Highrisers

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To solve the problem (to start the game at all) you have to start the game in Admin-mode.

Till now I haven't played the game, since I am already happy enough to bring it to start for now.
But I refuse to recommend games where you have to lower security options and where the devs can't provide a proper solution even after years of development.
...even though I totally understand that they don't worry much, since the game is sponsored by the german gouvernment. Gouvernment jobs are always a free ticket to do whatever and however you want to do it. Nobody "up there" does even understand what you are doing. ;)

But there is still a chance to change my review to positive, when I have tested the game itself and its cool enough...

I thought I might like this despite the reviews, but the execution is just that little bit too clunky.

At first it seems straight forward, and like pausing will be enough to sort your way through each plan.

I think this wouldn't be terrible if you had time to plan things out, but you're already being rushed to get haphazard weapon crafting done during the first day. It doesn't seem like it'll be too hard to get this done, but the lack of a queue system or automation system means that each individual step of that process becomes a mental weight to lift instead of a few pieces of a puzzle you sort through.

It's tough to put into words just how many steps go into something like making a spear.
It's something I've done in a dozen other games, but I think here there's such a period of stress between each step that it becomes unfun. You're juggling 4 workers who you desperately need to make the best of your limited time with before the zeds come, but it's difficult when various tasks take different periods of time and making something can go all out of wack when you're trying to keep in mind the 4-6 things you'll be trying to disassemble by travelling to different locations, which'll result in various amounts of resources (seriously, I ripped apart a leather couch once and either didn't get leather or it fell behind a stone table that I no longer had time to disassemble, and I really needed that leather to make a machete, but no leather means no machete so no 2nd weapon that night meant my one defender took a ton of damage defending herself and just AAAAAAAA I thought I was making a spear but couldn't find the metal poles either!!

I was able to handle Factorio and Rimworld but not handle this, even with the pause feature. I'd really like to see this company iterate on the idea and come out with a second title in the future, but I think I'm just stopping here. One of the 4 survivors whined an 8 second quip at me about being asked to tear down a shelf I needed metal out of for a barricade so she wouldn't you know, die later that night, but oh my god who says "no, fine, you know what, its fine, it's just as bad as the last thing you asked me to do" and like AAAAA maybe thats supposed to be a hint but I cant tell and despite their backstories none of the characters at level 0 seem to have bonus stats to any particular actions before they level up into new skills so I don't think she's supposed to be doing anything specialized anyway?? just AAAAAAAAAAA

The game is a solid idea and build as well, problem i face is the controls are wonky at times. But other then that is a good game just need a little more work is all and i hope to see more from this dev as they have a good idea just not the skill to make the best yet

I enjoyed this concept but after waiting years for development to progress, i find out there has not been an update in over a year. maybe there is an explanation for this but i'm not happy about spending money on this game now.

I read a lot of the negative reviews and hoped that maybe the biggest gripe was that there was no pause (which was added in.)

Well, I have been unable to successfully move to a different tower due to consistent crashing (at certain times in-game) and it seems like the game has been abandoned at this point. When I try to report the crashes like the game asks, it just takes me to a broken web link.

Despite some annoying QoL stuff it would be pretty fun. Unfortunately, it's been impossible for me to get beyond 6 or so days due to crashes that are unavoidable. It would be fun, but for that reason it's been pretty much unplayable.

It could have some bug fixes and improvements, but it is a good game.

This. Game. Is. Hard.

And holy crap do I love it for that. Highrisers is a retro survival crafting sim where four survivors who have crashed their helicopter atop a high-rise building must survive to get their bird back in the air and survive to crash again. The amount of detail put into this game is staggering. Everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) in the building can be broken down into parts and repurposed. The crafting system is simple and pretty intuitive - each part needed to craft something, from a spear to a helicopter part, displays clearly next to where it's being built and mousing over the icon will make any nearby parts of that type glow quite clearly - the controls are solid, and the music is enjoyable.

This game will also kick your ass. The clock is always ticking, and everything takes time (although it does stop when you've got the action menu open). This is also a highrise, so you have over thirty floors to keep track of, between four survivors, so you have to be sharp on your micromanaging skills! At night, the zo- excuse me, I mean, the Dreamers come and climb the building. More show up every night, and if they see a survivor, they won't stop until one of you is dead (and there's more of them than you!). Luckily, you can build barricades and make weapons to help your quartet fight back, and the terrain has a grid layout so you can place defenses and materials exactly where you want them.

This game is not perfect. The sheer volume of items that can be found, disassembled, and put together can be a little overwhelming, and sometimes it's hard to find exactly what you're looking for. Survivors who don't have a weapon will not run away from Dreamers, and just stand there while they get pummeled to death. Some of the dialog needs to be thrown to the editors - while it's comprehensible, there are definitely some typos and translation misses. The UI is a little squished, although that may just be on my monitor, but some elements do overlap.

TL;DR - If you're looking for a fun, punishing micromanagement sim that lets you craft pretty much whatever you want while monsters try to kill you, this is definitely worth your time.

Has potential, but still has major crashes & janky mechanical quirks (notably the assist)
& Devs still seem to be hammering it out, so hopefully they get it playable, but as it is I never made it off the starting highrise...
The only time it spawned both the fuel barrel '&' the jerry cans, it ended up perma-crashing on the morning after the auto-save point

I'll have to come back to try it in a year or so

tl;dr: There's something almost compelling here, but it's barely too much micro-management for me. And it crashes and loses progress way too often to push past that.

[hr][/hr]

For the first 14 hours, I was pretty frustrated, getting to day 7 or 8 and being overwhelmed without having found the weird/rare resources I apparently needed. I reached the point of restarting almost immediately if I couldn't see the things I believed I needed, e.g. accessible fuel supplies, close enough to reach.

At about this point, I realised that I didn't need to fully repair the chopper, just get it repaired enough to take off, and refuel it enough to take off.

Once I had that realisation, the game become much more manageable. Taking off to a new building resets the zombie load, so you can quickly arrive, harvest whatever fuel is available and try and advance the chopper's repair status, and then move on. In this way, my next game went through four or five buildings in 11 in-game days, with a machete-equipped team, fully repaired and fueled chopper, and a large pile of (I believe) hard-to-find supplies and consumables being carried from building to building.

A few annoyances became clear in the gameplay at this point:

• Micro-management is annoying as most tasks are either really short or really long: You can pair up your people, and I basically played this way continuously by this point.
  
• Zombies seem to always attack the most-damaged person in range, and there seems to be no way to force the character who can self-heal to be the target; in fact, because he's self-healing, he's almost never the most-damaged.
  
• Repairing fortifications is ridiculously slow. Basically pointless. I'd be 0% surprised if one of the developers looked at this in future and said "Oh, that decimal point is two places left of where it should be", it's that slow. It takes 3 hours game-time to build, and it could easily be real-world hours to repair.
  
• Weird bugs. Random buildings becoming inoperable, occasional items that don't seem to work (tools and toolboxes), and in one case, I left a building and got the same building again. This last one was handy 'cause I knew exactly where everything was, and could just run down and grab the aluminium and fuel and a few other bits, and fly off again.
  
• There's a long gap from "Things seem stable" to "Whatever happens next". Higher levels of the skill trees have interesting stuff that looks like it'd upgrade the chopper even further, hinting at an end-game of leaving the city. But I was nowhere near unlocking those by Day 11 (as I'd needed to unlock other skill trees first), and by this point the game loop was a bit boring, as I was just wandering around trying to find enough screws etc. to cover my escape, and then hiding from the zombies overnight. Progress felt like it'd come to a grinding halt, and crafting unlocks are very slow to deliver new gameplay interactions.
  
• You arrive at a new building at 9am or so, and the daily skillpoint is awarded at 4am. So moving to a new building, it's definitely possible to miss a skill-point opportunity. I'm pretty sure this is how I got to Day 11 but had only earned 8 skill points.
  
[*] No save slots. Starting a new game wipes your existing save.

Ok, where to start . I have a Love/Hate relationship to this game . To me it is a very fun and addictive game , if you like micromanagment and scavanging, obtaining and transporting crafting materials back and forth .

It took me at least 12 hours to first get off from the starting building . The game seems hard or overwelming at first , but after a while you know what you doing , know where to find the stuff you need and getting faster at identifing the materials on the ground . It even seems to get easy if you get familiar with the mechanics , whom you will gaining while playing and not by the not very in dept tutorial , but thats not bad because you try and learn every run and thats the fun to me .

What kills this game for me are two gamebreaking bugs .
The first and fatal is : The game crashes after i left building two , corrupts the save file and you can start a new game again . I also had that crash randomly while playing otherwise , but rarley . I never got to building 3 because of that so i never experienced mid or late game .
The second is : Never repair an unfinished build barricade . If you do , you never can interact with it again and you ar screwed if it was your main big barricade and you don´t have enough materials to raise a new one .

I hope this bugs get fixed . I will never understand why they dont get you 3 autosaves to save the game at the start of a day or at least by arriving on a new skyscraper, so the chances of losing your progress are a little smaller . I wrote this review on 13/01/2022 , and i don´t know if the defs still are working on the bugfixing , if they do and fix this two major issues i will give this game a big thumbs up , but until then i can not recommend this game .

Have played this a fair amount and it is a great game.
The characters are likeable ad have personality even though they do not do much.
Pros:
Simple to learn, difficult to master. Fun game will get you to come back again and again.
Interesting mechanics.
Lots of crafting and RPG style progression.
The Devs are quick to respond with patches.
Music whilst simple goes great with the theme.


Cons:
There is not always the stuff you need spawned because it is generated randomly.
Bugs and crashes. Have had a great progress wiped out from crashes.
There is no quick save to prevent this from happening.
There is also only 1 save slot which when patch 1.0.5.a came on, glictched so everyone went back to level 0 and were stuck so all progress was lost.

Suggestions for devs:
Make a way to build a research table coz when one does not spawn, it is not possible to advance after a certain point.
a 2nd save slot?

Would I suggest this for a friend?
Yes definately!
It is currently a good game, but a few tweaks from the devs and it could be a great game!

19/11/2022 edit
game appears to not have anymore updates (last update was 15th november 2021, over a year ago)
very disappointing and annoying as it now appears to be an unfinished product with no more updates
I have since changed from a yes to a hard no on the game.
dont get it, there are no more updates
so sad
game had lots of potential

The only thing this game needs to be great is a time pause button. I love the art, crafting, and concept but right now it feels like every second you spend looking around the map, or not having all 4 of your people working is punished so it just becomes a frantic rush to keep everyone productive. The ability to pause, look around, and figure out what needs to be done next would solve all this. Until they implement that its a thumbs down from me.

Edit: Devs have been very responsive to feedback on both UI & control issues plus game now has pause feature! Leaving original review above for reference.

Gotta say, I love this game.

Bought it on day one, and it did have a couple of issues, but a lot has happend since. The developer is super responsive, which made me stick with it, and I'm glad I did!

There are still some QoL features I'd like to see added, but judging by my experience with the developer so far, I'm sure I'll see them sooner rather than later.

Keep it up!

This is a maybe for me, not an actual yes. Yet. The core concept is amazing, the art style is great, and there is real ingenuity here. People complain it needs more tutorial and I disagree. However, it needs pause, the ability to queue orders, and more depth and sense in the skill system.

I really want this game to be good. It's such an interesting concept, and fun when it's parts come together. I've played 95 hours in it not just because my ADHD has me randomly focused on it right now. It is genuinely engaging. It needs a few things and once it has them this simple title could be one of my all time favs.

A somewhat fresh concept in survival-crafting is what drew my attention. You land a half dead helicopter on the roof of a highrise. Explore it and use the materials in it to survive and get the heli flying again. Zombies come up the building after you each night and food is limited, the two main factors limiting your stay. You have to hurry and get that thing running before you are overwhelmed or starve. Get the heli running with duct tape and bubble gum and limp it as far as it will go until you land on another building and the loop begins again. Each time you are better prepared with the skills and materials you brought with you.

The four characters have interesting skill concepts that interact with each other. Some builds require the skills of two characters, making you plan out your level ups. However, skills don't really pay off with much usefulness until the second level. The abilities or recipes you get seem sort of slapdash as well. Some abilities might not give you any recipes, while others give you over a dozen. Some early abilities give you recipes you won't be able to make until later in the game.

The building is procedurally generated which is great.... unless you land on a building that has no fuel in the early game. Food is scarce, but you can stretch it by growing.... as long as the building has water. You will learn to restart until you have those two things at least, but that doesn't help you if you get screwed on the second building. In my experience it will be about the third building before you have the skills necessary to take the fight to the dreamers. You might have to restart before then but it is REALLY satisfying once you can start mowing them down and taking what you want.

The most annoying thing at the moment is the obvious need, but lack of a pause and an order queue system. In the message boards, the developer has said they wanted the lack of such to be part of the difficulty of the game. In my opinion, this is the wrong way to do difficulty. Difficulty should come from gameplay, not making the game difficult to play. For Highrisers, what I mean is the user should be able to efficiently and easily command the characters. You have 4 characters which you directly control 100% of the time in a survival situation. You need a sense of urgency yes, but you also need efficiency. You will almost always have some characters standing around while you mess with inventory or concentrate on one character. The ability to pause and queue orders doesn't make the game easier to beat, and if it does there are ways to rebalance. Good news though: The developer seems to have decided it will be on the to do list due to enough mention by the player base.

Overall, this is a promising concept. I hope that as updates come, more depth and control get added to the game. I don't believe it needs more tutorial. Factorio, Rimworld, these games don't have much in the way of tutorial. Learning through trial and error is greatly satisfying in those moments where you realize something new. A pause and queue system, and more depth and sense in the skill tree would top off this wonderful game.

Do not buy this game yet. Treat this game as Early Access or Alpha

A few game breaking bugs in all their builds so far + emergency fixes. More testing needed from the team please.

There are some really cool concepts are in this game such as scavenging for resources and jumping from building to building on a helicopter. Snazzy music although clipped poorly. Lack of descriptions and text which actually help you understand the game. RNG on the building may need a bit more refining

Update 8/3: The devs improved the aluminum issue since I posted my review, but I couldn't make it through the early game long enough to see how the game is now without burning out. I'm not able to reevaluate the game unless my burnout passes, but I wanted to acknowledge the much-needed change.

Original review:
The idea seems good, but I can't recommend the game in its current state because of frequently-encountered bugs and the game state not being completely saved. It's also too easy to be soft-locked or gated behind time-based progression thanks to the difficulty of obtaining aluminum and other materials. The devs are thankfully putting out hotfixes, so hopefully this will be enough for me to change my review later.

I had high hopes for this game, but even just 5 minutes in I see this is going to be a nightmare to play.

The main draw of this game is the number of items you can salvage then craft into useful weapons, structures, and crafting stations. Your characters have a limited inventory to hold stuff so inventory management will require you to go out, salvage, then return their loot to base. The absolutely glaring issue is the only way to "store" the items is to just dump them on the ground. Next to your crafting bench you start with some shelves but they only hold small items and it's only organizes items slightly better than just dumping everything on the ground. You cannot build anything else to sort inventory from the beginning and from looking at the skill trees there is nothing later in the game.

This leads you to not even knowing if you can even craft an item without taking stock of the absolute mess that is scattered around your feet. If they added a construction to dump items into it would make things much more approachable and less reliant on you knowing exactly how much of an item you have and where in the mess to find them.

Beyond that there is also some major bugs I encountered early in the game. The first time I played there wasn't even an option to play the tutorial so I ended up having to find my way through the game. When I made another game I was given the option to play a tutorial. I entered the tutorial, did the tasks assigned, repaired a helicopter component, then was left sitting there without any other tasks, and access to only the roof and top floor which I already stripped clean of items.

I am highly enthralled with the concept of this game, but unfortunately it just isn't a fun game to play as is. If it were an early access game that advertises it isn't finished then I could forgive the above issues. But it's not. It's kickstarter launched almost 6 years ago and this is advertised as a final product. I highly recommend against buying this game.

[quote]There is enough here to warrant a purchase, but be warned there are game-breaking bugs. I suppose that's the best compliment I can give this game; I am having fun despite my frustrations.

The devs are active with streams and players so I have no doubt things will improve. Buy this if the genre appeals to you to save some money while on sale and if you can handle your progression constantly being reset.[/quote]

[EDIT] It's quite possible I may need to change my review based on a few things I have discovered and don't really agree with as core game design decisions. If there was a "maybe" at this point I would select that instead.

[EDIT2] As much as I hate to do it, I can't in good conscience recommend the game any more. There are some dealbreakers which I have been given the impression will not be resolved and certainly not in any reasonable time-frame to reverse what I now consider will be the likely abandonment of further development.

Is this 1.0? Well i would say no. The actual state of the game feel like a beta, still filled with bug and erronous gameplay mechanics. In 5 hours of gameplay i was forced to relaunch multiple time the game because of various bug like sound spam, can't equip weapons anymore, couldn't progress in the tutoriel. I got multiple crash, two in game and 1 trying to launch my save of day 5, i guess my save is lost and i didn't try anymore after trying to launch it 3 time in a row. I'm done with this game until major update. Even before looking for the gameplay of this game you should wait...

Update:
so I came back to this after a few months of patching and fixing.
Played for about 30-45 minutes, then save/exit.
Tried to reload? Crash again.
I'm done, uninstalling and switching to thumb down.

Original review (was thumbs up):
Its a good game and because of this I recommend it - but be warned, its in a pretty bad state as of now that you can forget even a single playthrough.

I have restarted about 6-7 times, every single time with an intent of actually going through the game. Every single time, after about 45-75 minutes play, there's a game crash due to a random action that just isn't handled well in the code, and this effectively wipes your state to the last time you quit the game.
For example, first big bug was not being able to continue your saved game. Then, game would crash when you access a lab table. Then, game would crash when you try to assign assistants and try to craft barricades. Then, trying to shift things out of assistants inventory while they're building.
While complaining - its worth noting that developers are attentive and _very_ quick to patch things and push new builds out, so you never have to wait long between reporting a bug and have it fixed, but I didn't think I'm purchasing a product to playtest it for free. There are QA companies that make a business out of this!

That on the side - I am more than mildly annoyed that I keep redoing the initial game and can't unlock recipes further along to see whether this game is actually good or not, which is a shame because I want to play it - but I'm done with repeating the intro stuff over and over.
There is no manual save or timed autosave - you only save when you exit the game

Level ups are gained one per day, and you have to level up all your survivors equally, one per day. This means you have to wait at least by day 5 to see some 2nd tier skills and unlock recipes beyond starting ones.
That means that I have _no idea_ what gameplay there is, beyond the simplest tutorial basics, after spending 6 hours on this game.

Gameplay itself, is fun enough. You land on the top floor of a skyscraper, and your main objective is to repair your helicopter (which is always damaged) so you can fly to another skyscraper. Enemies roam lower levels during daytime, and venture higher up during the night, so you have to find or craft weapons to defend yourself.
You craft things mainly by disassembling various pieces of furniture (chairs, sofas, tables) and devices (such as computers, airconditioners, watercoolers) and obtaining their components. Recipes are unlocked via levelups.
Since enemies steadily grow in numbers, you have to smartly pick what to disassemble and what to craft, because sooner or later you're going to have to leave, and you better have your chopper ready by that time.

There's also a food bar that steadily keeps going down, and it _seems_ there's some farming to be done in the game, but I haven't gotten that far - I just keep foraging for vending machine food.


TLDR: game _seems_ to have huge potential, judging by first 30 minutes of gameplay, but its littered with game crashes without regular timed saves - that its just annoying to even try to play.

Come back in a month or so.

I really wanted to like this game, and it has some potential, but I had to request a refund. It has the makings of a good game, but it's not there yet. The complete lack of information given on how to do anything (no tutorial that I saw), coupled with the constant juggling of resources and character switching, back n forth, really made it hard to get anything done. Then it started crashing on me... so before the brief time limit was up, I decided it wasn't worth the risk at the moment in it's present form. The music got obnoxious after a while, too... I get going for the retro arcade style, but it's not really fitting with the mood, IMO.
I may try it again in 6m-a year... maybe.

Outright weak UI - unintuitive and too many clicks to gather all the stuff.
Outright weak graphics - everything is tiny.
Refunded, downvote.