I tried this game for ~20 hours early this year after craving a city builder. I found it intimidating, overwhelming, and frankly a little too much to wrap my head around. There are so many systems interacting with each other, and despite playing all the tutorials, I couldn’t really figure out what I was doing wrong and it felt like fighting against the game itself rather than an intended challenge. I didn’t think I’d revisit it, but here we are. I've put another 110 hours into it since then, and it has become one of my top 10 favorite games of all time.
This game is weird. The first thing I want to make clear is that I cannot recommend it to everyone. This is a very niche, special-interest kind of game. If you like difficult games, slow-paced games, city builders, management games, complicated and multilayered systems, transportation and logistics puzzles, and economy mechanics, you might absolutely love this.
You have to be willing to put up with some jank, a lack of player-friendliness, and one of the steepest learning curves I've ever encountered in a game. I wouldn't say it’s actively spiteful toward the player, but it isn't interested in holding your hand. You have to meet it more than halfway, and I'd say that you only get as much enjoyment out of it as the amount of effort you're willing to put into understanding it.
The sheer granularity of this game is incredible. Almost everything feels like it exists because someone actually thought through how it would work in a real economy rather than simply being another button on an interface. It’s not really about building cities, that’s just one aspect. You have to create jobs, figure out how people get to work, where the resources come from, how those resources get processed, how they're transported, how much storage you need, how much production capacity you actually require, how many workers need to arrive at a facility, how often they need to be picked up, and how all of these things interact with each other. When it works, it’s sublime.
There is a genuine sense of accomplishment in watching a complicated plan finally come together. You can spend hours designing some ridiculous industrial supply chain, connecting it to your rail network, figuring out how many vehicles you need, building the infrastructure to support it, and then finally watching everything operate exactly as intended. Few other games give me that same feeling of a huge payoff following hours of hard effort.
I also really appreciate how much freedom the game gives you. There are several ways to accomplish what you want, and the game is happy to let you figure out your own solutions. You can build things in ways that are wildly inefficient, extremely practical, or somewhere in between. There are also a high number of difficulty settings and options that let you tailor the experience. I appreciate this enormously, because the default settings can be brutal when you're still learning.
Unfortunately, this game has one huge problem. It is absolutely terrible at communicating lots of extremely basic yet very important information to the player.
The tutorials aren't useless, but they mostly teach you the controls, the UI, and the absolute basics of the individual systems. What they don't really teach you is how those systems interact with each other, which is by far the more important part of the game. You can understand what a distribution office does, what a bus does, and what a factory does without having any idea how to actually make them work together efficiently.
Train signaling was the worst offender for me. You basically need to go read guides online to properly understand how the signaling system works, or suffer through an absolutely exhaustive process of trial and error (ask me how I know). I don't mind difficult systems, but there's a difference between a system being difficult to master and the game refusing to adequately explain how the system works.
The same thing happens with worker transportation. The game has a limit on how long workers will wait for transportation before giving up and leaving the station, and figuring out how frequently your transport needs to arrive is an astonishingly simple calculation once you know what you're doing. Look at line spacing, check average lap time, divide that by 60, and figure out how frequently a vehicle needs to arrive to keep workers flowing properly. That's not an especially complicated concept. Why does the game never actually tell you this? You're just expected to figure it out.
The farming system is another good example. Fields don't actually require workers. You can run your farms extremely efficiently with machines and trucks from distribution offices. This is useful information to know, but the game doesn't really communicate it. A new player could very reasonably assume that fields need to be staffed and then massively overestimate how many workers they need to send to each one. There are tons of little things like this.
The least consequential one ended up being my biggest frustration. Why don't buildings automatically lock to the grid at 90 degree intervals? Even after double pressing F1, you still have to use the Ctrl + mouse wheel function to properly align things to the grid. It's a tiny thing, but when you're laying out an enormous industrial complex and trying to make everything line up properly, it’s annoying.
Unfortunately, I now have to talk about the technical problems I've experienced. If you don’t care about this aspect, skip ahead to the last paragraph. I have been absolutely plagued by a particularly bizarre issue where my entire PC will occasionally freeze while playing this game. Not a CTD. My entire computer locks up and requires a hard reset. The clock literally stops. Totally seized. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure this out.
I did a clean install of my graphics drivers, tweaked setting in the Nvidia control panel (effective), stress tested all of my hardware, tried different rendering modes, edited the config file, lowered the graphics settings to their minimum, forced windowed mode, tried VSync both on and off, tried different resolutions, stopped using fast forward entirely, stopped tabbing out entirely, closed other programs, unplugged one of my monitors, disabled hardware acceleration in Chrome, disabled GPU acceleration in Steam's web views, disabled Discord, Steam, and Razer overlays, completely cleared my shader cache, disabled MPO through the registry (effective), disabled fullscreen optimization on the executable, and toggled the game's "autosave to ZIP" option (the most effective thing I tried).
Some of these made a noticeable difference, but I never actually fixed it. At its worst, I was getting freezes every 20 or 30 minutes. After all of the troubleshooting, I was eventually able to play for four hours or more without a freeze, which is considerably longer than my typical session anyway. But the fact remains that this game is the only piece of software I've come across that can consistently trigger this particular problem on my PC, and I have not been able to identify exactly why.
I would not have gone through even half of the troubleshooting steps I listed above for the vast majority of games. If something else had been freezing my entire computer every half hour, I would have uninstalled it and moved on with my life. I don't really know how else to explain it, but there's some X factor here that I can't quite put my finger on. Whatever it is, I love it. I just love it. I can't recommend this game to everyone. I think there's a pretty good chance that most people would hate it. But if you're the sort of person who looks at an enormous web of interconnected production chains, transportation networks, worker logistics, economic systems, and infrastructure and feels an urge to figure it all out, then you should give this game a shot. Just be prepared to read some guides.
