This is a mobile game ported to PC and it shows. Ingame prompts to make an account with them for an online service nobody wants, limitations on the player from how many region slots they can make hidden behind a gold coin cost. You can earn the coins for free or you could pay them with real money. It has a really bad UI that was designed around phones and touch screens and mechanics that are very skin deep.

It takes literally 4 clicks to get to roads, pipes, powerlines or most buildings. When you place these you get an additional menu where you have to click the green check to confirm your placement. It feels extremely clunky compared to the Simcity games 20 years ago.

The depth of the game mechanics according to others online places it somewhere between Simcity 2000 and 3000. It also does that annoying thing Cities Skylines does where it locks buildings behind the population of your city instead of just locking things behind the ingame year like the Simcity games. In this game you start off with only the option for solar panels and the coal power is locked behind an arbitrary number of population which should be the other way around, starting off with the power plant with heavy pollution and having to work your way towards cleaner energy since no one is going to willingly opt into picking the power plants that are bad and pollute your town.

Too many mobile elements remain in the game such as build timers for essential utilities, and an obnoxious "ticket system" to expand your bus routes.

UI is still unfriendly and there are too many extra 'clicks' to get to where one needs to be.

Hosting an online region is gated behind a daily login currency. For a paid game this is unacceptable and a baffling decision.

Doesn't work on Linux as advertised.

I wasn't sure if to mark this as a positive or a negative review, because as flawed as it is, I'm still playing it, but I eventually decided to go with negative for one simple reason: The thing this game does best is make me want to play Simcity 4.

If you take into consideration that this is a former mobile game, it's impressive as hell, for sure, and honestly, you wouldn't guess it just from playing it. If you want to get this as a mobile game? GET IT.
But as a PC game it just feels like anything it tries to do, Simcity already does better to the point where this game feels incredibly lacking at times, and every feature simcity has that this game doesn't jsut feels so much more obivous because of this.

Cons:
-Not as much information is available to you as with Simcity, even when it's information that could be pretty useful. Especially when it comes to transportation. I can't know how much usage I'm getting out of my train station unless it's overloaded.
-The demand for the different kinds of zones is erratic as hell. You could have an intensely high demand for residential or commercial or industrial one second, and no demand for a different kind of zone, and moments later, without you having done anything, it could be completely flipped. This makes my decisions of how to expand my city feel completely pointless.
-The game's sense of scale feels off, A small elementary school only affects the block next to it, and at 9x9 city blocks size, the game had already classified my city as having gone past "City", "Big city", "Metropolis", "Megalopolis", "Small Country", "Big country", "Continent", and given my city the title of "Solar system".
Again, my city was 9 city blocks big. Smaller than a neighborhood in most real cities. This is despite the fact the the game map was definitely big enough to support a full sized, massive city.
-The construction mechanic is clunky. Not so clunky that you can't get a grip on it, but annoyingly inconvenient.
-You don't usually get abandoned buildings in your city but if you do, they're not going anywhere until you demolish them, no matter what happens with RCI demand.
-Even though when you place a bus station it placces them on both sides of the road, you can only have the bus go to one of them. It won't let you reselect it on the same route. Which means a bus can't go back the other way on the same street it came from.
-The transportation mechanic feels off and weird, sometimes when creating a bus route I would see it loop around a bunch of city blocks to reach the next station for no apparant reason, even if there is a far shorter, direct route to the next station.
-When I place a subway station it soemtimes tells me it's being used by a ton of people, to which I wonder "how. I haven't even connected it to the subway lines yet." Which makes me wonder if I even ened to be wasting all that money building subway lines.
-Not enough zoning options!!! You have regular zoning and high desnity zoning. That's it. If you want to create quiet little suburbs with lots of low to the ground houses and scenery? Tough luck, as soon as demand hits, those are all going to be brownstones and densely packed houses.
-Road and transportation infrastructure lacks realism. Highways can have hairpin turns and onramps/offramps are just one way streets that are connected tot he highway at 90 degree angles.
-Lack of save slots. I wanted to play around with the "Disasters" feature but relaized I can't save a city, blow it to bits, then load it like nothing happened. At best I can try to do it really quickly, hope the game doesn't autosave, and exit the ame entirely without saving. Why have disasters in a game you can't save/load?
-Speaking of which, the disasters are really disappointing. There's lots of different kinds but buildings are just suddenly blocks of rubble once they get hit. No fun destruction sequences. Even in simcity 2000 there was at least a somewhat satisfying puff of dust when a building gets demolished. Plus, it usually stays in the disasters overlay for a second, which doesn't even let you witness the destruction until you switch back.
-The weird way it handles Graveyards, landfills, and bus depots. They behave more like a minigame than like a fucntional service. Why does it keep expecting me to "clear room" in the graveyard when it gets full? How about you just STAY FULL because that's how a graveyard works?! Why do I need to wiggle around my mouse over it and watch the little cremation smoke come up every time?! And why does the button that do it autmaotically cost money?
-The city lacks life. If you click a building, all it really says is what zoning and economic level it is, and what is it the least happy about. Nothing has a name, or interesting details about it, and there are no pedestrians.
-Buses and trains seem to function by a different logic entirely. You need to decide on your bus's routes, but trains will jsut automaticlaly take you to whichever station you need to go.
-SOME building repetition. It's not TERRIBLE like in other games. But I did end up having a LOT of the same high density residential spires splattered across my city.
-I have yet to encounter a game that handles Landmarks correctly and this is no exception. You can mostly only build real world landmarks, and with the exception of generating a certain amount of income and possibly acting as a park for the nearby area, they don't usually serve any purpose, they don't provide workplaces or stuff like that. At least not noticably so.
I want my city to have it's own landmarks, not London or Sydney's! Sure, building Landmarks is optional, but still.
-Nothing generates noise pollution besides industrial buildings and power plants. You could have a fully jammed highway, it'll be nice and quiet according to the overlay.
-The pixel art doesn't hold up to quality when you zoom in too close (but that's natural)
-Buildings change rotation so they are always facing the camera
-You'd probably find more mods for Simcity, just because it's a more well known game. If this even has any. And let's face it, Simcity 4 lives on mods.
-Doesn't unlock certain buildigns like a highschool until your city is pretty big. Which means you're not going to get any wealthy residents during this time because they won't be happy with your level of education.

Pros:
-PIXEL ART :D
-2D graphics means buildings can actually look detailed and good rather than have to worry about being large smooth geometric shapes that don't have too many polygons. I'm looking at you, Cities Skylines.
-Honestly, anything that wasn't explicity mentioned in the cons section is done exceptionally well.
-The ability to turn on/off traffic lights at any intersection. (Though an arguable con would be the fact that this works SO well that it begs the question, why does a city need traffic lights to begin with?)
-Lovely architecture. Buildings actually have different styles, and they're pretty ones.
-The same "style" of building often comes in various different heights! So even if buildings are pretty similar, one cna be short, one can be tall. This adds to the variety.
-Cars seem to care where they're going. That's always a plus.
-While completely janky, the way cosntruction is handled does let you build multi-level overpasses and really tlal roadways if you want. Which is fairly impressive for a grid based game.
-There's not a lot but there ARE some features that Simcity doesn't have. Like religion, or treating sports facilities and parks as two seperate things.
-You can choose a difficulty setting.

Overall, a good yet flawed game, but it tries so hard to be Simcity that at some point the question is asked - why not just play simcity, then?

I simply cannot recommend TheoTown as it stands right now.

The game, whilst visually and mechanically reminiscent of SimCity 2000 (with elements of 3000 & 4) is mostly shallow, unexciting and really rather dull.

The systems are half baked at best. Whilst they work to a degree, the do not have any major impact on the long term gameplay. Once you create a small enough city, the funds just keep pouring in. The challenge therefore is non existent even on hard. You'd have to do extremely badly on purpose to fail at this game.

TheoTown therefore is great as a city sandbox. With plug-ins for extra buildings and structures, you can create a visual masterpiece. But if you're looking to be a mayor, plan a city and deal with all the challenges that face you as a result? You won't find it here.

Another issue is this game has the instability of a North Korean Dictator. Even if you update your graphics drivers and Java to the latest version, this game will crash often. You may be lucky and get away with stable gameplay for an hour or more. But most of the time the game will crash in 3-20 minute increments, which very quickly becomes infuriating.

I purchased this game on sale, and only after 2 days worth 7 hours game time, I've already uninstalled it. I may return to it one day, but it will need an awful lot of work at every level to make it worthwhile.

If you want a game that's actually enjoyable, go play Cities Skylines. If you want something old school, SimCity 4 Deluxe often goes for about 79% the base price of TheoTown and has everything this game has and more. SimCity 4 also works mechanically and has stability.

Bought the game, went to the plugin store, downloaded the ones i liked, the game crashed and never opened again.
Lots of people with the same problem on the Forum, they dont answer anybody.
Devs was smart, we cant delete the plugins from the folder manually, you gotta open the game to do that, how smart are those people huh?

Refounded.
Im done with companies that just dont care.

They also keep forcing us into Discord instead of just replying people that are HERE on steam community. BUT THEY COME HERE IN THE FORUMS TO TELL PEOPLE TO GO TO DISCORD LOL, if they come here to do that, ANSWER YOUR CUSTOMERS.

Imagine having almost 900 games and people try to force you into discord groups, no. Thanks. Discord is not a requirement to buy games on steam or to have decent support.
Lame.

The game is also being flagged by anti-virus.
Community manager talks like a kid whos angry, totally unprofessional.

Shady game, shady people, open your eyes, be careful.
They also BANNED me for the comunity and i just said truths, never called anyone any names, i did not do ANYTHING AGAINST THE POLICIES, so, yeah, there you go, that shows exactly the type of people behind this game.

You was warned, dont cry later if you get hacked "out of nowhere", those people are just SO SHADYYYYYYYY.


They say "WE talked with microsoft, theres no virus its all good"
Thats ok, so i asked "If thats really true, can you post here the email, the conversation and give us the name of the person that you contacted at microsoft so we can be sure that you are not lying??"

Guess what? BOOOOMMM, BANNED !

Correct me if im wrong, but acording to Steam policy i was ILEGALLY banned, i never called people any names, i just raised some points and i got banned for making "false accusations".

No im not making false accusation, their game IS BEING FLAGGED by anti-virus, and its not ONE, its more than one.

So....................
If you are smart you know whats going on here.

I said what i said, i did what i could, and you was warned.



PS: They never replied my request of showing us the conversation with microsoft, instead they just deleted ALL my messages like i never said anything.

Im glad im smart and im pretty sure theres something going on.
But i guess people just dont care.

You looking for a good city builder that runs on your pc? Grab Simcity4, its from the worst company ever, but at least the game works and dont come filled with malware.

I also tried contacting Steam, i explained all that, but this days the only thing Steam care about, is collecting money, for everything else, they are 100% useless.

Playing on Linux has a handful of issues. Looks like a good game...

- Lots of text is aliased beyond the point of legibility
- Full screen does not capture mouse. If mouse leaves screen box, game reverts to window size but remainder of screen goes black.
- Zooming is extremely glitchy on load

Linux 5.1.15, BSPWM, GTX 1080 (nvidia-430.26-7)

The game still has many aspects from mobile, the road placement is very annoying.

Keep crashing!!! I cant belive this thing cpst money