapes (basic square island, random island shape or a random spread of tiles), and different thorn spreads (standard thorn spread, thorn-free, or thorns spreading on a timer). If the challenge of these modes is not your speed, there is a free-play option. Thorns and combos are off, allowing you to build whichever buildings you want and make the island your own. I appreciate the depth of difficulty options City Limits provides. You choose the level of challenge and the level of relaxation you experience. All these options are available to you after a very short tutorial of the basic mode. After a few rounds and mix-matching game modes, it is likely you have seen all that there is to be seen.

Graphics and Sound – Let It Wash Over You

The entire game has a cohesive aesthetic of tiles and an ocean full of color. Every menu and option button is a tile, just like the island tiles that the main gameplay takes place on. An assortment of background will drift by including city-scapes and tropical islands. You are able to change the color of the ocean at anytime with 8 color options: blue, yellow, shades of green, shades of purple, and orange. There are options to declutter your screen as well, which fit the peaceful minimalism. As a rookie, it was convenient to have every instruction and option on screen. Once you get the hang of it and learn the building combos, you can play endlessly and uninhibited by icons.

The most minimal city building view.

The synth and piano-based music is just as good as the visuals. There are 10 songs on rotation, some relaxing and some upbeat. Admittedly, I left the game on while writing this review and greatly enjoyed the background music. My only gripe is that you cannot choose the songs you want to listen to like you can with the colors. However, the soundtrack is available to purchase as DLC on Steam.

City Limits was reviewed on Xbox Series S with a key provided by JanduSoft.