Hurts to give this a thumbs down, but it's really hard to recommend.
I forget if I was gifted this game by a friend or picked it up since I'm into city-builders, but after years of seeing it sit in my library I decided to boot it up one cozy winter night.
I started off by playing the tutorial, and got a feel for how to play the game. Next thing I decided to do was play the story mode - the entire thing (especially the first level) is [i]another guided tutorial.[/i] That started me off a little sour, but I kept playing since it's a nice looking game with an interesting premise.
The building controls aren't very intuitive, and you need to wade through different menus to find the blocks you actually want to place - would've really liked to click on a block to place another of the same, or perhaps a row of blocks, or see its synergistic blocks that it needs to function. On that note, the game bombards you with different types of resources during the tutorial - every small thing is a resource that's either raising or falling. If there was a search bar to find certain buildings, I totally missed it.
I spent about two and a half hours completing the 'story mode' - of which only about 7% owners actually did as of the time I'm writing this. The story mode might have been implemented later in the games development so not everyone got a chance to play it, but the game was last update in about 2018.
Of my 2.5 hours playing the story mode, I spent 45-60 minutes trying to figure out why my buildings weren't working. For example, I had the necessary inputs (they were positive + growing since I had a positive trend), but the buildings weren't operating. Turns out that even though my resources were growing (which was part of the quest), my electricity wasn't above a certain threshold to start actually operating the building. Some of these smaller nuances weren't explained in the storymode, only that it needed power to operate.
There was also some minor bugs/nitpicks - like my audio level settings not saving between loading into the story mode levels. I think it was a cute idea to have your previous builds persist throughout the story (it's about starting a neighbourhood, becoming greedy and exploitative, going to sh*t, then coming back years later and rebuilding for the better), but if your base is flawed - like you have too many resource consuming buildings which aren't punished during the storymode - you can start the next chapter with major deficits. The storymode has you do things like gather X resources, so you could build 20 buildings that produce that resource to finish the quest, but might cause problems later. There's also a system to 'restore' blocks, but a lot of the time it's easier to just demolish and replace them since there wasn't a building resource or anything in the storymode.
The challenge/sandbox modes are probably different, but in the main level of the storymode you're restricted from building or removing many of the tiles on the map. However, for some reason I was able to place grass and tree tiles in multiple layers floating in the air - which is how I was able to get enough animals to clear chapter 5's quest.
Maybe I'll come back and try the sandbox or challenge modes at some point, but the unintuitive gameplay really put me off, which is a shame since it's a cute concept. A lot of the reviews I've seen are from early access 2016, and from the sounds of it, nothing's really changed in the 'hood.
