Prison Architect ((BETTER))
Prison Architect is a sandbox prison management game being developed by Double Eleven and published by Paradox Interactive. This community wiki's goal is to be a repository of Prison Architect related knowledge, useful for both new and experienced players and for modders.
Prison Architect
after owning this game on steam and IOS and a ps4 (which was sold) i made the jump and bought it yet again.. 24 quid for what is essentially a massive full blown tycoon game is nothing to be honest (and Ive now bought it 3 times)it runs insanely well on the switch - 3 hours in and no lag with over 100 peeps in the prison. and control wise - give it 30 mins and you wont even notice you are not using a mouse - that's how well optimized the controls are. (i recommend pumping the sensitivity up to 100 % for the thumb nub) . With only a couple of caveats removed from the PC version this is the whole full blown experience. Good job double eleven. More sim / god games on switch now PLEASE!
As much as I really do want a good building and resource management sim on Switch... A prison theme is just not the least bit appealing to me. Even sitting aside the serious real world problems it reminds me of, because this is obviously fiction, I have never imagined being a prison warden as fun or interesting. The whole idea just seems like it would be tedious and unrewarding, much like I understand the job to be in the real world. When I saw the video for this I just thought "No. No, why would I want a game like this?" This game is very very near the bottom of my list of wanted games on the Switch.
Played this on PC and thought it was great, up until I shot too many escapees and the game abruptly ended as was and turned into some sort of weird prisoner simulation, with me then expected to try to break out of the place I'd created. There was no warning however in the tutorials that this could happen and 70 hours of play went down the tubes. Very bad design in this regard. The best strategy games would never punish you so instantly and totally.
Then I received a notification that an escape tunnel had been found. Five prisoners in adjoining cells had smuggled in tools and burrowed to freedom right under my nose (and right under the prison's exterior wall). I immediately felt betrayed. I'd been bending over backwards to meet their needs, to run a clean, efficient, and extraordinarily humane prison. How could they do this to me? That's when the embarrassment hit, because something important and incredibly obvious simply hadn't dawned on me until that very moment: meeting an inmate's needs isn't the same thing as making them happy. Prison Architect isn't like other management sims where you deal with a restless and fickle population. There simply is no happy state for your residents. Maybe they don't want to start fires or lay into a guard with a power drill, but that doesn't mean they actually want to be there. It's prison. It's right in the title. No one wants to be there! Lesson learned, too late.
Surrounding the simulation on all sides is cash. This is a privately run prison, which means the intake of new prisoners provides you with money, tempting you to cram as many bodies, sometimes too many, into your jail. The grants system, in addition to giving you more money, provides much-needed mission structure in the initially daunting sandbox mode. Applying for grants for programs like alcohol or drug addiction treatment, security training, labor skills classes, and even parole hearings and family visitations, gives you a list of criteria to meet, rewarding you in stages with cash. If you choose to play with random events enabled, you'll also experience kitchen fires, utility failures, and specific demands from the mayor, which periodically forces you to deal with a crisis, and sometimes several at once.
None of those issues prevent Prison Architect from being an incredibly engrossing balancing act, a simulation with the ability to surprise, challenge, and sometimes horrify you. While playing with a massive prison I'd downloaded from the Steam Workshop, a riot broke out because the mayor told me to remove all the TV sets from the prison or face a fine. Afterwards, while I stared at all the tiny bodies lying everywhere, drenched in blood, he called me again and casually told me I could put the TVs back. Sure, great, I'll do that once I've finished expanding the morgue. You can even experience the horrors from the other side of the bars: PA's Escape Mode lets you play as an inmate in your own jail, or one you've downloaded, and challenges you to form a gang and bust out.
Back to my very first prison. After those five inmates tunneled to freedom, my approach changed. I never became an evil warden like you see in the movies, but I dispensed with the warm and cuddly notion that I was overseeing a bunch of citizens who could be made happy with a nice library or a pool table in the common room. I instituted regular shakedowns (searching cell blocks) and bangups (sending everyone to their cells to be frisked), and closely monitored prisoners to see who was tired during the day (as the result of staying up all night digging with cafeteria forks.) I installed metal detectors outside every single door which led to a shocking number of tools and weapons being confiscated. I bullied inmates with extended stays in solitary until they agreed to become informants. I had guard dogs patrolling cellblock corridors 24/7 and officers patrolling the perimeter of the grounds, where contraband was often found, the result of accomplices lobbing things over the walls at prescribed times. How do prisoners arrange this? Probably by using the dozens of cellphones, smuggled in with deliveries, that I find every time I do a search.
Even with those harsh new measures in place, I continued to find the beginnings of escape tunnels. Guard dogs can detect tunnels, so the inmates, rather than digging straight toward the wall, were digging in circuitous paths to avoid the patrolling dogs. Clever, I'll give them that. Soon I had hounds not just walking the interior of the cellblocks but around the outside as well, and finally the tunnel-digging ceased. I haven't lost a prisoner since, except from the occasional cafeteria shanking or overdose from smuggled drugs. That's about as happy as things get in my grim little city.
Construction management system Prison Architect, where players are tasked with constructing and managing their own private prison, is getting the Jungle Pack DLC on February 7 for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions of the game. Prison Architect is also available for Nintendo Switch, but the DLC will not be available for Switch as Paradox is no longer supporting that version of the game.
The Jungle Pack DLC for Prison Architect will cost $2.99 at launch and give players a new jungle-themed aesthetic to customize their prisons with. Players will be given the tools to create a jungle-themed prison complete with wooden furniture, new flooring types, new walls, and new doors that all fit the jungle theme. Prison Architect players can chop down trees to sell or gain lumber, with the option to build wood variants of structures like guard towers, drains, and more. The jungle environment also introduces some new threats, though, with the potential for tropical fever to spread among the Prison Architect inmates. Players can utilize new medical features like netted beds and fire pits to keep the disease at bay.
The management aspect is even more complex than the building aspect.Proper planning and balancing are essential to create a successful prison.Build too much too soon and you could run out of money. Build too little and you could end up in problematic situations. However, remember that you have everything you could possibly need to manage your prison efficiently. Employ office staff and use them to unlock various parts of a research tree. Gain access to a robust and comprehensive range of statistics and options. Use the report screen to be kept apprised of a number of statistics ranging from the prisoners wants and needs, a list of staff, the ratio of the security levels, and the prisoners you take into the prison.
Balance how easy your prisoners are to manage versus the amount of money they bring in.Check what grants you can take on to gain more money to your prison in exchange for completing specific tasks. You can even see what your prison is worth and sell it, and use the funds raised to build a new prison!
Start an education programme for your prisoners, put them to work with prison labour so as to reduce expenditure on staff, arm your guards, segregate prisoners, and manage everything easier every second. Prison Architect is a superbly well designed and built management simulator!
Parents need to know that Prison Architect is a prison-simulation game that pulls no punches. Players build and manage private prisons. They can opt to take good care of the prisoners -- providing proper facilities for hygiene, recreation, and laundry as well as programs for addiction and alcoholism -- or they can neglect their needs, save money, and use brute force when prisoners turn rowdy. Some officials not under the player's control prove to be hopelessly corrupt, turning a profit for keeping certain prisoners locked up. Convicts sometimes riot, killing each other, guards, and staff, while leaving bodies in pools of blood. Narrative sequences depict serious crimes, including prison murders, a half-naked woman and her lover murdered in bed, and hostages shot in the head. The bulk of the game has a very basic visual style, with characters presented as colorful wooden pegs, but a handful of cartoon snapshots show graphic scenes. Both prisoners and officials use plenty of strong language, including "f--k."
PRISON ARCHITECT attempts to make enjoyable a task that most people probably wouldn't think of as much fun: building and managing a private prison. Its story missions -- which tell tales of criminals, mobsters, and corrupt officials -- lead players through the basics of building and maintaining a prison. You'll learn how to construct specific types of rooms, how to manage power and water, how to deal with staffing and bureaucratic concerns, and how to cope with emergencies such as fires and riots. You'll even have the option of improving prisoners' lives by starting therapeutic programs and helping the guards rest and recuperate by constructing staff facilities. Once finished with these lengthy episodes, the real game begins. You'll get to build a prison from scratch, which includes clearing out a patch of natural land, designing and building each and every structure, and picking a warden and planning guard patrols. You can set your own modifiers, making the game as easy or as difficult as you like. Completed prisons can be uploaded and shared with the game's community. 041b061a72