Project Highrise for Xbox One review: Is this building management simulator worth buying?

The building of your dreams

Project Highrise is a management strategy game in which your task is to build, maintain, and grow one or multiple buildings into a thriving business area. To accomplish this, you'll need to create the buildings themselves, and then fill each floor with offices, services, utilities, and more. As your structure gets noticed by various companies, they'll offer to pay you revenue in exchange for the opportunity to work inside. This is how money is made in Project Highrise, and the main challenge of the experience is to find a way to outpace your expenses with enough income.

Something you'll quickly learn is that buildings can be quite complicated to take care of. Everything from utilities like power and phone lines to services like trash management and interior decoration have a big impact on the appeal of your skyscraper, and will determine how happy or unhappy your tenants are. It's a little overwhelming at first, but the game has several tutorials to help you learn the ropes, and once you get the hang of things the game becomes incredibly fun. After I first turned it on, four entire hours passed without me realizing and I felt like I only scratched the surface of all the different possible building strategies and routes to take.

A way for everyone to play

At its core, Project Highrise is meant to be challenging. It is a strategy game, after all, and thankfully the title lives up to the expectations that come with the genre. If you're not paying attention to the concerns of your tenants or other sources important information, you can easily start to lose money and get yourself in a pickle.

If you're someone who prefers a laid back and easier experience, though, don't fret. Project Highrise offers a special mode where you have unlimited resources, meaning that right off the bat you can build the best offices, shops, and equipment in the game. Whether you're someone who wants to spend hours and hours working towards achieving these things normally or just want to chill out for a while and build a virtual skyscraper without having to worry about any of the work, Project Highrise has a mode of play for you.

Final thoughts on Project Highrise

At the end of the day, Project Highrise is an excellent skyscraper-management game that challenges the player with deep strategy and rewards them with gigantic, gorgeous looking buildings. Additionally, since the game caters to casual players as well, Project Highrise can be fun for everyone, not just strategy fans.