Prison Architect

Prison Architect: PlayStation 4 Edition brings an instant classic to console with a lot of retained charm, fun, and control.

Prison Architect is a fantastic strategy sim which highlights both the difficulty of running a prison and keeping a lot of prisoners happy.

Navigation on the PS4 port might be slightly wonky, but you get used to it. This is a crazily thorough and thoughtful management sim; slick and surprising enough to recommend regardless of format.

Underneath the cute exterior lies a tough-as-nails sim exposing the realities of prison life. If you can see past a few offences, lock your door and lose the key. [September 2016, p72]

Whether intentional or not Prison Architect isn’t just a creative outlet to ‘build stuff’, but it’s also made me stop and think about the kinds of things that are needed to run a facility such as this. I suppose that’s why I ensured my inmates had the ability to work and learn during their time in prison so that one day they might have a better shot in the real world. No matter how you run your prison Introversion Software has provided everyone with complete freedom to handle things in any number of ways. More importantly the campaign and a number of other quality-of-life features help to ensure that the game itself is fun and rarely overwhelming.

A lot of things can behave badly in prison, and I’m not just talking about the prisoners. But Prison Architect told me an engrossing story—and taught me a thing or two—with its tutorial and design.

Prison Architect is a game that knows how to make you think thanks to a deep and well-designed execution full of possibilities.

Underneath the cute exterior lies a tough-as-nails sim exposing the realities of prison life. If you can see past a few offences, lock your door and lose the key. [Aug 2016, p.86]

The pick up and play nature of Prison Architect in tandem with its wealth of gameplay options make this title far outshine its few flaws with a charming and engaging overall package.

A great simulation game that works impressively well on consoles. Although at times it almost feels like a psychology study of the player rather than the inmates.

Prison Architect is a full-on sim that will eat your time. If you fancy a dark look inside the running of a prison, look no further.

This port of the popular PC prison-building game has been nicely executed to deliver a deep and compelling experience on consoles. Its complex menus and mechanics present a fairly steep learning curve, even with the game's effective tutorials, but once you get over it, Prison Architect is a challenging, entertaining, and surprisingly addictive game that offers plenty of potential for long-term play.

Prison Warden is what will offer me some longevity in this game, since I can mess around with how the wardens affect the gameplay, and how each map runs differently. I get bored easily, and I will say that I found myself unchallenged after I got the hang of things. Prison Warden can help with that.

Prison Architect is a fantastic simulation game. Its clever systems combine in interesting and intuitive ways to create an experience which is tense, challenging, and engaging. Niggling control issues aside, the title is a terrific example of how a traditionally PC-only genre should be ported to consoles.

Prison Architect is an excellent sandbox, a throwback to the days of Bullfrog’s Theme series that forces you to balance an eye for aesthetics with pure functionality. Those who don’t need to be led by the hand to explore the deep systems at play will find an excellent simulation to lose themselves in, with online sharing options providing a huge selection of prisons to explore, tear down and rebuild.

Prison Architect is a really good game, a very immersive one, but needs to be played on computer.