समीक्षा

• gamedeal user

  Jul 9, 2018

  A combination of simcity 3000 and Democracy 3. It does a pretty good job in combining those two, but keep in mind that this is a one man project. I think some critics went way overboard with their expectations on how in depth the game should be. Others accused it of being biased. Well, I had no problems bulding my socialist, environment loving, welfare state ;p You need to be careful with your initial choices though. At the beginning I couldn't help anyone. Taxes were far too low and the economy consisted of some farms. But with time I could spend more and more money until I got my utopian welfare state :D I guess some critics went like "Here, you have to pay almost no taxes and now you get everything for free, lul" and were obviously surprised to see that this meant instant bankruptcy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• gamedeal user

  Sep 16, 2019

  This is a neat little game with some interesting concepts like the political decisions you need to take through out the game. And its definitly fun for the first three to four hours or so, but the point where you basicly seen every game feature that the game offers is quickly reached and it starts to become repetitive. For example, there is really little reason to found a second city, except you really want to try a different political system for your city, but honestly, they don't differ that much in the game. As communist you basicly need to build everything yourself, with you own money and also have generally more expenses. And as a capitalist you just assign landplots to different types of buildings and your citizen need to build their Buildings with their own money. Thats it! What the game lacks is depth in its mechanics and the Interaction with different Cities. Currently you can buy everything from an invisible market who have all the stuff you need. But it would be far more interesting to be able to trade ressources between Cities and build up economies. Some mechanics are also very questionable in their nature, for example: you cant build factories anymore, if you let all your Low-Class Citizens ascend to Middle-Class Citizens and eliminate poverty. Because the game needs a rising(!) Low-Class to let your Citizens build and expand Factories. Also the traffic simulation is just dumb, there are no vehicles who drive from a to b, the traffic on a road is determined by how much buildings with higher or lower density are bordering the street. This can lead to very obscure traffic density on your streets where you basicly have one small section of road with several hundred cars passing through by the minute, but the adjacent road tiles have just a few dozen cars passing through them. I wonder where all the cars go... All in all, Citystate is a neat little game with some interesting features, but in my opinion its not worth 15€. More like 5€ for a game that you play one afternoon and never touch after that.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 15, 2019

  This game has SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but sadly, it doesn't go anywhere with it. I've been playing this for a few hours and it just gets boring. You walk the fine line and get your finances balanced, grow and place everything, and that's it. There's no middle or end game content or even anything but looking at the screen and watching your population grow. It also gets frustrating because you can build monorails but no other forms of mass transit to help out the traffic situation. This is a good game for a few hours, don't get me wrong, but I'm pretty much done with it and probably won't touch it again unless some good mods come out or there is some new content. Not even sure I'd get any DLC unless it is well worth the money.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 4, 2019

  the game is fun but in reality it needs to change. What people want in this game is to try out their stupid ideology and they want it to work, this game only works if your'e working a moderate government. People don't want to play a game and simulate what they see all across europe. people wanna try the extremes like straight up socialism and anarchy. The riots are also really annoying. The point of the game isnt to please the people its to create a fantasy government ASSUMING thats what the population wants. Like sure in reality maybe drugs being illegal makes people mad but why would i do it if the people didnt want it. the people should be reflected by the player, if the player wants drugs illegal assume the AI do to. also its hard to do libertarianism in this game because if healthcare isnt funded by the government that doesnt mean theres no healthcare, and so thats annoying. people still have healthcare, most in fact yet the health is so low. and if i select legislation that says something will be privatized it should be taken off of the government spending secondary list. and private roads should be another legislation. and parks shouldnt be required to make wealthy people move in, it should be based off of how close they are to a big business (that a wealthy person works at) how far they are from industrial, and the fact that its high density. The games really cool but it doesnt let you get crazy and creative. Also last thing, the slums are super annoying and no matter what i do idk how to get rid of them. Even seattle my home city, which has a massive homeless problem, doesnt look anything like what the slums make the city look in the game. Theres way too many. And i think the game takes distance into account for jobs, like if the commercial are far away from most of the houses the commercial nearest to them will level up but not the farther ones. IN reality the map is like 8 city blocks long, i mean common, youre telling me people wouldnt drive 8 city blocks to work? they need to change that too.
• gamedeal user

  May 30, 2018

  I'd stay away for two reasons. First, intellectually the game seems to have strange motives. Second, the other is in that the game lacks a certain depth of play and its mechanics fail to deliver. I thought it would be cool to have a city builder with more political elements, but this doesn't really give a fair shake to all the political angles. The game seems to have a libertarian bent and is pretty anti socialist. There is also some weird in jokes about sjw's and hipsters. From an idiological standpoint, I think this game's developer shows their biases. It seems informed, but from a very particular outlook. That is, extract, exploit, capitalize. I feel like this is a weird propoganda tool which really detracts from the fun of the game. I don't want to be manipulated when I buy a game. When I played with a venture capitalist mindset I crushed the game, too easy. I tried playing as a enviromental socialist and the city wouldn't grow at all and I went bankrupt. I played with a mixed economy and was barely making it through, often taking loans. Maybe I'm missing something or blowing it out of proportion but something just isn't right. Onto the game. The traffic managment is pretty limited and very surface level. There is not much diversity in what you can build or zone for. There is no police building element (or fire, or education) but you can pump money into social programs. It is hard to determine what the 1-100 means for those though. Also the punishment for changing policies and taxes is steep, and that may be realistic, but starting with a tax rate of between 1% and 3% is just dumb then, and the initial tax rate should be yours to set. Also the punishment for having any taxes is ridiculous, like a 6% tax rate will keep the rich from coming to town, but a 6% tax on the poor wont mean a thing, come on. Also there isn't really that many policies, the one's that are there make sense but not all the consequences really make sense. They often have weirdly weak or strong influences on your three types of citzens. The loan system is stupid too. There just isn't a lot here either, you experience the whole game pretty quickly. I might give it another go around and try to be a good and just leader for everyone, but I'll probably go bankrupt.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 18, 2018

  I was expecting SimCity with a economic/political engine integrated into it. It is that to a degree, but the actual traditional city building elements are bare, and the political choices seems arbitrary to the city building aspect. Maybe I should have waited for the full release, but I saw the game was version 1.x which made me think it was released and "done." I was likely expecting too much, but I really like the underlying idea for the game. At this point, I think it needs more time in the oven, and some rounding out of features/messaging. I plan to check back in on the game in a year to see if it went anywhere Summary: It's a really cute idea for a game and I hope this game develops into more, but I was honestly shocked there wasn't the basic 1989 SimCity engine as the foundation to the game, the game does a really poor job telling you how your decisions in any of the one "layers" of the game impact anything wider than that layer, and there seems to be poor cohesion between the economic game, political game, and city building game they stampled into "the actual game." Most of the GUI boilerplate stuff is missing. GUI: Hitting escape does not give you the options main menu, and the main menu is not in the traditional top left. Instead it's bottom-right, but not even in the corner; it's sort of arbitrarily in the middle of your buttons at the bottom right. When you are out of money the game simply doesn't allow you to take actions. (traditionally you get a pop-up that says, "hey dummy you don't have X to do Y.") And you won't know if that's due to being out of money, or some advanced game aspect you don't understand until the bankrupt window comes up. Not that these things are always a problem, but when you are drilling (which feels like a contrived mini-game) you need to click a bunch of times, and if you cancel at any point your progress/square is basically trashed. So not only is the drilling mini-game annoying, but the cost of "not understanding" some aspect of it or a misclick completely trashed the square. City Building: There is literally no power, water, or garbage management. You really don't even need to manage traffic in as much as you need to make sure all things are no more than 3 squares away. I didn't need all those things per se, but considering it looks like SimCity 2000 I was expecting at least water/power. The only inferstructure the game cares about as far as I can tell, is roads. which has density levels for the roads, but that's it. And as far as I can tell, you can leave them at the lowest tier for the majority of the game and just spread the town out. The other management aspects are clearly the thing that makes the game interesting. If you wanted a city builder with economic/political engine, this is more like the other way around. It's a econ-politics game that has a "city builder" strapped to it, but it's mostly for the benefit of having something to look at. Also, it's worth noting in spite of all of this, there are a dozen city parks to choose from for plopping inside of your city and Arcologies like SimCity 2000 had, oddly enough. Economic/political engine: Privately or state owned is a major theme, but that is the breath of the choices and I can't determine the point of it, outside of "fitting" the political stuff you set. You can "drill for oil," "discover oil," and then arbitrarily declare the oil the ownership of the state or for private companies, and I'll be damned the game doesn't explain why it matters. The people don't seem to have any individual thoughts, other than "middle class hates/likes policy X" which was extremely unsatisfying. I would have expected people to move in agreeing with the way things are done and a portion who would want change, and any shift would have upset a number of them, even at least slightly. Like decision X upset %% of middle class who are [political idealogy]. There is this concept of stability that seems to only be effected by raising taxes or swapping advisors which are something you could completely ignore while slowly transforming your style. So from my experience in the game, all the stability mechanci does is punish me for not knowing what tax rate I should set from the beginning. I am surprised all the choices are strictly aboveboard as well. Everything basically aims to allow you to do things along a political axium and explore that set of ideas. I was extremely surprised you had to pick your "council" which is exactly one of two, while your city state is presumably the entire spectrum of ideas. I would have thought the advisors would have followed your "school of thought" questions you answered when founding the city. I was likely expecting too much, but I really liked the underlying idea for the game. At this point, I think it needs more time in the oven, and some rounding out of features/messaging. I plan to check back in on the game in a year to see if it went anywhere.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 21, 2019

  This game is genuinely compelling ;however, the poor performance makes the game less enjoyable. When you build up a medium sized city, the game will freeze for a few seconds every time you build anything. The near constant freezing makes the otherwise fun game a tedious experience. If the game was better optimized I would play it more. This game definitely feels like it needs a performance update. EDIT: If you have a gaming computer and you've done research on how the game plays , I expect you could enjoy this game. However, If you don't have a specially equipped computer , then issue I mentioned may or may not be unbearable for you. Overall the choice depends on how good your computer is. I have an I 5 processor and a dedicated graphics card so you may need more than that. The gameplay in my opinion is simple yet satisfying. It seems to work on system of choosing socialist or capitalist polices. The more socialist you get the more people will like you but its generally loses you money. The more you focus on capitalism the more dissatisfied your people will be but you will have more money. Generally its best to create a compromise between socialism and Capitalism to make a viable city. So overall a compelling game hindered by flaws.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 13, 2020

  I'm glad I discovered this little gem. As a fan of political philosophy and economics, this game speaks to me. When It asked me to choose between the Austrians and the Keynesians, I knew I was going to like it. At its core, it's a city-building game. But the city-building is more of a vehicle to see the results of your policies and decisions. In that sense you could think more of it as a simulator. Yes, It doesn't have plumbing, electric tending, transportation systems, etc. But that is a deliberate design choice. What you do have, is millions of knobs you have to carefully turn in order to keep your economy and society from collapsing. Once your state runs out of money, you lose. As a third world country citizen, I'd have loved to see how the developer handled a debt default situation. Maybe in the second game. Now, what keeps this game from being a classic, is that is very unpolished, I mean, very. You've got almost no information about how any of the mechanics work. You wanna know what the effect of raising taxes by 1% are gonna be? Tough luck. How about the results of bulldozing this one shanty town? As a result, most of the time it feels you are spinning plates, going by trial and error. I had no choice than to have a list of policy effects open on a browser tab. The interface has troubles too. The game is very inconsistent about what you can do while it's paused. You're gonna let me delete things while on pause? Ok. Why doesn't the spending show on my balance? If you select a building, pause, build, and then unpause, sometimes the building will keep autobuilding without you clicking. This is specially frustrating when it happens with a government building, which cannot be relocated. Also, bugs. Lots of them. Finally, the effects on some policies are weird. Apparently, the poor don't gamble. Subsides always have net benefits on the lower class (Hazlitt and Hayek raise a brow). And liberal (in the classic sense) policies are always deeply resented by the public. Despite all of that. I praise this game for trying something which was not done before. The developer is working on a sequel, and it looks like most of the problems I have will be adressed. The game is dirt cheap too. I strongly recommend trying it. Now, If only I could build that glorious communist dictatorship...
• gamedeal user

  May 9, 2020

  As a fan of politics and economics, this game is like no other. It is a fantastic and unique implementation of social and moral issues. However this game was created poorly. There are A LOT of glitches that I've encountered while playing this (some game breaking). The maker of the game is currently making a second, witch I hope fixes a lot of the issues the current game has. If you want to buy this game and try it for yourself, go ahead. It's difficult and very interesting. However, I'd recommend waiting until the second game.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 4, 2018

  A light city-builder that does what I've always wanted, introduced politics into the mix. Pros: -Nails the Sim City vibe -Attempts and sometimes successfully implements the political aspect, which alone should probably sell you on it. -Special buildings are nifty and fun to work towards -The trade cap is a smart mechanic - Gets the basics right - Cute little flag creator (coulduse more pixels, for the vexillologists among us) - Continued development. The Designer continues to expand and improve the game, another major selling point. - Genuine improvement. - Makes me want to play more, and to try different gov't styles. - Anarcho-Syndaclism maybe, rather than "Libertarian Anarchism?" Cons: -Many, many typos -Needs different types of commercial and industrial density - Needs a corporate tax slider (Sim City 4 style), rather than just 3 tiers of direct income tax+sales tax -Not always politically accurate (and really needs to explain itself better in respect to policy effects on given social classes) -The designer seems to have injected some personal politics, and genuinly stupid (as oppossed to charming) stats in the demographics screen. (SJWs/Attractive women... Come on guy, you're better than that) - Some performance issues. Wildest dreams: - Politically active neighboring states to deal with. - State infastructure such as police stations, hospitals, and military bases. - immigration should be more detailled. - Needs a happyness index in addition to the standard of living and income brackets. (Everyone could have low income, but be very happy for non-financial reasons) - Trains and light rail. Subways? (there are monorails though) Ultimately, trying to make a city-builder incorporate political classifications is bound to be incredibly difficult, but this game makes a genuine, good attempt, and is worth any Sim City/ Skylines fan to try.