Posted on: July 13, 2021
Early Access review
joveian
Verified ownerGames: Reviews: 50
A different approach to city building...
This review is based on playing the first in-dev version available here for a few hours. The game is not anywhere near release but there is still stuff to do. The game for now is entirely to make things look the way you want; nothing besides the look (and a few city-wide numbers) is affected by what you do. There is a photo mode similar to the one in Surviving Mars. If you have played Cities in Motion, this game is effectively the reverse of that: you get a fixed street layout (no public transit that I saw) and your job is to design what the buildings look like on each block. You don't do this in a stick-on way like the Spore builder; designs auto-adjust based on the plot size and a limited number of settings (height, roof structure, a limited ability to adjust the sides, and ground level shops or not on a very few buildings). You don't set the rules that they auto-adjust by beyond those settings, they are pre-determined. There are three sandbox modes: pre-built (choose this), pre-plotted, and single plot blocks. There are also landmarks that are always pre-built and can't be changed unless they have "major projects" which alter them in a pre-determined way. Some major projects affect particular blocks rather than landmarks. A career mode will give you specific things to do. Building designs and major project designs have four general types: neutral, people (colorful designs), planet (greenery), and profit (vaguely dystopian; there are also some commercial designs under neutral). For the major projects neutral is how it starts and there is one alternative for each other type. For building designs there are a dozen or more choices under each type and are organized in 1-4 design variations with similar styles. There are also a few other ways to filter designs. There is an info icon in the upper left corner of the screen that lets you point at an area to see decent help text. An in-game roadmap shows what the developers have planned for the next month.
Is this helpful to you?
