Venture Towns

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 57 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income, and Epic Astro Story established a Simulation style akin to games like Sim City, where you’re building out a town or settlement.

Venture Towns originally released on mobile devices in 2012, then saw a port to Nintendo Switch in 2018, PlayStation 4 in 2021, PC in 2022, and Xbox One in 2023. And given that this game seems, by all appearances, to be a simplified take on Sim City, you could be forgiven for thinking that it fits the Epic Astro Story mold of Kairosoft’s games. But oddly enough, this game is probably closer to Hot Springs Story, since the city you’ll be building is run like a company town. That is to say, you’re not just managing the town using tax income from residents, you’re also running all of the shops and venues and on the hook for their expenses while taking in their profits. So while Sim City will have you catering to townsfolks’ needs by ensuring that their homes are in decent proximity to both industrial and commercial districts, in Venture Towns you’ll also need to be aware of what shops are placed where so you can maximize their profits.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals presented in an isometric view, paired with repetitive chiptune music and sound effects. Apart from the forgettable and somewhat annoying synthesized music, everything about this presentation is really endearing, though by this point we’ve seen more or less the same thing in numerous other Kairosoft games.

While I feel like the gameplay here may strike some as a bit of a bait-and-switch, I ultimately think that this game’s biggest problem is a problem that plagues half of Kairosoft’s catalogue – it’s often unclear what’s going on, or what you should do to improve things. If a shop is performing poorly, the game doesn’t indicate why it’s performing poorly. If you have houses that no one is moving into, the game doesn’t indicate how you can attract more people, beyond the broad suggestion to make your town more attractive to those who would want to move in.

What’s worse, by having properties that are a constant drain on resources, and for some inexplicable reason not making a profit, it often seems like the best thing for you to do is bulldoze these businesses, not only wasting the money you spent, but sending the value of neighboring businesses down as a side-effect. And if your funding has dipped into the negative, you don’t even have this as an option, trapping you into a negative spiral of losing increasingly more money because you can’t spend a pittance to staunch the gaping wound.

Needless to say, this is frustrating, and the odd thing is that the core mechanics of this game shouldn’t have been all that different from an isometric take on what we saw in Mega Mall Story, one of the best games Kairosoft has produced. But that game gave players far more opportunities to upgrade businesses that were doing poorly, as well as allowing them to freely relocate them to what would hopefully be a better location. No such luck here.

In the end, regardless of whether you’re looking for a city-building Simulation or a business management game, I think you’ll be disappointed here. The lack of clear information and lack of ability to respond to situations when things go bad make this a frustrating entry in the genre. My suggestion to you is, if you want to play a game like this that actually works, try Mega Mall Story. If you want a city-building Simulation game from Kairosoft, try Epic Astro Story. But skip this one.

tl;dr – Venture Towns is a Management Simulation where players manage a town and all of its businesses, trying to ensure that everything remains profitable. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t give players enough information to keep things from going wrong, and doesn’t give them enough tools to fix it when it does. The result is a disappointment that doesn’t live up to the city management game this appears to be, nor to the business management game it wants to be.

Grade: C-

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