City Tuesday

               CityTuesday is an Xbox Live Indie Game released on September 8^th, 2012 created by Return To Adventure Mountain. Its description bills it as a “an open world platformer game about the last five minutes before a terrorist attack. You play a man who has become stuck reliving those five minutes before the disaster.” City Tuesday is also a puzzle game, but this isn’t mentioned in the short description for the game. So, how is this platformer/puzzler?

                 The first several levels are a tutorial of sorts. The objective is often to acquire a bomb before a specified amount of time runs out. Sometimes this is a straight forward objective like take the bomb out of the trash. As the games progress the objective gets more complex, like jolt the machines when people use them to get coins to give to musicians so there’s a distraction that the terrorist will use to plant a bomb and leave so you can then grab said bomb.

Watch out for the person in the red sweater that you met in the 3rd grade. They'll break your heart one day.

                Once you get through the “tutorial” levels, you presented with one large city level that you need to explore and find the bombs in a five minute time limit. You can speed up the progression of time but you can’t slow it down or reverse it. If you run out of time the world explodes and you restart the city scenario. Along the way you can interact with people who give you a bit of information about what’s going on with them, but doesn’t really do anything otherwise. Rarely will you gather useful information about how to solve a puzzle you’re currently working on from these people.

                Graphically the game is made up of simple backgrounds that are populated with stick people. The graphics are crisp and clear, and serve their purpose well. I really liked the initial screens where it shows a guy at the top with a bomb and a whole crowd below him fleeing in terror.

Here's a cross section of people going about their day. If you cut the New York Subway system in half, this is actually what you'd see. You also have to remove all the necks of everyone.

                The sound does its job, and that’s about it. The music is appropriately haunting, and the sound effects aren’t obnoxious.

Tabitha acquire her pretend degree at the fake Ohio State University.  This information totally has relevance  to what's going on in this scenario.

                Overall I would suggest at least trying to the demo for this game. It’s a fun and interesting puzzle adventure game, and I found myself not being overwhelmed by any of the puzzles. It’s on the short side though, and I would’ve liked a more robust city with more bombs to find. I really liked one of the puzzles that required you to follow someone around and figure out how to get the bomb that they inadvertently carried and would’ve liked more of that. For 80 MS Points, it’s a good ADD distraction satisfier, and I hope to see a second one that’s much bigger. An expanded inventory so that you could pick up, use, and combine items would’ve given it an adventure game layer. A big, deep complex city could really take this game off.