7/10 really, pretty cool game, has some good and bad parts to it but it looks promising. genuinely managed to make me invested as a long time cities skylines player. ill go into detail
The good:
Very cute game: either the visuals were made with love or their designer was getting paid a lot. you can see they chose a lego style and they pulled it off. With only a little effort you can build some very nice looking scenes, one of the few games i actually frequently used the photo mode tbh
Map design: While there are some bad parts to the maps of the game as i will go into later, the map(s) are well made to offer a variety of biomes and shapes letting you build in most ways you would want. The maps weren't randomly made by an algorithm, they were handcrafted to offer enjoyable gameplay.
Customisable decoration: The decoration in this game is very cute and sweet, but more importantly, its not sorted into presets which force you to have maybe 10 different ways to make a building. there are many decorative objects and most have different variants for being placed on roofs, windows, buildings, on the ground, on water and close to roof edges. you have a lot of freedom with decorating your buildings and unlike in cities skylines, you can place a lot of decorations close by.
No god awful grid pattern: Listen man i love cities skylines but the grid pattern of buildings was horrendous and i hated it. this game gets rid of that, buildings dont necessarilly need to be squished onto a road and the fact that you can draw (yes i mean draw) roads of adjustable sizes and textures makes it so you can make your building a forest retreat or a semi urban apartment however you want.
The Bad:
Surface level economy: I don't know if this is by intention as they wanted to make it ignorable as they developed the game more, but the economy is very surface level, the only way you lose money is by the fact that all commercial workplaces lose you a fixed amount of money and all citizens pay you a tax. This system might sound annoying to manage, but no, it is ridicilously easy to the point where you wouldnt notice if you had an unlimited money cheat, i played the whole time with taxes as low as possible to increase happiness and never had any issues with money, on top of that, employment is very surface level as well, a house on one edge of the map can have a citizen employed at the other with no consequence whatsoever
Only 2 maps: Thats pretty much it, you start with a regular nice looking map to build your first city on and later on you get to have a second farming city running simultaneously with a big lake in the middle of that map. there is supposedly a third map in development.
Map size: The maps are genuinely very small and you will not be able to really make any peripheral settlements as they will at most be a 5 minute walk away, there is no way to expand the maps.
Small Scope: You can't really make a big city as the population caps around at 1000, you can adjust this but you really shouldnt because it will cause major lag problems.
Few building choices: While most buildings are very nice looking and encapsulate a certain aesthetic very well, you will usually have no more than one style per building, you can not make a different aesthetic in this game other than what the devs intended
No landscaping/bridges: certainly feels counterintuitive to make a game of this aesthetic without having scenic wooden bridges, but i digress. the developers implemented no such systems, the enviorenment is final, no way to avoid it.
The ugly:
Horrible optimisation: This is the only thing in this category and the only problem actually big enough to make someone not wanna play this game. I have a pc of average build w 12 gigs of ram and a 3060 ti, and at 1000 people, i was experiencing MAJOR issues with fps and lag. this is probably why the maps are small and the scope is limited, shame, really.
In conclusion, nice game, try it, if you like city building, its probably going to be your cup of tea, if you dont like it, just get rid of it
Some of my opinion about the down side you mentioned:
Surface level eco: That's intended. This is a "relaxing city builder" instead of a "city simulator". The economy is just there to give player some sort of "limitation" of how much they can build, or reward them when completing a citizen's request.
The maps are IMO at the right size for what this game is focused on. Again, this is not a "city simulator" where you build a gigantic megacity with metropolitans, suburbans and rural areas. If you've played Galaxy Grove's previous game, Station to Station, you'll know it's more like a score-based builder game where you build a "diorama" of a city instead of a realistic one size-wise.
The optimization might come later, for me I just turn off Global Illumination since that thing doesn't provide much beauty and just eats on your GFX card.
A very cute game on the facade, but besides the visuals, the game needs a lot more polishing than its current state.
There is "technically" only one map available in the game, and you can unlock the same two more areas by game progression. That means if you abandon the current game and start a new one, you will still repeat what you did in the last game. The map is the same, the events are the same, and the progression is the same. I really think the game of this sort should at least allow you to choose your starting locations.
This game gives you a lot of "quests" that make you feel you always have something to do, but the quests are so simple and rudimentary that I wasn't really having fun getting a whole bunch of them. Most of them are people asking you to decorate something or change the layout of their garden, etc., to build something for them. It is similar to Sim City but way more annoying. You start getting repeat ones only 10 minutes into the game.
The game emphasizes customizable buildings, but you still need to connect buildings directly to roads. I really think the game should allow you to place the buildings in approximation to a road instead of directly on the side of the road to benefit the "customizable building facade and front and back garden". (I think the developers have already fallen into a thinking fixation of "Buildings must be able to connect to the road.")
I played quite a lot of city management or simulation games. This one is one of those "looks cute but plain inside", I know the game is still on EA, and my score is based on the performance and the gameplay on EA version. If this game can further develop into something like city skylines, or oxygen not included type of sophistication, then I will change accordingly. But I don't have high hopes for it. If you tell me this game was released in 2018, I would probably give it a much higher score. But for a game of 2025, when there are a whole bunch of pre-existing, amazing city-building games readily available for them to learn "the gameplay and game mechanisms that are required for a good city-building game". I can't give this one a higher score.
There are two maps, i dont really get what you mean, and you also dont have to abandon your city. the map is different and there is an entirely new progression tree focused on farming with different quests.
The quests arent supposed to be difficult to complete, theyre supposed to be little nudges for you to make good looking cityscapes, in truth, most quests can be completed by stacking 5 assets next to each other, but then again you can just make a city of hyperblock type grids thats super efficient. the point is to give a suggestion on what type of thing to build. i.e. i had a lot of fun making a very nice looking hedge maze even though the actual quest was completed once i was 15% done with it. Ill attach a picture of the hedge maze.
you can just draw tiny dirt paths, which i think would look better than just letting them stay in the open, also a lot of buildings dont need road connection either.
heres an ss with part of the maze and a few houses visible
That's exactly what I said. There's only one map, and one map has three areas (one area is still in development, so technically it was a 1 map with two areas). All areas are so small and do not qualify for a maps. So I say it's one map with three different areas. And it was the same exact map for everyone and every run. If you start a new game, you will know what I'm saying.
The quests are just too many and have too little variety. I don't know if I'm being unlucky or what. I get a lot of repeat quests. Doing it once or twice is fine. Doing the same exact quest three times back-to-back is another level
I know you can draw a dirt road, but it's still a compromise. The house really doesn't need to directly connect to any road, to be honest. If you say the shops need some road connection, I can get behind that. For any other buildings, why can't I just place them anywhere I want? I comment this specifically because on the video trailer, it seems that you can place your building anywhere you want, but it turns out you still have to place it on the road. I think the trailer video is misleading. That's all I want to say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=despqW-znBw
The good:
- Very cute game: either the visuals were made with love or their designer was getting paid a lot. you can see they chose a lego style and they pulled it off. With only a little effort you can build some very nice looking scenes, one of the few games i actually frequently used the photo mode tbh
- Map design: While there are some bad parts to the maps of the game as i will go into later, the map(s) are well made to offer a variety of biomes and shapes letting you build in most ways you would want. The maps weren't randomly made by an algorithm, they were handcrafted to offer enjoyable gameplay.
- Customisable decoration: The decoration in this game is very cute and sweet, but more importantly, its not sorted into presets which force you to have maybe 10 different ways to make a building. there are many decorative objects and most have different variants for being placed on roofs, windows, buildings, on the ground, on water and close to roof edges. you have a lot of freedom with decorating your buildings and unlike in cities skylines, you can place a lot of decorations close by.
- No god awful grid pattern: Listen man i love cities skylines but the grid pattern of buildings was horrendous and i hated it. this game gets rid of that, buildings dont necessarilly need to be squished onto a road and the fact that you can draw (yes i mean draw) roads of adjustable sizes and textures makes it so you can make your building a forest retreat or a semi urban apartment however you want.
The Bad:- Surface level economy: I don't know if this is by intention as they wanted to make it ignorable as they developed the game more, but the economy is very surface level, the only way you lose money is by the fact that all commercial workplaces lose you a fixed amount of money and all citizens pay you a tax. This system might sound annoying to manage, but no, it is ridicilously easy to the point where you wouldnt notice if you had an unlimited money cheat, i played the whole time with taxes as low as possible to increase happiness and never had any issues with money, on top of that, employment is very surface level as well, a house on one edge of the map can have a citizen employed at the other with no consequence whatsoever
- Only 2 maps: Thats pretty much it, you start with a regular nice looking map to build your first city on and later on you get to have a second farming city running simultaneously with a big lake in the middle of that map. there is supposedly a third map in development.
- Map size: The maps are genuinely very small and you will not be able to really make any peripheral settlements as they will at most be a 5 minute walk away, there is no way to expand the maps.
- Small Scope: You can't really make a big city as the population caps around at 1000, you can adjust this but you really shouldnt because it will cause major lag problems.
- Few building choices: While most buildings are very nice looking and encapsulate a certain aesthetic very well, you will usually have no more than one style per building, you can not make a different aesthetic in this game other than what the devs intended
- No landscaping/bridges: certainly feels counterintuitive to make a game of this aesthetic without having scenic wooden bridges, but i digress. the developers implemented no such systems, the enviorenment is final, no way to avoid it.
The ugly:- Horrible optimisation: This is the only thing in this category and the only problem actually big enough to make someone not wanna play this game. I have a pc of average build w 12 gigs of ram and a 3060 ti, and at 1000 people, i was experiencing MAJOR issues with fps and lag. this is probably why the maps are small and the scope is limited, shame, really.
In conclusion, nice game, try it, if you like city building, its probably going to be your cup of tea, if you dont like it, just get rid of it- Surface level eco: That's intended. This is a "relaxing city builder" instead of a "city simulator". The economy is just there to give player some sort of "limitation" of how much they can build, or reward them when completing a citizen's request.
- The maps are IMO at the right size for what this game is focused on. Again, this is not a "city simulator" where you build a gigantic megacity with metropolitans, suburbans and rural areas. If you've played Galaxy Grove's previous game, Station to Station, you'll know it's more like a score-based builder game where you build a "diorama" of a city instead of a realistic one size-wise.
The optimization might come later, for me I just turn off Global Illumination since that thing doesn't provide much beauty and just eats on your GFX card.A very cute game on the facade, but besides the visuals, the game needs a lot more polishing than its current state.
- There is "technically" only one map available in the game, and you can unlock the same two more areas by game progression. That means if you abandon the current game and start a new one, you will still repeat what you did in the last game. The map is the same, the events are the same, and the progression is the same. I really think the game of this sort should at least allow you to choose your starting locations.
- This game gives you a lot of "quests" that make you feel you always have something to do, but the quests are so simple and rudimentary that I wasn't really having fun getting a whole bunch of them. Most of them are people asking you to decorate something or change the layout of their garden, etc., to build something for them. It is similar to Sim City but way more annoying. You start getting repeat ones only 10 minutes into the game.
- The game emphasizes customizable buildings, but you still need to connect buildings directly to roads. I really think the game should allow you to place the buildings in approximation to a road instead of directly on the side of the road to benefit the "customizable building facade and front and back garden". (I think the developers have already fallen into a thinking fixation of "Buildings must be able to connect to the road.")
I played quite a lot of city management or simulation games. This one is one of those "looks cute but plain inside", I know the game is still on EA, and my score is based on the performance and the gameplay on EA version. If this game can further develop into something like city skylines, or oxygen not included type of sophistication, then I will change accordingly. But I don't have high hopes for it. If you tell me this game was released in 2018, I would probably give it a much higher score. But for a game of 2025, when there are a whole bunch of pre-existing, amazing city-building games readily available for them to learn "the gameplay and game mechanisms that are required for a good city-building game". I can't give this one a higher score.- There are two maps, i dont really get what you mean, and you also dont have to abandon your city. the map is different and there is an entirely new progression tree focused on farming with different quests.
- The quests arent supposed to be difficult to complete, theyre supposed to be little nudges for you to make good looking cityscapes, in truth, most quests can be completed by stacking 5 assets next to each other, but then again you can just make a city of hyperblock type grids thats super efficient. the point is to give a suggestion on what type of thing to build. i.e. i had a lot of fun making a very nice looking hedge maze even though the actual quest was completed once i was 15% done with it. Ill attach a picture of the hedge maze.
- you can just draw tiny dirt paths, which i think would look better than just letting them stay in the open, also a lot of buildings dont need road connection either.
heres an ss with part of the maze and a few houses visible