Game: Urbek City Builder
Genre: Indie, Simulation, Strategy
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Estudios Kerlinois | RockGame S.A
Controller Support: No
Price: US $15.29 | UK £13.49 | EU €12,59
Release Date: July 13th, 2022
Review code used, with many thanks to RockGame S.A.
Urbek City Builder is a new twist on the city building genre. Most people walk around their city and don’t pay much attention to where services and such are placed. Unless you are a Cities Skylines player, then you do pay more attention to how your actual real-life city is built.
City building with a Difference
Urbek City is different from most city-building games as it’s more about city planning than the management side of being mayor of a city. For a start, there isn’t a budget or any money to keep under check. So instead, Urbek City focuses on balancing resource chains to ensure that each area of your town can be sustained and grown.
You’ll also need workers to work on the log camp farms and the rest. The workforces come from the houses you build in your city. Your ultimate aim is to create an efficient, attractive town before you run out of natural resources.
Text-based Tutorial
A decent tutorial of text-only dialogue boxes walks you through starting your fledging city and through getting the production chain up and running. You begin by placing a wood loggers camp to supply wood for building.
Then it’s on to placing farms for food and building a few wooden huts to start your city’s population growth. And of course, electricity and water are also needed. In addition, you have to keep an eye on your population’s happiness; happy citizens are what you want, and unhappy citizens will eventually stop working and leave.
Zones of Influence
Buildings have zones of influence that affect the infrastructure around them. So, for instance, the population lives in wooden huts, to begin with, but with careful placement of parks and shops, the huts upgrade to a village houses and so on.
The opposite can happen if you are not cautious with your building placement. Placing houses too close to pollution or insufficient services will turn the huts into rebel houses.
Thirty Buildings
As you meet the requirements and resources for each building area, the game will constantly give you new buildings to place. So very soon, before your eyes, what started as a tiny village with a few roads, soon grows into a modern city. There are also various policies to set for your city; each has advantages and disadvantages.
Stuck in a Loop
I did find I got myself stuck in a loop at one stage. As with how the building proximity works, you see, sometimes placing a single new building can cause an entire neighbourhood to upgrade spontaneously. That in itself is fine, but there is a strain on resources being supplied as the neighbourhood upgrades. Then I couldn’t build more farms to feed my new citizens. Maybe the game was developed like that, but I can’t help feeling the pacing is slightly off.
Visuals and Controls
Urbek City is a voxel-based builder, and I like the game’s look. You can zoom in to the street view and watch the people and traffic up close.
Controls are the usual keyboard and mouse and work as they should. Unfortunately, the game crashed a few times while I was playing it for this review. However, the developers are constantly updating the game, and I’m happy to report I haven’t had it crash again.
Conclusion
Urbek City Builder is a relaxing, chilled game to play. I enjoy working out where to place buildings to get the city to grow. Also watching the city come to life and take over the map adds to the puzzle elements of the game as you start to run out of room. However, it wouldn’t be suitable for all fans of city-building games as it feels more like a mix of city building and a puzzler to me.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot 
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