Boardwalk Builders Review: Sit and Watch the World Go By | The Gamerheads Podcast

Platform reviewed: Nintendo Switch

Also on: PC (Steam)

Price: $7.99

I love games where I can be creative, and one of my favorite games is Theme Park. I love the fact that I can design the layout of the entire park and create rollercoasters (which sometimes made my patrons sick). So when I saw Boardwalk Builders, I was hoping it would scratch that same itch. Unfortunately, it didn’t. There just wasn’t enough there to really design my boardwalk like there is in games like Theme Park. Too much busy work and not enough creation to keep me wanting to go back and play more.

The game starts with a short tutorial. A character pops up telling me how certain features work in the game. I’m not really sure who this person is, but they’re helpful. The first thing I’m instructed to do is build some shops. There are seven different categories of shops: art, media, entertainment, food, health, gifts, and fashion. I’m limited to only a few shops to begin with, but one of the features I do enjoy about the game is combining shops. Taking two different shops and combining them creates a new type of shop (and a different tier as well). I need to combine two shops of the same tier and have enough resources to build the new attraction. This can be difficult in the beginning because resources are limited.

Fortunately, there is a way to get easy money, which the game doesn’t tell you: click on objects that fly by, whether it’s a plane or a kid paragliding. I found this out by accident, clicking on the objects to see if anything would happen. This is one of my favorite aspects of the game: experimenting and seeing what happens.

For each shop I own, I can adjust certain aspects to hopefully increase revenue. I can change the quality of the product, increase the sale amount, decrease the service time, and change the store’s capacity. Playing with these controls obviously changes the income the shop makes, but I didn’t really feel like I understood why or the logic behind the controls. A lot of the time, I was just fiddling with the changes, hoping something would work.

Combining shops is an important part of the game, as this earns me stars. Stars are used to open new features, like maintenance workers, entertainers, the VIP Outreach Center, and more. However, because combining shops, especially for higher-tier buildings, can be very expensive, earning stars is slow. And each new feature costs quite a few stars, so I found myself sitting and waiting and hoping I’d earn more money quickly.

And that’s the crux of the problem I have with this game: I sat around and waited a lot. Outside of placing buildings and managing those businesses, I can also run social media ads. But I didn’t really do much in the way of designing anything. I sat and watched people walk to the stores. I’m not even sure if they enjoyed the services I offered. There wasn’t anything indicating that. I quickly became bored and never really connected to the boardwalk that I was building. It’s too bad because I think building a boardwalk could be a unique idea in this theme park building genre, but there wasn’t much to design, and running the shops and social media just isn’t much fun.

Final Grade: C

The idea of running a boardwalk sounds fun, but there isn’t much to do in the way of designing anything. Part of the fun with these types of games is designing and implementing your vision for your park, and Boardwalk Builders doesn’t do that. I’m placing shops and running those individual businesses. Too much busy work and not enough to keep me engaged.

Review code provided by Flynn's Arcade