Highrisers

Highrisers pitches itself as a gritty urban survival RPG: you lead a team of four survivors through a decaying metropolis overrun by 'dreamers', mutated victims of some unexplained plague. You craft, scavenge, defend, and try not to die in a city of crumbling high-rises that should, in theory, feel alive with danger and atmosphere. The bones of something genuinely compelling are here. The vertical, building-by-building structure of the world is a fresher backdrop than the usual post-apocalyptic fields, and the premise of managing a small crew with different roles has obvious appeal to anyone who has burned hours in squad tactics games or classic survival RPGs. In practice, the game struggles to deliver on most of those promises. The crafting system exists, but lacks the depth needed to make resource management feel meaningful past the first few hours. Exploration reveals floors and rooftops that quickly start to feel recycled rather than handcrafted, and the 'mysterious dreamers' never develop into the kind of nuanced threat that the premise hints at. Combat is functional but shallow, and the build variety across your four survivors does not evolve in ways that reward long-term investment. If you are looking for the kind of RPG where character builds matter at hour 40, Highrisers will not scratch that itch. The stat systems feel surface-level rather than interlocking. The narrative is the biggest letdown for anyone coming in with RPG expectations. The dreamers and the disease behind them are genuinely intriguing setup hooks, but the writing does not do enough to pay those hooks off. Dialogue is minimal, story beats are sparse, and there is little sense that your crew has arcs worth following. For a genre that lives and dies on whether you care about the people you are keeping alive, that absence stings. Filler content, meanwhile, is plentiful. Floor-clearing starts to feel like padding fairly quickly, and without compelling lore or mechanical rewards to punctuate the grind, motivation erodes. The Steam review picture is not kind, sitting well below the threshold you would want before spending money on an unproven indie. That does not mean the game is without any audience. If you are extremely forgiving of rough edges, genuinely starved for urban survival settings, and treat it as a short experiment rather than a full RPG campaign, there is a limited window of novelty in the first three or four hours. But Solar Powered Games set up a world with real potential and then underserved it at nearly every layer of execution. The metropolis looks the part from a distance and collapses on closer inspection.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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