I've had my eye on this game for ages, waiting for it to go on sale, as although I loved the graphical style seen in the trailers, the "Mixed" review score did put me off.
Arguably, it is a cosy city simulator as it states, but it also has some weird roguelike elements and very heavy building constraints. It does not play like a typical city builder/simulator, instead placing you on a random map with very limited build space, which you cannot increase.
The gameplay here is that you start out with a select few basic buildings, and as you hit milestones, like population total and hitting the culture cap, you will get the option of unlocking 1 new building out of a selection of 3. After a while, you will have upgraded versions of all the basic starting buildings, so you need to destroy the old ones to replace them with the upgraded ones.
These unlocks are pure RNG though, so it is possible to get the "Greater" versions of buildings, before you even see the initial version or the +1/+2 upgrade.
Also while playing, you will get events pop-up like traders/merchants and more civs migrating in. On higher difficulties you will also get negative/debuff events happen too.
I personally did a match on "Cozy" difficulty (so no negative events, outside of weather/seasons), and got a Victory by building the Great Pyramid after just over an hour of playtime, even though I only had ~300 pop and shouldn't have even unlocked the Master Architect's house by that point.
Although the game is very aesthetically pleasing and runs well, it does become a case of letting it run on x3 speed until you get a building unlock you actually want/need to progress, or unlocking something that actually allows you to accept more pop.
In fact, pop in this game is really weird. Pop doesn't seem to actually do anything, outside a couple of unlocks. Pop doesn't affect material gathering, doesn't affect what buildings can be placed, build speed, nothing. As there's no happiness or, seemingly, game-over mechanic, it doesn't even matter if 90% of your pop die to homelessness or famine.
Overall, as I already alluded to, the game feels like a roguelike, but without 3/4 of the systems that would actually make it one. This does leave it feeling like a weird mish-mash of typical city builder and roguelike, without being fully either of them. That said, it definitely does check the box of "cozy builder" for me. Also, seeing as the devs are still updating it, and the "Legendary" mode seems to remove a lot of the restrictions, I will be giving this a recommendation. Even better if you can get this on sale (like right now).
