this game is so fun if you love deck builders and city management sims!
it reminds me of other city sims, like Steam World: Build, but in Slay the Spire form

Very chill nostalgia-graphiced city builder with deck-building aspect. Every now and then you can change the draw priorities and basicly have diffrent development cycles for your city. All while balancing ressources and money. I like it, I like how the buildings stack and change shape.

A very aesthetic game, though with a slightly frustrating resource management system and metagame.

Vertical Kingdom is a 2D city builder 'roguelike', in the sense that you have multiple mini-campaigns to build a bunch of cities in each campaign to reach a certain goal, and accumulate progression points to give you more starting resources and buildings.

The mechanics for how you are forced to construct your city are super fun, and reward building the city in pretty ways. You only have a finite amount of land that you can build on, so you rapidly build upwards to save it for farms, mines, etc. Optimizing for space is fun, though cities tend to look a little silly at the extreme of min-maxing, as they keep fanning out with arches extending the surface area of each city layer. One of the core units of construction, the city block, will blob up with other structures to form larger ones that it pairs with, which adds to the visual variety.

The core resource in each city is your loyalty. If you have a deficit of anything, it cuts into your loyalty. If your citizens don't have a need met, it cuts into your loyalty. And if that goes to zero on any city, game over, campaign over. The game is not very hard, the only thing that can really ruin you is if you forget that your loyalty is going down, and you don't have any loyalty boosting cards coming your way for a few turns. So I found myself messing up perfectly fine campaigns multiple times because I just wasn't paying attention. I would have liked to see a slightly clearer visualization showing how much loyalty you are losing each turn, maybe with some bright flashing graphics for dunces like me. The other big difficulty mechanic are invading armies, but you nearly don't have to deal with them, as the only penalty they inflict is also on loyalty. Basically, when you are given an option for a bonus, always take the bonus passive loyalty.

Overall, the game is really fun. I had a couple smaller complaints, but the devs have been super fast on bug fixes and most of those have been addressed now.