Everything in Voxel City is made of voxels, the 3D version of pixels. The houses, the shops, the bin lorries, the trees, the people on the pavement. It's 406 models at the last count, and you can pick up and turn round every one of them on the showcase.
Zone some land and buildings grow on it. Homes, shops and works each go through five levels, from a cottage to a tower, and every level is its own model. There are five designs for most plots, so a street of the same zone doesn't look copied and pasted. There are thatched cottages, a Georgian crescent, a bakery, a pub called The Swan and a pottery kiln.
When a building goes up a level you see it happen, inside timber scaffolding with the builders' lorry parked outside.
The land is a grid of voxel tiles, so rivers have stepped banks and coasts have that pixel staircase look. You can raise and lower it with the terrain tools. What's under it matters too. Stone, clay, sand and timber sit in patches across each map, richer in some places than others, and the works dig them out to make planks, bricks and concrete.
Why the clay sits by the water explains how that's laid out.
These come straight out of the game's own files. There are 18 kinds of Voxie, 126 buildings that grow from zones, and everything from a pram to a rocket on its pad.
Voxels can look flat. The game is made in Unreal Engine 5, so these ones get proper light. There's a low golden sun with long shadows in the evening, and windows that light up as it gets dark.
The models stay simple on purpose. A cottage should read as a cottage from right up in the air, and a Voxie should look like someone walking a dog when you zoom in on the pavement.
· 3 min read
A lot of buildings promised something and then just sat there. Now robot crews roll down a ramp to the fire, helper robots walk to building sites, the home printer has its gantry, rockets launch, and the post office, the bike docks and the sawmill all get on with it where you can see.
· 3 min read
The water-bomber airship used to stay on its mast and the fire drones never left their tower. Now helicopters and drones share one way of flying, over hills and round tall towers, the airship casts off to fight fires, and the coastguard's lifeboat goes out on the water.
· 2 min read
The title screen has a little card in its top corner now, with forty true tips about the game. It shows you the things you haven't tried yet first, and you can turn it off in Settings.
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