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).
I loved the Impressions games as much as anyone, and I came into this fairly optimistic. There are actually a few robust systems here that iron out some of the annoying kinks from those, but the entire game is let down by the fact that it's almost impossible to lose. There's no regular cash outflow outside of import costs, so there's no pressure to build early surplus production and scramble around for trade routes. You can't overinvest in military spending partly because you don't pay any wages and partly because there's no military. You can't overcommit to a specific trade good because there isn't a financial cost to producing untradeable surplus, it just sits in your warehouses while someone else pays your workers to pick their noses. In general, things only go up in this game. Your treasury only ever grows, your population will always hit a steady state at a certain level of investment and quietly hand you money until you can invest more, and there's no unforseen even that will wipe out a chunk of your city. Your prestige rating can go down if you reduce trade volume, but since things only ever go up there's rarely any reason to. This isn't a good thing - it means there's no puzzle to solve in each mission, so you end up building the same city over and over. It's fun enough to figure out, but once you know the mechanics there's no requirement to actually use them.
