City builders are a popular genre for many players, but there are many titles that are released in the genre each year. Even among indie titles, the bar for innovation and polish is relatively high for a game to stand out and leave a lasting influence.
Silicon City is a city builder and management game developed and published by Polycorne. Its Steam page describes the game as a new take on the classic city builder genre where each citizen voices their opinion, and we have to see if it can deliver on that claim.
There are four tutorial missions that tell a simple story, as you visit various towns as a consultant to mayors and hear the citizens’, or as the game calls them, the silizen’s problems and solve the cities’ issues. It’s a decent tutorial that introduces the player to all the different mechanics and resources and threats that you have to manage through gameplay, and it offers a short and fun story, something that is missing from most city builder games. But unfortunately, the tutorial is the most enjoyable part of Silicon City.
Once you are done with the short story mode, you can start on an empty map and build a city from scratch. You can modify the map to an extent, and choose between various modes and difficulties. There are two modes that you can choose from: classic and sandbox. Classic is where you start with a limited amount of money and have to manage your budget and grow your population to unlock more buildings. Sandbox mode removes all of these restrictions, allowing you to design the city the way you want with unlimited money.
The sandbox mode doesn’t seem to offer any challenge, so I started with the recommended map size and started my first city in the classic mode. The graphics are voxel-like and minimalistic, but the stick figures of the citizens and the cubic shapes of various elements do bring a stylistic look to Silicon City. What threw me off the visuals was the UI design. Navigating the different panels and finding information feels unintuitive. The UI bars at the top and bottom of the screen prevent you from panning the view while you can do that if you pan left or right. And when you want to scroll through the horizontal build menus, you have to scroll up to get to the recently unlocked options, or click and drag the very thin bar at the bottom of the panel, something that I never got used to.
Silicon City has been in Early Access for a while, and one would expect that these types of UI issues would’ve been discovered and fixed before the official launch. The game lacks polish in many areas, and the UI is the most obvious case. There’s also the issue of performance, that has been improved in the last few patches, but it still isn’t perfect. The game recommends that you play on the medium-sized map, but the medium map doesn’t offer enough space to get creative with your design and city planning. If you want to reach high tiers in the medium map, you have to start on a map with no bodies of water and make a symmetrical grid to get the most out of the space you have available.
The large map is where the performance becomes a huge issue, especially once your city has grown past 1000 population. Placing new buildings and roads becomes impossible at a fast speed, and you have to pause or slow down the game just to have enough FPS to build on the map. City Builders usually require a lot of processing power, but my system can run games such as Cities: Skyline at the highest settings with no issues, while I was getting a handful of frames per second in Silicon City while playing on a large map with a large city. Even turning all the graphic settings to the lowest option didn’t improve performance that much.
I was hoping there is still a great game beneath the UI and performance issues, but after 10 hours of gameplay, I started to realize that was not the case. The gameplay isn’t a new take on the city building genre. You have to assign residential zones for homesteads and farming, and commercial and industrial zones to provide jobs for the population. You slowly unlock service buildings to meet essential needs such as power, healthcare, education, and emergency services such as police and fire stations. And finally, you can provide entertainment through parks and various entertainment arenas to increase the happiness of your citizens.
It’s all the standard mechanics that you can find in most other city builder games. Silicon City claims that each citizen will voice their opinion, which matters in the gameplay, but that’s not the case in the standard single-player experience. There are elections every four years, and I never lost one to even see what would happen if the citizens are unhappy. I had to put a lot more effort to make the city as bad as possible and lose the election, and I was not interested in seeing the repercussions of that. The game also offers Twitch integration where the viewers can become citizens of the city you are building, and that may be the only way that the citizens’ opinions could affect your gameplay.
Based on the description of Silicon City , I was hoping for citizens or a city council to send us their requests and needs in the form of quests, and we even get that in the tutorial, but the main game mode is just balancing the needs and the budget, which gets repetitive and time-consuming. I played Silicon City for 11 hours, and half of that time was spent waiting through the extremely laggy fast forward, so I could get enough money to place the next building. This downtime is an unpreventable part of any management game, but in other games, you can explore and enjoy what you have built so far, something that is hard to do with the poor performance of Silicon City.
You have the option to raise taxes to reduce the wait time, but after a while the unhappy citizens will start leaving the city, reducing your income once more. At one point I left the game running as I went for a walk, hoping that I would have enough money to build another block of buildings once I came back. You know a game is bad when the most engaging hour of the gameplay is spent walking outside.
Silicon City does have the potential to be a decent city-builder game with simpler management and fewer resources to keep track of compared to larger games that might be overwhelming to some players. But in its current state, it’s not an experience worth your time.
Nima played Silicon City on Steam with a review code provided by the publisher.
