Dystopika Review

Dystopika is a city-builder, heavily leaning into the sandbox side of the genre — which I find is a criminally underrated sub-genre. There’s little context to Dystopika, but it doesn’t need it: you’re immediately thrust into the godlike position, given tools to build your cyberpunk paradise.

Starting at a dark, empty plot of land, you’re given the freedom to place your first building anywhere within this area, and upon doing so, it, along with a small bundle of lights pop up within said plot of land. There’s a satisfaction to placing them and seeing what may flourish into a small community. These can be rotated, moved around, and enlarged, sometimes just making them taller, yet others grow in different ways, sometimes even adding additional decorations. To spice up your city, you can select between three main districts, which alter the design of these buildings. They each have their variants, along with Omega Corp and Alpha Corp: speciality districts with only a singular megastructure and work as fantastic centrepieces.

Placing more structures and growing them can often unlock special decorations, from holograms to company logos and others, some of which can then be placed at will. Alongside this, there are text signs which can be placed, allowing for custom text. There is also a lighting system, allowing you to light up specific areas of your city or even none at all. There’s enough here to prove satisfying, and it is a fantastic little title to burn some time and relax.

My biggest and only real issue with Dystopika is the general lack of options. The different districts and variants of each building are nice, and the decorations are a good touch, but I can’t see much growth or change in a longer period of playing. From a zoomed-out perspective, every city you build will eventually look incredibly similar, aside from the megastructures. I would have liked to see a wider variety of tools to diversify the city in more major ways, such as bigger environmental options.

Dystopika is a genuinely brilliant time that I can see myself regularly returning to. Despite some issues in content and complexity, it fills a niche I’ve been hunting for for a long time — one I specifically wrote about here. It’s incredibly satisfying, but it could do with some more tools to deepen its options for creativity.