It seemed like a nice little city-building game at first, especially since it was made by Kalypso, who brought us the excellent Tropico series, which I enjoyed. Boy, was I wrong. the game itself is fine but it has one fatal flaw that entirely ruined it for me: Snowball effect. Let me explain.

Just about every building relies on other buildings, mostly houses. That means for every building you build to accomodate some citizen's complaint, you need to build a house or two nearby and sometimes, the building you need relies on another production building. And the problem stems from the evolution of houses, they upgrade automatically and so does the inhabitants' needs, which leads to YOUR need of constructing specific buildings that leech on your already bad economy. The best example are sausages. People will complain that there are no sausages so, naturally, you build a pig farm to produce meat that the butcher shop you're gonna build will make into sausages. And you basically need one house for each of these buildings, growing your upkeep needs, it's all a huge buildup of needs that only pile up until you're overwhelmed.

And you have to take into account the disasters that might hit your little community: riots, fires, plagues, barbarian attacks and so on. It takes barely 5 minutes of gameplay before that little thumb up on the left side of the screen becomes a thumb down and your citizen start rioting. It's unbelievable how impossible this game is. I saw reviews saying that this game is more casual and more forgiving than say Banished ... well for all the trouble I had with banished, I had my town last a whole lot longer than in Imperium Romanum, in which I can barely make enough production building to sustain my town, let alone build a growing economy.

Well, just like this game gives me a thumb down early because of sausage shortage, I'm giving it a thumb down too, there are much more memorable and playable city builders out there, Cities: Skylines, Tropico and Banished being three fine examples of good city builders that don't rely on overwhelming you with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to make it challenging.

It seemed like a nice little city-building game at first, especially since it was made by Kalypso, who brought us the excellent Tropico series, which I enjoyed. Boy, was I wrong. the game itself is fine but it has one fatal flaw that entirely ruined it for me: Snowball effect. Let me explain. Just about every building relies on other buildings, mostly houses. That means for every building you build to accomodate some citizen's complaint, you need to build a house or two nearby and sometimes, the building you need relies on another production building. And the problem stems from the evolution of houses, they upgrade automatically and so does the inhabitants' needs, which leads to YOUR need of constructing specific buildings that leech on your already bad economy. The best example are sausages. People will complain that there are no sausages so, naturally, you build a pig farm to produce meat that the butcher shop you're gonna build will make into sausages. And you basically need one house for each of these buildings, growing your upkeep needs, it's all a huge buildup of needs that only pile up until you're overwhelmed. And you have to take into account the disasters that might hit your little community: riots, fires, plagues, barbarian attacks and so on. It takes barely 5 minutes of gameplay before that little thumb up on the left side of the screen becomes a thumb down and your citizen start rioting. It's unbelievable how impossible this game is. I saw reviews saying that this game is more casual and more forgiving than say Banished ... well for all the trouble I had with banished, I had my town last a whole lot longer than in Imperium Romanum, in which I can barely make enough production building to sustain my town, let alone build a growing economy. Well, just like this game gives me a thumb down early because of sausage shortage, I'm giving it a thumb down too, there are much more memorable and playable city builders out there, Cities: Skylines, Tropico and Banished being three fine examples of good city builders that don't rely on overwhelming you with bullshit to make it challenging.