Welcome to our review of Prison Architect for Nintendo Switch, a real-life simulator of running a prison.
In Prison Architect you will see the impact of your grand design on the lives of your inmates be it an utopic center for rehabilitation, a brutal Super Max Prison or anything in between.
Acting as both architect and governor, you control every detail of your Prison – from building new cells and facilities to hiring staff and creating reform programs – all while dealing with informants, contraband smuggling, gang warfare, full-scale riots and more!
Expose your prison to a whole host of outrageous characters who will impact your prisons in unique ways, take charge of new prisons and build your penitentiary on exciting new plots!
All Day and a Night contains 8 new wardens, 8 new prison maps and 8 new plots to expand your prison experience and bend the rules!
Prison Architect is most of all a very realistic game with a lot of heart. When you start the game, the game insists you head to story mode which is basically one big tutorial of everything you need to learn in order to tackle the alternate gaming modes.
Start off by expanding your prison with the electric chair and it becomes pretty clear from the start that this game is meant for adults and not your kids. The story is simple, you have an inmate that was sentenced to death and it is your duty to see to it that you have a place to do this, get the electricity working, making sure its capacity is enough and so much more. This is just the first story too!!!
I will not spoil how it goes, but the second you succeed, you get to the second storyline, which is intertwined with the first. Now there was a fire in the canteen and kitchen! Make sure you salvage what is left, take care of the sole survivor, who just happens to be a big time mafia boss. Rebuild both places by getting more staff hired. Build the kitchen according to the demands of the game, which can always be brought up, a part that I simply adore. Nothing beats being able to pick a game back up after putting it down for weeks and instantly knowing what is up. Well done addition!
Once you get the canteen and kitchen back up, by building them from scratch, you hired some kitchen staff, … Suddenly the CEO calls, you need to hire more guards, … It just does not stop, the management feeling is very real and while it has a dark side to it, this is a game to spend hours or even days worth of gameplay into.
So what is bad about this game?
I can not say any bad things about the story, most of my concerns are all about how the game is played in handheld mode and how it is really too little a screen to really enjoy the game. It is more a game deserving of a screen the size of an iPad. While it provides a zoom function, that can be a little clunky. When you zoom back in, it takes the middle of the screen as the starting point, not the pointer. You can change this in the settings, I just felt it makes more sense to have this as the default.
The menus themselves are crowded, but I did not feel like it was too much. Despite having a gazillion options, that is really how it feels, I did not have the idea that I could not find what I was looking for. I do think this game is something that was clearly built with a mouse or a bigger screen in mind. Again, nothing that was really bothering me, just an observation.
The big fun of this game is actually not even the story mode, but the World of Wardens, where you will find prisons from all over the world. Build your own prison and share it online!
In conclusion, supported by its community, Prison Architect is a realistic simulator where you need to keep your prison running and avoid uprise, deaths, inmates fighting, … Be sure to have enough guards, cooks, food, … All bundled in 1 small yet huge game called Prison Architect for Nintendo Switch.
