Technotopia

Very addictive and interesting game. With an scifi art-deco unique style, fluid GUI, good models that are actually voxels if you zoom in, I had an interesting beginning figuring out the best way to endure the weeks without daying and having good satisfactory sensations when figuring out the best way to add more points to each faction. Very nice game, I recommend it. I wish they add more events, options and maybe a fourth card instead of three to the game and that they keep updating it. Very cool and immersive trance-y soundtrack. Very good!

The gameplay has some decent ideas with randomly drafting 3 buildings/cards from a deck and choosing one to place. It's passable, but it's really missing that special sauce that gives lasting appeal. The story is passable, giving a neat setting and plausible goals to proceed towards. The story contributes very positively to the worldbuilding, but also overstays its welcome in forcing some failures requiring new games to proceed. Most importantly, the price is right.

By that I don't mean this is the best game of all time. However, for what it is and tries to be, the game is basically perfect. It is an engaging, fun, clever and at the end surprisingly challenging puzzle game in the guise of a city builder. The retro-futuristic cyber punk / art déco reminiscing of Metropolis aesthetic is innovative, new and perfectly implemented. The story is interesting, neither trodden out nor overshadowing the gameplay. All in all a next to perfect puzzle game, a true gem!

I finished the main story in 80 minutes. Resource consumption rate increases frequently, meaning overall consumption is roughly parabolic over time. On the other hand, resources are created (not consumed) by placing buildings, but these are fixed amounts and not rates. With only slightly better buildings becoming available over time, the consumption is guaranteed to eventually catch up and surpass the production, causing a game over. Main story progress persists across attempts. Story objectives are achieved by placing buildings at random locations on the map, which seem to appear just a few tiles away from already placed buildings. Taken together, the main story gameplay consists of placing random buildings in the direction of the next objective on the map. Optimizing building placement for resources is counterproductive because even the best optimization might extend the runway until game over from 40 rounds to 50 rounds or so, but comes with the opportunity cost of not advancing in a straight line towards the next objective, making it less efficient overall. Once the main story is done, the gameplay does a 180 because the goal is then to just survive as long as possible. There's a lack of objectives that actually align with city building. The writing feels subpar at times, where one faction representative personally kills a policeman, and the player then confronts the representative due to CCTV footage. That encounter seems hard to believe because 1) the reason for the killing was rather weak, 2) a faction leader would not get their hands dirty directly, 3) surely in this type of society they would tread carefully around surveillance, and 4) even if they did manage to pull it off, they would be the prime suspect. Finally, supposedly there is English audio, but that is not true.