I love city builders, esp simple ones. But I didn't fully understand what was happening in my city, which made it really difficult to play.
- Every 10 seconds, resources deplete, and the number required is shown on your top bar. So 180 food was going away every 10 seconds. I had 3 farms, each producing 100 food each 10 seconds. I should have an enormous surplus of food and never need to worry about it, correct? And yet my food was constantly falling dangerously low. I think maybe the distance people have to travel to their job matters somehow, but it was never explained, and rearranging job paths and trying to guesstimate from the numbers what was happening was really frustrating.
- After planting a building, there is no way to look at its info panel again. You can plant another one to see the info screen, then cancel it, or upgrade a building nearby to see the upgrade info, then cancel... But that's incredibly tedious, and once you run out of room, it's not exactly an option.
- What causes fires?? Who knows??
- Does having 3 houses connected to 1 job speed up production? Maybe? It's impossible to tell.
- Why are you required to plant mines on rocks, but you can't plant woodcutters on forests?
- Why does the mine work so incredibly slowly, slower than all the other buildings in my city?
Other issues:
- Typos in the menus
- You can't switch to another type of building to build... You have to close the build menu and re-open it, which is just obnoxious.
- Visibility in my city is ridiculous. I've tried numerous combos of sky/ground tint and sometimes it's clear, other times there's a weird blue haze over everything and at night the town lights can't penetrate it so it's impossible to see. There's no settings to improve this.
I adore city builders and this could have been a very cute, fun game, but the confusing guesswork made it impossible to enjoy. I'm glad I got it as part of a humble bundle deal, because it's absolutely not worth it.
