Utopia Must Fall does one of my favourite things when it comes to futuristic settings. It takes the names of actual cities, then bolts on words like ‘neo’ or ‘hyper’ on the front of them. I love it. I wonder what prompts the city to make the change. Is it when you’ve put up enough glowing neon lights and giant TV screens? We can’t be that far away from ‘Neo New York’ then. Though personally, I’m more into ‘hyper’. ‘UltraHyperMega London’ is surely what we should be aiming for.
Anyhow, despite ostensibly being set in the future, Utopia Must Fall‘s gameplay is a definite shot into the past. It’s very deliberately modelled after arcade games. That sort of lays out what to expect. Very simple gameplay, bright colourful graphics, some upbeat music and a big, flashing high score counter at the top of the screen. Arcade games have their good and bad sides, though. Utopia Must Fall is extremely accessible and has a good, entertaining skeleton – but it’s lacking in staying power right how.
Neo London Has Fallen
The specific arcade games that Utopia Must Fall is calling back to are Missile Command and Asteroids, with a health dose of Space Invaders in there. You start a run by getting handed a city, which could be, say, HyperParis. It’s protected by a shield, and a giant cannon that follows your mouse cursor. You need to defend it from encroaching waves of asteroids and aliens, and all their assorted missiles. After each wave, you pick an upgrade from an extensive tree. That might be increasing your fire rate or shield strength, or spawning in a drone for help.
It’s an intensely bright and colourful experience. As you progress through the days, your screen will get filled with brightly coloured ships and rockets, and flashing explosions. If it gets too much, you can release a nuke to wipe out a section of the screen. You keep going until the enemy manages to punch through your shield and reduce your population to zero. The core loop is quite frantic, and fun as a result. My highest result came around day 27, and I was barely holding back the constant barrage of missiles. It’s bright, flashing insanity.
Midnight in HyperParis
That said, while I found the core gameplay of Utopia Must Fall quite fun, it didn’t really get its hooks into me. I had to vivisect that feeling for a while before getting to the bottom of it, because Utopia Must Fall has a lot going for it. There’s a staggering amount of enemy variety and a decent amount of upgrades. I think the problem lies on two fronts. Firstly, there’s just not much variety in the actual enemy designs. Coloured triangles don’t really look that different from each other. So, while each run is technically different, it all starts feeling the same.
The second point is related to the first, there just isn’t enough build variety yet to keep the runs interesting. Most of my upgrades follow the same lines. Invest in getting triple shot, gets some drones done, beef up the shields and increase nuke production. Then keep pressing on until the enemy missiles get too much. There need to be some truly exciting upgrades. In fact, the ‘refresh’ upgrades button is given a silly name each time. One of them is putting wheels on the city; very funny. But, honestly, why not? Moving the city would add a complete new dimension. Maybe we could split the city, giving us two targets but essentially, two lives? These are the things that keep me coming back.
Utopia Must Fall – A Good Skeleton
Maybe there are exciting upgrades way further down the tree, but I’m too incompetent to get there. As a result, I’m left with the sole draw: the high score. I’ve never really been one for chasing scores. In fact, I tend to set one that I’m vaguely happy with and then never think about it again. And that’s sad, because I’d like to think about Utopia Must Fall again. It has a lovely, fun core. It just needs to build on it. Perhaps literally, in a way. Maybe the image of our city could change the more upgrades we have?
That’s sort of what I need. The feeling that something is changing and improving as we go, beyond the hidden stats attached to the upgrades. The Steam description points towards some meta-progression in the future, which may help. As it is, I think it just needs more stuff in general. No bad place for an early access game to be in. If you want a fun little arcade game to soak up a few hours, check out Utopia Must Fall now. But if you’re patient, I’ve a feeling it might become much more than that in the future.
