Screenshot: Urbek City Builder / Kotaku
Urbek City Builder recently launched on Steam, and being a fan of just about any attempt at a city-building game, I was eager to check it out. What I found after playing for a few days was more surprising than I expected!
Outside of big studio efforts like Cities: Skylines, modern attempts at city builders tend to (or, to be more accurate, are forced to keep things simple, focusing on specific things like transportation networks) .
At first glance (and throughout much of his tutorial), Urbek seems more ambitious than that! It’s a city builder, but you also have to lay out farms, cut down trees and mine for coal, and build factories, which I know sounds like a lot when you’re concerned with the usual stuff (building houses and roads). ), but it turns out that the actual experience is much quieter.
Because even though Urbek presents itself as a city builder of reasonable complexity, it’s actually more of a simple puzzle game, asking you to solve some basic challenges, such as separating buildings and building a certain number of them. Satisfy these basic requirements and all you can do is pure sandbox fun, especially since this is a game driven by resources, not money.
See how the houses next to the docks look more “coastal” than the others? Nice touch! Screenshot: Urbek City Builder / Kotaku
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All virtual reality, all the time. This set is compatible with 4″ to 6.3″ phone screens that have a gyro sensor. It also supports drones that require a VR headset for your phone. Advanced VR gaming technology offers FD and OD (Wide Field of View) adjustments to widen the viewing angle.
I was wondering when I first started the game what the deal was with its voxels, as it seemed like an odd art style for a genre that’s usually more at home with cartoony versions of the real world. Playing it soon answers that question, because the whole point of Urbek is that you don’t just build a city, you get to watch it evolve before your eyes, as your buildings morph and grow in reaction to what’s going on around you. they.
Put a house at the start of the game and it will be little more than a log cabin. Upgrade it manually (meeting other build requirements, see my light puzzles comment above) and it’s a nicer house. Build a few of them together and it will be a village. Put a park in the middle of a few others and it’s an apartment.
With the push of a button, you can zoom down to street level and walk around, checking out your creation from a resident’s point of view Screenshot: Urbek City Builder / Kotaku
I know most city builders have some degree of this, but Urbek’s malleability is so much more fluid and noticeable, it’s wild. Add in the fact that the game is able to slightly customize their appearance based on buildings and their surroundings, so houses near water/docks will look completely different than those near a coal mine in a forest, and you have something with the potential to allow you to be super expressive and creative with your creations, which is really all that a lot of people are looking for in this genre in the first place.
Some other interesting features include that progress isn’t an unquestionable inevitability, as some upgrades and unlocks require difficult moral decisions you may not want to make, and the ability to choose a “biome” to build your city around creates different challenges depending on the weather .
Urbek City Builder is now available on Steam.
Urbek City Builder – Launch Trailer | STEAM