I was pretty excited to get my hands on this game since we started seeing some pretty cool footage from the content creators who were able to try the game during the Home of XR and were pretty enthusiastic about it.

I was able to get my hands on it pre-release and after playing around four and a half hours, I came out of it with a little bit of disappointment. I'm sure that you're curious into why I feel like this since this is such an innovative Mixed Reality idea, so lets get right into it!

Wall Town Wonders came out on November 21st 2024 for $19.99 and is available for the Meta Quest 3 and 3S. The developers of the game are Cyborn, who are well known for their award winning game Hubris! It's not a game that I had a chance to try yet, but I know that this sci-fi action adventure game had a lot of praise. Alright onto Wall Town Wonders now.

Gameplay

So the idea of the game is super cool and unique. Your main goal is to build a town on your actual wall. Every time that I was turning on the headset and saw all of these buildings on the wall, it was pretty awesome.

To upgrade or build more buildings, you have to basically gather resources. The buildings will mostly require wood, bricks and metal to be able to be made.

The main way to gather these materials is by going into mine expeditions. When you go in these, your town will disappear, and then you'll get into a cave that you have to explore with your miner. You can only do these expeditions once a day in real time, but as you keep playing, you get more way to gain these resources.

You'll obtain buildings that will automatically generate those resources in real time. So you can gather them as they appear, or you can take a break from your headset, and then when you come back, you'll have a good chunk of resources to gather. There's also other minigames that you can play that will help you gain resources faster.

Another really important resource is the food! You'll need it mostly to go in expeditions with your lizard to find more mines if you don't feel like waiting for a day. You can gather food by growing your farm, or by doing some fishing.

Last resource that you have are stars. You gather them just by playing the game or trying some mini games, it's kind of like experience point. You can use them to buy different new cosmetics for your townpeople or your buildings. But later in the game, some building upgrade may require them.

Game Flow

That's pretty much the whole concept of the game! You gather resources to build more buildings to gain more townspeople and so on and so forth. Going in, this is what I was expecting for sure. The thing though, is that I was looking for something relaxing, something to lose my mind in a peaceful and mindless setup, but as I kept playing, it felt more like a chore simulator than a relaxing crafting world for me personally.

The game starts strong, since you're greeted with some nice silly cutscenes and you get introduced to a lot of new characters. While you're learning how to play, and you get to build a lot of new things and discover some nice things to do.

But I'd say at around one and a half hour, you get to a point where you're in a loop to gather more resources to make more buildings, and that loop just don't seems to end. The loop is as followed: the core thing that you need are resources to craft buildings. The first thing that you need is food, and your farm doesn't grow fast enough, so you need to go fish a few times. Then you need to go on an expedition with your lizard using the food to find a mine. Then you mine your resources. Then you have to do it all over again.

As you keep going, there's a little bit more variety of things that you can do, but it doesn't add to the fun factor after doing it a few times. You just end up with the same goal throughout the game. After upgrading my townhall to tier 5, and noticing that it didn't add up to any new variety, I've simply decided that I was done and couldn't bare the idea that I just needed to grind again with no new added mechanic.

Also, every time that you have to start something, the townperson will have the same dialogue and I wish that I could just skip it, it doesn't add anything new.

There's 2 things that I can think that could've helped in making this game better:

The first quick and easy one would be to introduce a trading store where you can simply trade one of your resource to something else. There were many times where my bricks where maxed out, but I had no wood at all. It was annoying going to the mine grinding wood while I was wasting the brick resources.

The second thing is that I feel like there's something missing to break the ice. Like, I wish that there would be some events in the game that would stop you from doing your work for resources. There are some minigames in there like a flying a plane going through hoops to get experience, but there's not enough for me to keep doing it since it's extremely optional. It'd be nice to have things such as needing to complete these minigames to unlock buildings that you have to build, or things like that.

Graphics

Something that I've heard during some Home of XR footage is people telling how great the characters looked up close. That instantly reminded me of Demeo where the game looks gorgeous when you zoom in the board.

I did not get this feeling with the game sadly. The thing is that it's using dynamic resolution rendering, and for some reason, when I record my gameplay, the game thinks that I'm using a lot of resources and it needs to lower down the resolution to the max. So when I go close to the characters, it just looks very blurry from the headset. This is not an issue when you're not recording, but it personally affected my enjoyment. No other games I've played that lower down the resolution THAT much when recording.

The game also felt pretty janky. Many times there would be a frame skipping or a lag that would be noticeable when I move around. Since this is Mixed Reality, it really breaks the immersion when it happens, and it's a little hard on the eyes.

Bugs/Issues

So I did encounter some annoying bugs in the game. Some even that prevented me from completing a minigame, but it didn't stop me from progressing at least. Something to note is that the developers are aware of the bugs, and there should be a patch fixing most of this in the next few days, so keep a lookout.

The first bug I've encountered is a minigame with a lizard where I have to search for berry seeds to grow in my farm. The lizard tells me where the seed is to dig, but he never actually dig it out. So I was never able to grow this kind of food.

Second bug is when I do the airplane minigame, the rings that I have to go in goes behind my furniture for some reason even though it's in front. The air lines following the plane and the indicator for the plane to follow also goes behind it.

Third bug is there is some money that I can't gather in my town. You need to just touch the resource to obtain it, but there are just some that doesn't pick up.

Last bug is during an air balloon minigame, there's a specific dropzone that I just can't drop any crates on. It just goes straight through it.

So guys this is mostly what I had to say about the game. Very promising at first, but my journey through it ended up in frustration at the end. There's a patch coming soon that could fix all of this, but I'm here to give you guys the experience that I have right now, and personally, I probably won't be touching it again due to my impression of it. And it's not as if I didn't try, I did play 4 and a half hours of it, but it's just not for me. I do hope that the game improves and does well in the long run because it is definitely a cool concept.