AdvertCity is a relatively simple management game about running an advertising firm in a cyberpunk metropolis, earning your keep by slathering the surrounding cityscape in neon billboards and lewd cyberspace ads at the behest of several other megacorporations, each with their own likes and dislikes. This may all sound pretty engaging, and it is, at least for the first hour or so. Once you've got a steady cashflow going, any sense of challenge flies out the window and the management facade flakes off to reveal the idle-game core underneath. It's extremely easy to become best buddies with all the other megacorps and unlock every advertising technology in the game before the end of the second hour, turning gameplay into little more than endlessly clicking the same few buttons. Losing money is next to impossible, with no rival ad firms and all strategy reduced to "dont place a companies ads on a building owned by their rival". The (randomly generated) city this all takes place in makes for some nice screenshots, but feels very lifeless during actual gameplay. This is supposed to be a bustling futuristic megacity, yet the only moving parts seem to be the advertising blimps. No traffic, no pedestrians, no construction work, nothing. The fact that all the buildings are indistinguishable blocks doesn't help either. The only thing that saves the atmosphere is the very solid and theme-appropriate soundtrack and perhaps the writing, which, although confined to small descriptions of corporations and advertising technologies, does contain a good dose of cynical humour. The last thing to mention would be the buyouts, which are after all the main goal of the campaign. Taking over a rival megacorp is usually so ridiculously expensive that it might take several hours to save up enough cash, especially since running successful adverts for a company increases its overall value. Alternatively, you can hack them to decrease their value. This allows you to buy them out a lot faster, but it's still a pretty annoying process. (The game never tells you about this by the way, I only found out through the Steam forums) And besides, buying out corporations doesn't actually help you in any way, quite the opposite, since for some reason you can't run adverts for companies you own.
In the end, AdvertCity offers up a great concept, but fails to do anything with it. The charming and relaxing atmosphere fails to paper over the crippling lack of content, depth and variety and leads to a game that feels more like a rough prototype than a finished product.
Final rating: 4.8/10
originally written on 14/12/2022
