Citizens Preview

Citizens aims to be not just another city-builder. It is a city-builder, but it’s also a puzzle game. Merging two genres in this way is developer Redkar’s attempt to make something a little bit different to your average SimCity Clone.

Like most titles that put you in charge of a populace, your goal is to keep your titular citizens fed and watered, and provide the amenities that they need to thrive. Unlike similar games though, you’re provided with resources in a very limited way and given a set goal. This might be to grow to a certain size, obtain a specific number of a particular building etc, but whatever it is, your goal will mark the end of the level and the provision of another. 

If you like a nice sandbox type simulation, then this might not be the same for you. Instead, what Citizens brings to the table is a more bite-sized version of the genre, giving a quick blast of gameplay instead of the long play sessions more traditionally associated with a city simulator. You can complete most of the levels in a reasonably short space of time, just a few minutes for the ones that I played in the demo, although the full game is expected to have some longer levels to keep your attention engaged.

One of the issues that often faces a city-creation type game is that of building oneself into a corner. It’s easy to reach a point where you have expanded too quickly or built the wrong buildings, putting you in a position where you are unable to recoup your losses and reach a point of profit. In games like SimCity, it can sometimes be hours before you realise that you have done this, but in Citizens, it’s usually obvious fairly quickly, making it possible to have another go quickly where you might otherwise ragequit in other titles. That said, the reinvention of the genre like this would have been a great time to fashion a game that doesn’t have pitfalls like that, but Redkar hasn’t chosen to do so, with some of the levels being incredibly unforgiving in their win conditions. 

This somewhat sporadic difficulty curve meant that I didn’t see as much of the game as I would have liked, with multiple defeats on the same level being too frustrating for me to see everything the demo had to offer. Explanations in the game’s tutorial aren’t as clear as they perhaps could have been too, which made it more difficult to get the right balance.

All in all, I do think there’s a lot of potential in Citizens, which does something a little bit different to your average city-builder. There’s a bit of polishing and refinement needed, and the developer has admitted this is something they are working on so I look forward to seeing the completed version sometime later in 2021.