This game is the virtual equivalent of a Zen Garden. Relaxing, simple, and feels really, really good. I can close out of a particularly annoying match of Overwatch, then play this for about 30 minutes, and all of the anger just drifts away.
Pros:
-Visuals are beautiful, cell shading done well
-Hyper-minimalist
-It feels good to design these massive "Cities Under a Roof"

Cons:
-I feel like it needs more modules
-There is a "Challenge Mode" that is named like it is the real game, instead of "Sandbox Mode" where I feel the emphasis should be placed.
-There are a few really annoying bugs (like that one where after you use the inspect tool you can't use the delete tool), but most of these are easilly fixed.

Short Review (because I tend to ramble a lot): An interesting concept with a lot of potential, and is something different than the generic city builder, as it intergrates some puzzle aspects, and requires you to be able to manage buildings efficiently. Because of this, it is rather difficult to be creative for some, as you have to carefully balance a lot of resources in order to run a successful "hood", so casuals be warned! Added with the horrible camera, and lack of small details, like dynamic pedestirans, keep Block'hood just shy from being a must buy. That being said, this game IS on early access, and it's really cheap for such a quality game, so if you are interested in a little challenge, and like what you see through pictures and such, get this game!
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Block'hood is an interesting twist to the "city builder" genre. I have heard that it is very similar to SimTower (or whatever that is), but I personally never heard of said game, so I went in only with images from the store page for reference to what this game has to offer.

The pictures of towering skyscrapers and beautiful little villages can be a little deceiving, as the there is a rather steep learning curve (keep in mind that this was through my PERSONAL expirence, you may find the game easier or harder to grasp than me). The tutorial does a decent job at explaining how to connect buildings and such, but does a poor job in explaining the necessary mechnics and basic resource management tips in creating your own little "hood". Though it might not be as big of a deal for some of you, It took me 2 failed "hoods" and about 30 minutes to finally understand how to get my place started. Because of this, and coupled with the fact there is no "infinite resource mode" (for practicing your building skills), you probably won't be able to build that amazing apartment complex right from the start. However, there is a pretty good guide on the "Steam Community Guides" on teaching you how to get started, so you can look into that if you do get this game.

Another thing that really bugs me is the camera. It is clunky at best, and will take a while to get used to. I'm fairly sure it was a design choice becasue the camera snaps to one of the four corners of your building area, zoom in and out from your corner of choice, and adjust the angle of view (to keep with the cube theme). There is no free camera, and once you start building higher, it will get in your way if you accidentally place a corridor in the wrong spot which really bugs me. Another annoyance that I have, is the lack of "life" in your city. There are a small amount of pedestrians, which each requiring a certain building to unlock. For example, building a basketball court will unlock athletes to start roaming around town, and play a game of basketball by themselves every now and then. Outside of these two activites, they do nothing else. They can't use the beer garden I placed down, or visit the fancy new restraunt down the corridor. I would have loved to see the pedestrians interact with everything in the neighborhood, and not just the building that they came with. Although not a deal-breaking problem for me, and I was more worried about balancing my resources than studying the behavorial patterns of my citizens, I have seen people complain about this game SOLELY on the lack of little people walking around.

"Well, if you have only complained about this game so far, why are you recommending it?", pigsnort.mp3. Well, because it has a massive amount of potential, with a (through limited knowledge) great dev team behind it. In one of their more recent update, they added a feature in which you can create you own world which can be customised from the type of biome it will be, to the amount of landmass to water ratio of your choosing. From there, you can create multipule "hoods", each with their own personal lot of land assigned by you. Eventually, in a furture update, you will be able to share your resources between your hoods, as long as it is on the same world. This creates a lot of freedom, and makes the game a little easier to manage, becuase that means you can designate a certain plot of land to be your resource producing hood, and be free to create whatever you please on your next hood. This alone has a massive amount of potiental. Image creating a world where you and your friends can build on, with everyone helping each other to create the biggest, prettiest structures, and compare them to other groups of people, and be ranked on a leaderboard or something. Though this particular feature was not promised or even mentioned by the devs (to my knowledge), it was just an example to show you what this game CAN be.

If any of that didn't convince you to get this game, then consider this. This was one of the most polished early access games I have ever played, and even if it seems a LITTLE interesting, get this game, and see where the devs take it. It's really cheap, $10 for base price, and even less on sale (got it for $7 personally). I honestly don't know how to end this review, because this is the most serious review I have done, so....8/10 potatoes, would cover half of my plot of land with solar panels again. Good luck building your dream vertical neighborhood!

The game has a really nice art style and lots of potential with its design. It feels like a modern version of Sim Tower mixed with Banished. It's in alpha, so a lot of the flaws are to be expected. I'm not at all disappointed to have spent $10 on this, and I look forward to seeing it developed further into a polished game! I think this is a great game and I would definitely recommend picking it up and trying it out if you're at all interested. My feedback and suggestions for improving this game are below:

There are quite a few bugs, although most don't detract heavily. I found I could place standard corridors on the second floor, adjacent to second story structures, as long as there weren't any corridors beneath the corridor I was trying to place. After, I was able to place the ground-level corridor underneath the elevated one. There are corridors that come with supporte intended for this, but access to them is blocked during the first few challenges and tutorials. If we're supposed to be blocked from expanding vertically, then building any second-story or higher structures should be blocked completely. Alternately, if we are supposed to be able to build vertically in these early challenges, please make those structured corridors available so we don't have to exploit the "standard corridor" bug I described above.

I felt more information could be given during the tutorial - more of a reason as to WHY we're learning what we are. I understood connecting structures via corridors was required, but why does a well need to be connected to a path to function? Do my citizens need to walk to the well to retrieve water? Does the corridor also contain plumbing? Why don't trees need to be connected via corridors as well? The first few challenges felt like a trial by fire (which some may enjoy) but for this type of game, I'd personally prefer a little more hand-holding. I figured out that money was generated by retail stores, which was in turn needed to operate the water towers required to complete the challenge, but it felt weird to suddenly be worried about a new resource (money) which was previously unmentioned. This happened again with "youth" for the "knowledge" challenge. A little more preliminary explantion about how the resource works, and where to get it from, would be helpful in these early challenges.

In general, it would be great to get more of a sense of the connectivity between different resources. This takes X of that, this gives X, etc. Perhaps some (optional) floating text or other visual cue that floats upward from a structure when it produces or uses a resource.

I was also confused about decay. What causes decay? Perhaps this was mentioned but I may have missed it. During my first few challenges, buildings started breaking, and I was in a race to delete them and replace them while still placing more resources (presumably why they were decaying, though I'm not sure.) More explanation here, and/or a "repair" tool would be great.

The interface felt a little "sticky", in that it was difficult to clear the current mode, data vis, or tool you were in. I found myself turning inspect mode on and off again just to clear the current structure from my cursor so I'd stop accidentally trying to place more of the same structure. I found that the various data visualizations and information menus stayed open when I didn't want them to, and then closed automatically when I didn't want them to, which was sort of unusual. Part of this is learning curve of course, but the interface seemed to work in ways I wouldn't expect based on other similar games.

A shortcut to delete things would be much appreciated, as well as a "return to default view" which closes all windows and data visualizations.

I also wasn't able to change the controls, or rather, I wasn't able to figure out how to once I was in the "controls" menu. After clicking on a certain control, I tried to press other keys to ressign the control but nothing happened. I might be doing this wrong, but there is no explanation in that menu.

I found that nighttime made it more difficult to see things going on, and the shift to nighttime was particularly distracting. I would love to see night mode visuals implemented better, perhaps less green-black and more dark blue, with less clouds. Maybe retain most of the brightness of the buildings, but make everything appear a bit cooler.

If I had to suggest one thing, it would be this: more information about what exactly is blocking a given structure from producing. When I inspect a structure, I can see it's not producing, but not WHY. Seeing a list of all the problems (improper facing, no electricity, etc) would remove a LOT of guesswork that I don't think is intended to be a part of the challenge, as well as help players learn the flows of the game's resources much more efficiently.

This game taught me that a thriving beer industry has the power to replenish even the most strained environmental resources: greenhouse gases and organic waste. Beer really is the answer.

📏 A technical (re)view on: Block'hood 📐

🔊 Audio - Beautifully scored that fits this specific genre and with all the level controllers one would need (music, effects, etc), but sadly only supports 2Ch (Stereo) audio output 🔊

📺 Visual - Clean and simplistic and despite the low resolution limitation, it is still visually pleasing. Not suitable for playing in low-light conditions as the plain bright white loading screens will completely blind you. The 1920x1080 bug/limitation got me poking around to force the resolution to set above this, see my update (below) 28th July 2016 for the workaround 📺

⌨️ Configuration - The 1920x1080 bug/limitation workaround can be found below in update (below) 28th July 2016. In both a 'Window Mode' and 'Full Screen' the the pointer is not fixed to the game itself which gives active application problems when the pointer unknowingly moves outside of the gaming area, which is worse when using more than one monitor. The 'Keymap' shown within the main menu, a pop up within the game and the in-games Ui itself are all inconsistent, which created a lot of work for me when creating my eXZ Steam Controller Configuration and not all in-game options are assigned keys (such as tilt camera), which often breaks the experience having to use the pointer to then select what you want to do, as most other options have been assigned ⌨️

🔧 Mechanics - The interactive Tutorial needs a lot of work and disappeared on my first two attempts. It also does not effectively guide you through what one should be doing exactly, requiring you to click on Tutorial icon again ...and again. The Tutorial window overlays the actual game, so you must read it first, close it (only by clicking on the [X] with the pointer and no assigned key) and then perform what you just read the Tutorial ...very unfriendly. Tutorial 3 for example instructs you to "...open the Resource panel...", but the panel is actually labelled (as well highlighted) as "Analysis" 🔧

🎚️ Optimisation - I've only played for a short time, but it has crashed once already and despite its graphical limitations, it ran fluid and stable otherwise 🎚️

🎮 Controller Compatibility - No official Steam Controller support, but I have provided one for you all to love and abuse, just look out for my usual 'eXZ' configuration with your beloved Steam Controller/s 🎮
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📝 Update - 28th July 2016: To get a resolution higher than 1920x1080, such as 3840x2160 when using multiple monitors, try... within Windows OS, disconnect your other monitors except the one you wish to game on (that is most likely higher 1920x1080 or you wouldn't be reading this), then start the game, it should now give you options to set the resolution above 1920x1080, set this to whatever you require, exit the game, within Windows OS again reconnect your other monitors, re-enter the game and it should now output to the correct monitor and also in the exact resolution you have just set 📝
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👍 0 / 3 - Games and applications that are currently in Early Access are not personally rated until the final build is officially released ...Meanwhile, Block'n'load, it's building time 👎

😈 If you are not familiar with my re(views), I typically give a technical perspective various aspects, such as audio, visual, configurations, mechanics, optimisation and compatibility with Valve's Steam Controller as well as VR (particularly HTC's Vive) were applicable. I choose to limit my synopsis as much as possible on the story, plot or characters, which is shared vastly enough already (Steam or the internet in general) and just like any art on our beautiful planet, each human will always experience and appreciate it differently to one another 😈 🎮 The eXZ Steam Controller Configuration Collection: plus.google.com/collection/wTVTfB 🎮

Good game and very fun unless you crash.

Pros:
-nice world system things in the world update. the map changing system is nice.
-Challange mode gives good objectives
-sandbox mode is fun just to see what you can create


Cons:
-There are limited save slots and there is no autosave so crashes can cause issues.
-You cant delete things underneath other objects
-I get frequent crashes so i havent played a single game completly without loosing everything.


Its a good game just make sure you save often.

architecture students gonna luv this one

trust me, im an achitect.

I may have picked this game up on a whim. I like city builders and I figured this was an unusual little city builder, but I didn't expect to like it quite so much as I do.

Okay, so this game is really good in the state it's in. I hope it gets more soon to help fix the few bugs there are and expand what this game can do, which is already a very decent amount.

I love the notions of the design here: verticality is possible, buildings are small and efficient, you have data easily available so you know the exact economy of your outputs and inputs, really it designs the kind of places that, honestly I don't know how they would work in real life, but I would want them to so that I could live there. You really do build an ecosystem: work, leisure, learning, natural resources. While the appearance isn't exactly slick, iphone or chromed out scifi like we've come to expect from the genre, the result is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect in an arcology. It's very cool.

That said there are some small bugs: sometimes the cursor will lock to a block and I can't delete, rotate or move any others. Sometimes (and I may have just missed something), while the challenge modes are very good about giving options to complete each one in different ways, there are points where you have a building that lacks a certain input building. Now if this game worked in the sense that you could let it continue operating at a reduced cost, that would be fine, but usually if you lack even one input for 8 output cycles or more, the building ends up abandonded or permanently (as far as I know) hamstringed in some way, meaning you have to rip it out and put something new in there. That seems a little weird but hopefully that's something that will be fixed later.

These are pretty small gripes though, the game is easy to pick up and play, the tutorial gives you the base concepts in no time and the game is otherwise user friendly enough to help you quickly pick up the specifics.

It's awesome, I just hope it keeps getting better.

The white loading screen is perfect for reminding me to clean my monitor.

Nice game. I like the concept of creating a micro-economic-system and the possibility of building on different levels makes it even more interesting. Additionally, the very clean and reduced art style is very appealing.
BUT: The game also has still a lot of flaws. Deleting something is not working very good as you have to click the building several times before the game recognize it - this is annoying.
Also the challenges are not very good balanced. Some are easy others are extremely hard - mostly because you don't have access to buildings you normally would need to produce needed resources... Therefore, also from a game design/balancing perspective there is still some work to do.
But keeping in mind that the game is still early access, it offers a lot of potential and it's worth a look if you like economic/construction games.