Posted on: December 14, 2023
Mantraa
Verified ownerGames: 179 Reviews: 2
Rough little gem of a city builder
TL;DR: Urbek is absolutely worth picking up if you're a fan of the genre, even at the (already modest) full price. It doesn't do everything perfectly, but it definitely has enough new ideas to be entertaining. I want to put the praise at the top here, because Urbek is really *really* close to being incredible, which makes me want to write a lot more about its flaws than I would for a game that was just bad. Urbek feels like a SimCity rewrite that replaces the city planning principles of 1980s America with something more modern, so the end goal isn't to cause a housing crisis by demolishing every low-rent building in the city. Instead, you're encouraged to build particular neighbourhoods that satisfy the needs of other nearby neighbourhoods while also giving you points towards unlocking useful ploppables. The end result is that it's possible to build something that feels much more like a real city in Urbek, with different parts of the city having a distinct character, and the game also has amazing "sunny blue skies" atmosphere thanks to some really tasteful building models and an absolutely bangin soundtrack. The game's biggest downside is that none of these mechanics are quite fleshed-out or interconnected enough, and the endgame still usually devolves into trying to build as densely as possible to hit the objectives without running out of space. Once you have enough artsy neighbourhoods to unlock the last culture ploppable, those houses are now taking up valuable map space that could be a skyscraper, and the map is small enough that you're gonna really need that space. It's also missing the traffic engineering side, which is where a lot of SimCity's challenge lies. There's still plenty of challenge left, but it doesn't really use the diversity that makes Urbek unique (unless you're adding some self-imposed challenge because you want your city to look nice, which is definitely more rewarding in Urbek than it is in other games).
Is this helpful to you?
