Cole Jefferies is bringing his fascinating Concrete Jungle to mobile this week, and it should be on your radar. The game is basically what you’d get if you’d combine a city builder with a deck-builder or CCG like Hearthstone (Free) and a puzzle game. The whole thing perhaps works better when you try it out, but essentially, you have to play cards that represent city buildings on a board. Houses are the key unit, as they collect the points that are necessary to clear a column at a time, akin to a puzzle game. Other buildings can have effects on tiles that increase or decrease their point value, so you’re trying to place houses and buildings in such a way that you get enough points to clear out each column to expand the board and progress toward the goal column. But, as you lay down cards, they have values that can allow you to buy new cards to add to your deck, or to increase the value each column needs to be cleared. Then, there’s a 3 star system for how well you do in each level. The game’s tutorial stages are friendly without being overly hand-holding, and it all makes sense once you play it.
Now, you might be hearing terms like puzzle game, city builder, deck builder, and CCG and think “this must be the most free-to-play game ever, right?" Wrong! This is a paid game with no IAP. Concrete Jungle started as a Steam game, and the mobile adaptation should be the same (though the interface is a bit small on phones), just with a $4.99 price. The concept seemed ingenious when I first heard of it, and the early stages of the game proved there’s some fun to be had here. You can check it out on iOS and Android on Wednesday, September 28th for $4.99.
