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| I'm desperate for a good city builder by disappointed so far ( . )( . ) 06/14/2025, 1:00am PDT | ||||
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| I've had a hankering for a good city builder(ish) for close to half a year now. Something satisfying and meaty. Really anything from RTS to 4X to economic game will do. Just not the dry and autistic model train set types like City Skylines.
Darfall 
What happens when someone takes a stab at recreating Stronghold via a Warcraft 3 mod. Then throws in sorta the day/night cycle from They Are Billions. Probably the most enjoyable of the bunch I've tried. It's just missing some tuning. They can't quite nail a balance between the two victory conditions: sweeping the map for all demon portals or defeating the final night attack. The former is nearly impossible and the latter disappointingly easy. It's enjoyable just dicking around base building and clearing camps, but with the looming disappointment of the end game. Demo gives a good idea of the full experience. Devs have been fairly active with forum feedback and updates. Stario: Haven Tower (demo) 
City builder where your city is one giant tower you build on the outer edges of. Stario is what happens when you never let clunky camera views get in the way of your VISION. You will get sick of having to rotate the tower constantly and not being able to see everything at once in less than 5 minutes. Shadows of Forbidden Gods (demo) 
The closest attempt I've seen at a viable single player Solium Infernum, where instead of Satan you're playing 2nd age Sauron attempting to corrupt the kingdoms of men and elves before taking the mask off. I still can't tell if this is brilliant or an incomprehensible mush of nonsense. Still waiting to see if Mischief picked it up. Demo provides the full game with 1 of the available dark gods. Dyson Sphere Program 
Much much prettier, but much much less navigable and functional Factorio. I could get into Factorio right away, and got into developing my sprawling mess of a factory. I gave up on this shortly after my first conveyor belt. Kaiserpunk 
Someone tried to make an Anno clone, but it feels like they got the team behind one of those garbage Zombie Survivor type mobile game city builders to do it. Like the Dyson Sphere/Factorio experience, I've sunk tons of hours into Anno, and couldn't even make it halfway through the 2(!) hour tutorial of this. The premise is interesting that you're rebuilding war torn cities in the aftermath of WWI (a war that stands out for being one of the least civilian damaging conflicts as far as industrialized total wars go). But you only see this in the opening tutorial cutscene. It then immediately cut to starting with your first mud shacks in an empty field. Anno did this too, but it didn't bill itself as a post apocalypse rebuilder. Frostpunk 2 I had no interest in going back to play Frostpunk 1 after I beat it once, but my first playthrough did pull me in right away, with concepts and feedback that was obvious right away. I walked away from the tutorial in Frostpunk 2 three times, and quit almost as soon as I started chapter 1. If nothing else than I hated the visual layout. Let's take a look at the two games interfaces lined up side by side. 
Tell me, which looks like a prototype and which looks like a polished final product after someone who actually knows how to design a GUI gave it a few passes? On the left, you can tell at a glance what nearly everything is without even having played Frostpunk 1. You have the obvious build button, a tech tree button, a button for laws. The red bar is a bad thing and the blue bar is a good thing. Along the top there's coal, wood, building block things, raw food, and cooked food. There is a current crises of food and medicine, shown by the obvious bright red icons. The COLD temperature is featured in the very center because it's the central fucking concept of Frostpunk. Every single button and meter is being overtaken by growing frost, punk! What the fuck is going on with Frostpunk 2 to the right? Did someone design this to integrate with macOS? Why is everything charcoal grey on light grey? Where is the frost? Can you even spot the temperature in under 5 seconds of looking? What are the top icons? Population, some...things, there's the building block things, houses, and the rest...whatevers. What is under control and what is a crises? The crises are now those smoky black things in the top center. Can you even tell what they are? Who thought those were an improvement over "red fork&knife"? Can you spot an obvious BUILD button in your city BUILDer game? Did you guess one of the tiny little lower right buttons? Someone thought the dumb faction loyalty juggling system was more important to devote all the central real estate to. And it keeps going. Clicking on events in FP1 led to dynamic animated menus and layered stills, with the frost once again encroaching on it all. FP2 just dumps you on a static white menu and static picture. It's like going back to Persona 3 menus after experiencing Persona 5. I don't get how the visual touches took such a step back. They could have kept the overall look while still moving the scope to a more strategic level, but nuts to this static charcoal look. It also affects feedback as stuff that was easy to parse in FP1 is lost in this mess of tiny grey. If their goal was to simulate snow blindness then good job I guess. Didn't someone post about a decent spiritual successor to Pharaoh a couple weeks back? I can't seem to find it. |
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