Why its so bad? Mini Hi-Fi City Review

Mini Hi-Fi City is a Tower Defense mobile game. First impression was fantastic, I thought I found a hidden gem, but how wrong I was. Game needs a lot of work to be interesting and fun or at least hold a player for longer than 20 minutes. Lets break Mini Hi-Fi City to its basic elements and see what is good and what not.

Gameplay

Unlike other tower defense games Mini Hi-Fi City have towers placed on the map beforehand. You can only put proper chip inside to activate them and make them shoot the enemies.

You can summon chips with energy, that is awarded for taking enemies down and at the beginning of the game.

There are several chips of different colors, but description of whats special about them only works for 2 of them. For the rest of them we should guess how they work or test.

And this is where the trouble starts. Since you dont know what each color do you dont know where to place it. Moreover you can merge different colors, and it should have abilities of colors included. In reality its hard to understand how it works. It seems merging chips to the higher level only increases the damage a bit.

I found that red ones give small splash, blue slow enemies down and purple seems like have sniper ability, but those are just guesses. Orange one should get stronger as it attacks the enemy, but I havent noticed that.

Moreover levels have 6-8 waves only, so they are pretty short. You cant plan long term strategies here.

So you try to mix and match those chips to stop enemies from going through, but I didnt managed to win even once in my 10 tries or so.

The enemies are looking good, but game seems unbalanced, since I always lose at wave 4-6. Enemies are just too powerful no matter how you place your chips.

Controls are kinda ok, but when you click on the chip in the inventory there is nothing indicating that, so you can accidentally merge things. Thats what I did few times, while trying to check out the tooltips.

Progression in the game is non existent, and thats really sad. There is no way to upgrade your towers between the runs to make runs easier and progress from easier stages to harder ones.

Speaking of that, you can play any of 5 stages straight away, but the main difference will be the enemy route, amount of prebuilt towers and amount of waves. Enemies are the same and since you cant upgrade towers, there are not  that many strategical decisions you can do.

So yeah, sadly without progression mechanics, some currency to upgrade towers/chips between runs, chips proper description and balance gameplay gets bland pretty fast.

Although I would like to point out that game says that its a development build, so maybe all those features are planned and WIP. Hard to say, I just got the game from App Store and there is no notice that its a test build.

Gameplay Score: 2/10

Difficulty

As a veteran TD player I didnt managed to win even once. Some leaked enemies take 80% of your health straight away in one leak. You cant do much outside of trying to mix and match your chips. And if you are unlucky or chips dont work as you think it will (or like it should) you are done.

I did one more try just now, and won by just ignoring the color and maxing the chip level with 0 health left. Although when you win you just go back and start over.

Its very hard, and not like Dark Souls fun hard, its frustrating, since you dont understand why its like that and you cant do anything about that.

Difficulty Score: 9/10

Graphics

Mini Hi-Fi City Graphics is actually really good.  Tower design, enemy design are well made. Background is good too. Maybe adding a little bit more effects to different tower attack types would be cool, like color coding them based on the % of chips placed.

Some more enemy types would be good too, if gameplay will be fixed.

But yeah, game graphics is good as it is, its sad that with such good graphics game lacks actual gameplay.

Graphics Score: 8/10

Sounds and Music

Mini Hi-Fi City Sounds are good, towers shoot, enemies blow up. Just like it should be, no complains in this are.

Music soundtracks is good too, its energetic and making you want to destroy enemies too. Sadly its only one track, and it gets old pretty fast.

Sounds and Music Score: 7/10

F2P or P2W

Mini Hi-Fi City is free and there are no IAPs, no store or ads or anything. So at the moment of writing this review game is completely f2p.

F2P Score: 10/10

Overall scores and Conclusion

Gameplay 2/10

Difficulty 9/10

Graphics 8/10

Sounds and BGM 7/10

F2P - 10/10

Mini Hi-Fi City looks very promising at first, but those promises break down really fast when you start playing the game. It lacks everything, from the tutorial and chip description to the actual progression to support the gameplay and complex game mechanics.

I really hope its just a development build showing the basic game mechanics and main thing around it will be added later. When that will happen we can get another review. In the current state game is boring and bland.

Overall score: 2/10