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Most of the time this is relatively simple. At the same time, in order to build new housing, you have to first implement a solid farming supply chain or you’ll run out of food very quickly. To build almost anything, you’ll need unskilled labour which is supplied by housing. While resources typically start to manage themselves after a while, it is possible to get stuck in a loop. That said, it’s not entirely without fault either. If that’s what you’re looking for in a simulator, then this game absolutely fits the bill.
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Where Urbek excels is creating a calm, reasonably-low stress atmosphere that lets you explore the building interactions on offer. In what can feel like no time at all, you’ll progress from managing a handful of building types and three resources to monitoring an entire city with all the diversity that implies. To a new player, the sheer variety might be confronting, but the built-in tutorial does a masterful job of slowly revealing new mechanics in a way that is fast enough to stop the game from becoming stale, without becoming overwhelming. Deserts and tundra prevent you from building farmland, for example, and certain industrial buildings require proximity to resources like forests or iron deposits.ĭifferent terrains can restrict where you place buildingsĪs you might expect, Urbek City Builder has a tremendous variety of building types to work with. Furthering this complexity is the landscape itself. As a result, you need to put quite a lot of thought into how you organise your city. In contrast, housing near polluting factories will regress into shanty towns and, if there’s no police presence, rebel houses. For instance, having a lot of parks and food shops in a neighbourhood will lead to more expensive housing. Certain buildings have zones of influence that affect the infrastructure around them. Instead, the core of the game is putting your city together just as you want it to be. There is certainly challenge to be had in balancing your wide variety of resources, but once your city is well established, these generally start to manage themselves. You won’t be facing natural disasters like in Sim City and you won’t be worrying about the human element like in Banished. More than almost any other game in this genre, Urbek is about city planning, more than management. It’s important to understand what you’re getting into before starting playing Urbek City Builder.
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So, if gameplay has seen the majority of the development focus, what have we ended up with? If you are in the market for a city builder with some kind of narrative to move you along, then you should be looking elsewhere. There are a lot of settings to explore when starting a new city
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