City Play Reviews

This game is more of a puzzle game than a city builder - which is fine, just not the style of game that I am interested in. I would recommend it to people that like casual games with simple strategic elements. It's more about putting the pieces together than crafting a creative and thoughtful city.

it's kind of a mobile game more than pc game, but I like it, it's an ok game for me, nice cartoon graphics but the price for this game is ridiculous

UPDATE 5/27/16: There have been some changes/fixes/enhancements, but I wanted to let the original review stand, so I'll mention the new stuff here. The Housing, Shops, Jobs, and Safety sliders now all work in the same manner and it's much more intuitive (no more confusion over when to build shops!) This was the one confusing point I had with the interface originally, but now that's been fixed. In addition, the mousewheel zooming is more intuitive (up to zoom in, down to zoom out), and there is now a proper exit game button. The dev has been kind and collaborative with players, and has asked for and considered (and in some cases, then implemented) player suggestions. Compared to most games on Steam, this is a game with a smaller scope, and a smaller price point, so having this kind of dev response to game issues is really refreshing. PREVIOUS REVEW: This game is cute and relaxing. I have to admit the negative reviews put me off, but I kept being drawn in by the screenshots and the videos. So, I decided to buy it and make my own decision. If it simply didn't work, I could get a refund. I'm not going to refund. I've had a blast playing this game. As soon as I figured out how to manage the "Build Shops" meter, it's been very entertaining to place my colorful little isometric buildings and watch my city grow. Basically, build housing. Build industry to gather materials. Build offices or factories for jobs. Then, when people start moving in (build a LOT of housing... that's the only way the population will start to really grow), your Build Shops meter will move. Build ONE shop, and give it about 15 minutes to let it get supplied with materials and then it'll start generating cash for you. Then, just build more when the meter moves to the right. Beautify your city with parks and playgrounds, and make sure things are safe by placing your fire station and police station. The larger your population gets, the more shops and different kinds of housing open up. I enjoyed SimCity back in the day, but it was a little micromanagey for me what with the power grid and water pumps and zoning, etc. This little game is truly pick up and play, and you don't have to invest a lot of time into every session... but I can't help that I have. :) I'm not going to say everyone else's negative reviews are wrong, but I sincerely don't understand what they were expecting... except for that one reviewer who was somehow expecting power and sewage and curved roads... all for under $4. Wut. I love the game for what it is, but then... I have reasonable expectations. UPDATE: Just hit 250 population and I got my first disaster! I about jumped out of my skin, because up until now, things have been calm and quiet and peaceful. I started hearing traffic noise, which was cool... and then *crash*! Looked like a traffic accident with the yellow triangle. Luckily, I had not one, but TWO hospitals at this point, and a little icon appeared on the hospital so I figured I'd try to click it. Well, the accident was cleared up with some pretty cool sound effects and I got some gold coins out of it. :) UPDATE 2: Just hit 400+ population and my cops just busted a car thief! :D I've also had one apartment fire and one office fire. I built schools and schoolbuses are now driving around town with the cop cars and the fire trucks and the ambulances. I can finally build penthouses!

This game is awful, this game is a unfinished mobile game. - Build times are in REAL TIME. - Cars have no set path and drive down random roads, (the cars do not turn and instead just teleport to the road they're turning onto) - Buildings do not seem to have a desciption to tell you what they are + Nice cartoonish graphics

Shutterstock Watermark on the weath icon? Why should someone pay for the game, if the the games contents itself aren't paid?! I know this is a small and cheap game, but that is just a weak peformance...

I recommend grabbing this game when it's on a sale for those people who enjoy Farmville like mobile games. The good: + Good unlock system + Cute graphics + Intuitive controls + Steam achievements are clear and reachable + Ongoing assistance by developers The bad: - While there are 80 building types they produce the same goods and aren't distinguishable enough, to bother with placing a variation - Not enough feedback regarding what one is doing right or wrong - Encourages idleness - Low content - No map variation - Mobile like - Laggy road construction - Insufficient tutorial with language mistakes The average: -/+ Real time based construction time

I bought this game excited about a full sandbox type of city builder and was thinking I might get something like the old school Sim City that I played back in the 90s on my Super Nintendo. ..I was WRONG. Watch my full 30+ min review of this game right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVVq8MK-aUM There's no features available in the game for things like power, water, or sewage. There's no ability to rotate a building all four directions, they can only face the bottom right or the bottom left so you always see the front. There's no ability to make curved roads, and no mountains or hills to work your city around with the procedural generation. But my biggest complaint is that the progress of people moving into your city is WAY TOO SLOW, and there is NO OPTION TO SPEED UP THE GAME! Argh! I placed plenty of houses, plenty of services, and factories, offices and everything available to build.. but people were still moving in at a mind numbingly slow pace. My first impressions of this game are "disappointing" as I just expected much more and much faster progression that what this game currently delivers. I cannot recommend it even with it's very low price tag. While Romopolis doesn't offer the open sandbox style of play which I generally prefer, it just offers a lot more fun and value at about the same price. My score is a 43%. Not recommended.

Summary: This game is quite the bore, and quite horribly designed all around. Tutorial --- The tutorial left much to be desired. It doesn't show you anything, it just gives you a description of what to click, and it's only about 15 messages or so long. The content itself doesn't actually describe what you need to do in order to get started in the game - it just gives you some basic information and tells you some things you need to click on. After going through the tutorial, I was incredibly confused on what I even needed to do next. The messages lacked detail and I missed some very basic things (like auto-completing the building or *moving* the building to a different location on the screen). Then I sat there and wondered how I actually got people to come live there, as several of my homes had completed already but it still said I had no Free Homes. Eventually it just updated on its own, I have no real idea what caused it to do that though. Controls --- Terrible. You can only move around the map by moving your mouse to the edges of the screen, at least from what I can tell. I wouldn't be able to confirm because there is no actual Options menu which lists out controls, so I'm assuming you can only use your mouse for anything. I would have expected the minimalistic idea of using the arrow keys to move around easier, because using the mouse at the edge can be quite glitchy, and is pretty terrible in this game. The clicking action is also horribly bound. Clicking on something will click on *every single thing* under your cursor. This gets especially annoying when there are any messages on the screen, or if you're trying to click on something that is below one of the buttons on the right - it will activate both things you clicked on. The mapping for the buttons seems to be off too, as there have been many times where I've clicked something on the map that was just near one of the buttons on the right, but it still activated the button. Even worse, if you want to start over fresh to see if you can manage things better this time around - too bad, you can't. There is no restart feature. Once you've started, you keep that forever. As far as I can tell, all of the information for your city is stored on their servers, not on your computer, so you can't do squat. Countdowns --- The entire game is based on countdown timers for how long it will take for a building to complete or how long it will take for a new resource to appear. It's really quite boring, and all you can do is just sit there and wait. You can instantly complete your building if you have coins to do that, but if you run out you're boned. Resources --- The resource system is possibly the most annoying part of this game. They make it incredibly easy to get all the coins you could possibly need by building shops, but they limit you to only 5 of each type of resource miner, and some of them barely pump out squat. Nowhere near enough to keep up a steady building pace. I had all five brick builders constructed and I was still having to sit around and wait for more because even with all five, you still only get enough bricks each round to construct one, maybe two more buildings. Further, I'm pretty sure the stone mining building is completely glitched. It keeps adding a bunch of squares where it looks like it's generating more stone, but near the end doesn't complete the task and just stops doing anything. I had to keep moving my brick buildings around to new spots of stone because the stone mining wasn't actually producing more stone for those buildings. Maybe I was doing something wrong. Maybe that was something that needed included in that crappy tutorial I mentioned. Advertised Game Features --- The description of this game is quite hilarious if you've actually been into the game to see how it works. Mainly, the list of "features" that this game has. - High quality building graphics -- I wouldn't call any of them high quality. They look ok, but they're extremely basic and nothing to be excited about. There's also a lot of anti-aliasing issues that make some spots look pretty bad. - More than 80 different types of buildings -- Most of which are the same. There are several different types of Apartments that all look similar, several Condos that all look similar, and several Row Houses that all look similar. You get the idea. There's a lot of different types of the *same thing* that are slightly modified to look different. - Changing vehicle traffic on the roads, animated cars and buses -- There's traffic, that drives around pretty randomly and doesn't really add anything to the game whatsoever. Might as well not even be there. - A unique road construction system -- Nothing unique about it. It's an incredibly standard "put a piece of road on the squares and they connect together" road system with no curves and no creativity to it. - Fun game play in a unique tycoon game -- Fun is quite the overstatement. As is unique. - City builder game for all ages -- Maybe elementary school students. - Be a city building tycoon -- Were they just trying to make their description longer by adding bullet points? - Artificial intelligence based on real simulation of in and out moving tenants -- None witnessed. It's just numbers that represent your population and then a couple of bars that represent the number of free homes and jobs. I'm not sure they know what AI means. - Unexpected catastrophe simulations -- Never tried this because, well, why would you? It takes freaking forever to build anything up in this game, why would I want to destroy it all in a few moments? - Travis the city adviser will give you hints -- He's about as useful as the Microsoft paper clip. - Continuous updates and bug fixes -- Oh boy, I sure hope so. --- --- They should have spent quite a bit more time on this game making sure it was actually ready and would be fun. Spelling mistakes in your text is a HUGE no-no. I mean, come on, really? That's so damn easy to catch. Hopefully this game gets a *lot* of improvements to make it more fun and live up to its description. But right now, it's not worth the $3 I paid for it.

[h1] The Good [/h1] -Sims like music on main menu -Possible potential if major updates come -Very high FPS -Reacts to WIndow key appropriately [h1] The Bad [/h1] -No resolution control -No show of collected resources -No volume sliders -No porper explanation for top bar -No right clicking in game -No pause unless you go to main menu -No ability to create multiple cities -No campaign/ misisons -Very slow gameplay -Options only changed from main menu -Bumpy moving when scrolling map -Game resets to windowed mode every time it starts -Animations have a slight pause in them -Useless + buttons next to resources -Long waiting time on new buildings -Only 2 speed options -Unexplained icon from resource collecting with a big X on it? -Very few amount of starting buildings for a game that progresses this slowly (lots of duplicates buildings) -Scrolling can continue when you move mouse down and off the window -Buildings only have two directions they can be placed -Build menu takes two clicks to open see all he build options and a further click to close it -Population isnt close to realistic -No exit button in game (have to go to main menu) -Ugly icon

Seems like it was an mobile app before and dev just deleted in-app purchases. But you still have to wait hours for buildings to complete, e.g. an industrial plant you could effort from start of the game needs an hour (real time!) to build, it's just like in one of those facebook or mobile games. Additionally it seems that some things like those plus buttons beneath the ressource displays don't work, guess they were for in-app purchases and were not removed. It would be nice if you could build roads also by holding your mouse and do have to tap for every single piece, additionally this doesn't work sometimes (especially if their was wood on this tile). Surprisingly you get some achievements so easy, that you nearly get them just by starting the game and do what is just logic, so in fact it's not really something you achieved (first 5 achievements got 99,9% global completion rate). I thought this game would be fun, at least in a casual style, but I don't want to wait most of the time in a desktop game. -- Update: I played again, first of all the game didn't saved at all, but never mind I haven't done much before. I have to admit, that you can speed up building by just buying it for ingame money, even if this is senseless and realistic in no way, but why is it like this instead of just spending some more money for building something in like a few seconds or even a half minute instead of three minutes for the first house, fifteen for the first shop and even an hour for the first industrial plant. You can buy more land, like in Cities:Skylines or many other games, but the game seems to fully loads again for this, which is kinda weird, because I can't imagine how this was programmed so this is needed. It's also weird, that you haven't all buildable things one after another in building menus, you have to go to the next page for some already buildable things, even if there were not buildable stuff on the page before. Basically it's maybe just that irritating, because the whole game just uses six categories for building, which are living, plants and stores, if you click another time on the building button offices, service and parks are revealed, which isn't very intuitive to my mind. Cars which drive around sometimes just disappear or turn around in a curve, streets do not stick togehter, there's always a small part grass between the road tiles. Farms do not use tiles near the farm or even tiles touching each other to grow wheat, they randomly choose tiles in the whole possible region. While some achievements are rediculous easy, I can't imagine that you can reach 1,000 inhabitant even in multiple hours of play, because people are moving in amazingly slow, even if there are houses, jobs, stores, food and parks available in a great count. Also there isn't anything like electricity or water needed, another fact is that everything is perfectly flat, but you can't automatically destroy wood or stone when you want to build a house on this place, but if you want to build a road you don't have to first demolish it using another tool. Controls are sometimes weird, for example things you want to build doesn't stick do the cursor, you have to drag them, but sometimes you don't directly see the green building you want to drag, sometimes it's also place out of your view so you have to find it first. It's not worth playing or even spending this few bucks at the time of writing this to my mind, maybe this changes someday.