MicroMacro: Crime City Review – Waldo Takes a Trip to Fortitude Valley

Welcome to MicroMacro: Crime City! Where every corner is a new opportunity to be mugged, drugged, or murdered. For Americans, think St Louis Missouri, or if you’re a local, Fortitude Valley.

Amongst this backdrop of crime, you’ve naively started a new job as a detective. With a gleam in your eye, you believe you can clean up this backwater city with nothing but gumption and elbow grease.

Throughout 16 separate case files, you’ll put your eyesight and deductive reasoning to the test while trying to clean up the streets of Crime City.

Getting the obvious comparison out of the way, MicroMacro: Crime City is Where’s Wally (or Waldo) for adults. You spend your time looking at a map chockablock with people and objects and are then tasked to find a specific one.

What makes MicroMacro: Crime City so interesting is that the map shows both time and space. You’ll find the same person in multiple locations, and by following them from one activity to the next, you’ll piece together their timeline of events.

A timeline that usually ends with a body bag…

With each scenario taking roughly 10-30 minutes, MicroMacro: Crime City serves as a perfect bookend for a board game evening. It’s easy to pull out, play, and put away, but you might find it difficult to stop playing after just one scenario.

Murder, extortion, adultery… just another day in Crime City

MicroMacro: Crime City is at its best when you’re unravelling a story by using both your eyes and your mind. When there’s not enough information to immediately find the answer, but enough to let you infer where, or when, it could be.

For example, the game might ask: Where did Joe Schmidt go after the market?

So to answer this question, we need to track back Joe Schmidt’s activities for the day. Investigating anything pointing to his next location. In this made-up scenario, we can find him going for a run, and then a swim, and then… Wait!

Aren’t those triathlon trophies in his house?

Therefore, he must be headed for the bike track!

Every person I’ve played MicroMacro: Crime City with has had a similar moment of illumination as they finally pieced together the mystery. It hooks you into the mystery, providing you with the same thrills garnered from a detective novel. Just going to show how many words this picture map is worth.

Speaking of the art; it is nothing short of fantastic. Moreover, its overly cheery tone takes the edge off of some extremely dark subject matter of murder, extortion, adultery, and even suicide.

But more impressive than the aesthetics are the painstaking details put into each character. Even when a lot of people crowd the table, and make it hard for you to follow the main storyline. You’re still able to enjoy following individuals around the city, and the hijinks they get up to.

The big reveal

The one thing I really wanted, but never got from MicroMacro: Crime City (outside of a protective layer to guard against errant sneezes) was a big finale. Something that wrapped up all the cases, or joined them all together so that there is a final full stop on the game.

But I didn’t get that, instead the ending of the last case is the same as the first:

Congratulations Detectives you’ve solved the case!

This was a letdown, because there was no closure or finality to it. No evil mastermind, no secrets to uncover, not even a well-done solving all the cases. Instead, there was an emptiness where I expected the end to be.

So every now and again, I take the box apart and scour its insides, hoping to find one last case that ties it altogether. So far, I haven’t found anything. But I still hold out hope that there will be a solid ending to the game. Maybe we’ll get something in the expansion: MicroMacro Crime City: Full House.

Still, even without that overarching plot, MicroMacro: Crime City is phenomenal and worth picking up to play solo or with friends. Even if there’s not much to do once you’ve finished the game. You’re always able to pass it on to a friend, so they can share the same experience.