Recent reviews by ExiOfNot

I wouldn't recommend this game unless you can get it significantly discounted. It was fun enough to fill 8 hours or so, and for the discounted price (about $8) I think it was a fair trade.

The aesthetic and visuals are very pleasing, and lend themselves to a cozy city builder, but it feels like the game could have used a bit more fine tuning. For example, despite tutorial popups, it felt like I didn't really understand when and why new cards would be added.

Additionally, it feels like there's not a lot of control over deck composition. Card removal is rare, so deck bloat becomes a major obstacle near the end. New industries add tons of cards to the deck, disincentivizing you from playing with them. Additionally, building removal is rare, so you're not really upgrading anything so much as you're expanding outwards towards a rather small map.

Ultimately I dropped all my typical restraints (clean energy, good housing, etc) and just did the objectives best I could. My town looked horrible (one objective was to literally just build housing in industrial and dirty areas), but I won the run, so it felt like a good time to call it.

I haven't seriously played anything but classic version. There are other game modes, unlocked through play, and maybe there's a gem in there that makes the game's quirks all fit together, but I didn't feel inclined to search for it. The most appealing was a creative mode where you can just free build a little cardboard city. It's a little too samey to justify a full playthrough, but building out a little cardboard city was in and of itself fun. Almost like playing with legos.

Move around the map constraints, add some card removal, focus the deck building around comboing good districts to fight disasters instead of succumbing to bloat, and the game might deliver. Either that or remove deck building, and just have a cozy cardboard city builder. Just some suggestions, though I'm no game designer.

One last thing: For Linux users, be sure to force Steam to use Proton for this game. Without it, I got glitchy graphics and no sound.