Boardwalk Builders (Switch)

Boardwalk Builders is a humble management sim not about making a gigantic theme park or trying to keep a tricky business from going under. It’s a leisurely pixel art game where you plop down many of the familiar types of seaside entertainment, or at least, that’s how it looks from the start. Despite not having as many midway games as you might expect, you do work your way up from corn dog stands and sunglasses shops to more extravagant rides and strangely enough eventually museums and spas, and some of this confusion about what a boardwalk should offer does hint at the game’s oversimplification of the building process.

 

After your assistant Erica takes you through the tutorial, Boardwalk Builders will let you get started on building your very own boardwalk, although there isn’t really a long-term endgoal designated beyond staying profitable and building up as much as you can. Your boardwalk begins as a rather small stretch of wood by the sea, there essentially being three rows of space no matter how long it eventually gets. The bottom row is for entering though, meaning you’ll only get to place stalls and businesses in the top and middle row, and there really does not seem to be any thought required in the exact location you should place them. A business’s prosperity is tied to visitor demand for their specific category, with categories like food, entertainment, art, and more rising and falling in visitor interest and helping guide how you build in the early in-game days.

Boardwalk Builders offers a great range of businesses to put on your boardwalk, but there are limits that rein in your ability to make interesting choices about them. You can only have one instance of each business type, so even when you eventually get a long boardwalk, you can only ever have the one burger stand or set of bumper cars. Unfortunately, while each little building has a supposed purpose, a great deal of them just end up looking like similar shops with different colors and a unique sign. A sushi shop looks like a toy shop, a yoga studio looks like the surfwear store. Places with interesting sounding premises like the driftwood art store or the caricature artist will never let you see their wares, little pixel people just running up and then walking away after paying for something you never get to see the results of. Rides at least are more visual, you can actually see people use a roller coaster or hop into the gravitron, but a lot of the businesses don’t feel like they’re really adding anything new to the boardwalk besides another source of income.

 

Sadly, managing individual businesses isn’t very involved either. Your businesses in Boardwalk Builders can be modified slightly, most of them having a few similar options. You can reduce or increase employees to influence service speed, reduce or increase quality to influence costs but also visitor interest, and you can pay for some permanent upgrades to a building like reducing its overall costs, increasing sale prices, or bumping up how much it contributes to the general visitor interest in your boardwalk empire. In the early hours when your money is tight and you only get a few visitors at a time, you will find you should watch over these elements of your businesses if you want to earn a steady income. You can shut down a business that’s not doing well and reopen it whenever you like too, and trying to find the sweet spot for costs without losing your audience gives you something meaningful to manage at the start. Keeping your boardwalk thriving will start to lead to consistent level ups where you will get bonuses like boardwalk size expansions, but as your visitor count rises and you start unlocking options like selling tickets to even step on the boardwalk, the management side starts to fade away and you can usually just let your businesses run however and they’ll earn you enough money to keep working on other development projects.

 

Since staying afloat doesn’t end up being too difficult after you leave that early phase of futzing with meters at your businesses, Boardwalk Builders starts to end up more about its business combining system. To make higher end and larger businesses, you’ll need to take businesses you’ve already placed down and combine them into something new. Usually this is just a way of upgrading a specific store type. You start with a simple food stand but its upgrades serve higher quality food or even become sit down restaurants. You start with simple entertainment options like a test your might game and eventually end up with large swinging pirate ships. For the most parts, these combos have “recipes” that mostly consist of picking the business you want to upgrade and one of a similar value to push it up to the next tier, but beyond providing a more costly but potentially more profitable business, these also contribute blue stars. Blue stars are used to purchase a lot of extras in Boardwalk Builders vital to growth. Some business types must be unlocked through them, you can upgrade your repairmen or bump up ticket prices with them, and they can help the simple walkabout entertainers you purchase to earn easy passive income more effectively. You’ll also need to invest the cash you’re earning in other helpful services unlocked with those blue stars. There are other businesses in the area who will do things like sometimes gift you more stars or some visitor buzz if you give them money, there are festivals you can host that increase interest in a specific category of business, and there are VIPs you can invite that, should they like your boardwalk’s offerings, will teach you a combination recipe you can’t earn otherwise.

However, some of the extra options to help your boardwalk are very shallow. Marketing campaigns are just brief visitor boosts with a small permanent rise in interest attached, and they’re basically always worth having going at the highest level once you have the money for it, the effort a no-brainer rather than an interesting element to engage with where it would help. You’ll learn what VIPs need to be happy if one doesn’t like the place and lays it out a bit too plainly why, making future VIPs easy to please. Gifting money to other businesses really just feels like bribing to get later gifts, although while they do help you out early on with their surprise help and it is cute to see Tiff from the developer’s other game Attack of the Karens serve as one of them, these competing businesses also interrupt play which can be rough during the endgame. Once you reach a certain level of income you really don’t have many levers to pull or choices to make to increase it. Your boardwalk size and visitor interest hits a cap and micromanaging meters feels like it’s not worth the time investment. Setting things to triple speed and letting the money roll in so you can keep combining businesses feels like all there is left to do, but the pop-ups from those helpful rival businesses giving you free stuff that won’t help much anymore keeps pausing the game so you can’t let it idle too long.

 

Combining businesses climbs in price the more you do it, and since there are various tiers of businesses, you sometimes need to start from the beginning to work up to the max upgrade. You start placing businesses without much thought since you might as well have them all there for when you can afford to mix them together and start working towards the exorbitant costs of the VIP business recipes, and once you do have that high end building, unless it’s something like a rollercoaster, it’s just an income generator rather than something with a unique feel to it or any real reason to think about it again unless it needs to be moved aside to make room for the next giant combo business.

 

A management game losing its charm and thrills once you’ve figured out a path to easy profits isn’t a new thing of course, but restarting in Boardwalk Builders really won’t see you making any new or interesting choices. It’s not a matter of optimization ruining the fun so much as just having very limited options on what’s possible to do, with placing businesses often not about making strategic business decisions besides maybe seeing what is in demand at the time. Maybe if Boardwalk Builders made it easier to earn all the combos before you’re left waiting for long stretches on money to roll in to afford them it might be easier to step away a little fulfilled, but the obnoxious waits for millions of dollars when you’re only earning thousands makes building your own boardwalk less and less appealing. Restrictions on building even mean you can’t really make your own personal boardwalk so much as gradually plopping down everything with no room for aesthetic consideration or theming. Gentle background music might be there to make things feel a little cozy, but the lack of substance behind so many of your decisions makes even the moments of progress feel too paltry to pay off a possible attempt at making a game about laidback management goals.

THE VERDICT: The early moments of Boardwalk Builders provide some decent management fun, the player needing to play with meters and manage costs to get their small boardwalk off the ground. A bit too quickly though they’ll start to see the game’s restrictions start to remove reasons to really consider which businesses you place and the limit of having only one of each business type means you don’t have much choice to place them all down rather than having room for creativity or theming. You’re mostly meant to place down businesses, combine them into bigger ones, then keep up that process over and over as its cost increases until you’re just waiting to pay the exorbitant price to make another business that, other than the rides, might as well just be a new name for the same offerings you have already. VIPs and working towards blue stars at first give you smaller goals, but Boardwalk Builders is structured poorly so that you miss out on being able to make meaningful business or aesthetic decisions after the early work is done.

 

And so, I give Boardwalk Builders for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. While there are other little quibbles you might have with Boardwalk Builders like how the controls on Switch would really benefit from more button shortcuts to make building easier, the real issue is how the appeal drains so quickly from the experience. When you’re working through the early days and needing to think a bit about what you place and how your businesses are run, you are at least kept mentally engaged even as you start to notice that your businesses aren’t really fun or interesting to watch. The combinations pique your curiosity as you want to see what can be placed on the boardwalk, even though even the stranger shops are just the same building you’ve seen before with a new sign much of the time. What really ends up stinging though is the realization that you’ve reached a point far too early on where choices matter less than they already did. Restricting the player to only having one of each business type means there’s not really going to be room for personalization unless you want to wait on income even longer by refusing to build available buildings. Optional extras like marketing are too straightforward in the considerations made and are often just a place you throw your money at and forget until it needs to be done again. Boardwalk Builders ends up a management sim where it’s not enjoyable to play long term and there’s basically no value to restarting unless you want to go through the same motions since you don’t have other choices. Player boardwalks will be differentiated just by where businesses happen to be, there not enough room for meaningful choices or imaginative layouts. It’s just two rows of money earners after you’ve unfortunately left that opening stage where you did have to think about what you’re doing some.

 

Building your own boardwalk is a lovely twist on the type of entertainment management you’d see in games like Roller Coaster Tycoon or Planet Coaster, but it doesn’t have the scale or even elbow room to really make the boardwalk feel all that customizable. You’re working your way up the combination tree and the actual running of businesses fades away before it really reached an interesting level of complexity. The fact there is little room for even trying to personalize the place on top of how plain the businesses tend to be feels like it can’t even hit the notes of a low difficulty builder, Boardwalk Builders fumbling its fun idea since it can’t find a way to cater to people looking for mechanical depth or aesthetic appeal.