Urbek City Builder

An engaging city-building game explicitly created for control freaks, Urbek City Builder is equal parts puzzle and resource manager simulator. Expanding your cities in a game like this has never needed this much thought, as every decision you make in your city's layout could drastically impact the curse of the game.

Besides some minor annoyances due to the game's restrictive nature, Urbek City Builder is as fun as it is addictive. The fact that its visuals look crisp and charmingly retro at the same time is just the cherry on top of this highly-enjoyable title.

City Blocks

The core gameplay mechanic of Urbek City Builder is based on founding neighborhoods. While other city builders (like the ever-so-popular Cities: Skylines) have you making zones that NPCs will eventually inhabit and develop by themselves, the player controls every aspect of what goes on with the building in their cities.

Managing population density also becomes a core mechanic early on in the game. Overpopulation might sound like a good thing in other games of this type, but certainly not in Urbek City Builder. The player also has some liberty over the sort of neighborhoods they develop, as creating buildings of a particular kind is more attractive for specific neighborhood types.

Redefined Resource Management

From Sim City to Jurassic World Evolution, nearly every city-building game ever developed uses currency as a way to tell the player which buildings they can build. The same can't be said of Urbek City Builder, however.

Instead of using gold, credits, or some other form of monetary currency, everything in Urbek City Builder is tied to your resources. The type and amount of resources your city produces will determine how and how much you can expand. This also means that choosing the right type of resource to produce becomes essential for how the game progresses.

There's a bit of an issue with this mechanic, however. While it might sound rather appealing for veterans of the genre, it also severely limits how creative the player can be with the design of their cities. A minor problem, but an annoyance nonetheless.

Cubic Towns

There are hundreds of great city builders out there, and they all look more or less the same. If a game really wants to knock it out of the part in this genre, they have to look different than the rest, and that's something that Urbek City Builder achieves with ease.

The Minecraft-style blocky visuals look great in motion and still screenshots. So much so that I've already set a pic I took of one of my cities as my desktop's background. Did I mention that you can take the camera to ground level so you can explore your city from a first-person perspective? Because you can absolutely do that in this game.

Pros

• Amazing visuals
• Addictive gameplay loop
• Great UI

Cons

• Resource management messes with creativity