This game is not the best city builder game I've ever played, but it wasn't the worst one either. It falls in the middle, desperately lacking an "identity" on what this game could ever be.
The gameplay is a fast as you desire it to be, as difficult as you plan it out to be and the concept is not about your town's survival, but rather it's thrive to be bigger and wealthier.
Whether it's the "sandbox" like elements that brings fun to building, or the scale between what you started with and what you ended up with hours later, something just captivates me back into it and I cannot really explain why.
As in I lost interest in all other city builders due to their complexity and forceful goals that sets the player be somewhat overwhelmed. In this game, I never really felt overwhelmed, cuz the player never get punished for making mistakes here... and maybe this is what I liked the most about this game now that I write about it.
The gameplay is super forgiving, giving you chances to build a proper town out of nothing, or even from a worse state than what you started with. You can make the difficulty harder yes, but it was meant to make thriving more of a time hassle, more or less increasing the progress that you could ever do. Even at the easiest difficulty, you can get the fun out of building your own town, however you want it. I really missed that feeling on many city builder games, and only this game gave it it's purest intention of control over your town.
The features it includes, like agriculture, housing, healthcare and trading are well made and nicely synchronizes with each other. Not on a high end of "dependancy", but not on a lower end of "independancy" either. It's more of a middle ground where you could choose to build this and that in order to improve on what you need the most. It won't affect other parts of the gameplay, but under a management game, you could have the feeling that you should take care of your people and town.
A weird concept of "not needing a specific building, but if you wanna manage this problem (which won't have dire consequences) then you gotta build that up" is, actually an amazing feeling. I don't know why, but it feels like it belongs there you know.
It's sad to hear that this game won't get further support, since the game had plenty of potential to be, even tho a casual sandbox, a nostalgic town builder game. I bought it at full price and I didn't regret paying that much for this game. This game provided me a feeling that only a city building enthusiast can experience and I cannot thank the developer enough for this!
As for you reading this long yapping session of mine, what do you think?
Are you a person who's looking for a city builder that may change the perspective of "fun"?
Give it a try at least. For me, it's fun.
