City 20 is the newest title to come across my desk and probably one I have the most mixed feelings about in a while. While my experience with this Early Access title left something to be desired, I can see that it has a lot of clear potential and a promising future for a niche audience as it grows throughout its Early Access development.
City 20 is an open-world survival game inspired by Kenshi and Rimworld. The former clearly plays a huge role in the game’s inspiration, and the similarities are immediately visible as you begin the game.
After a short, very stylistic cutscene explaining where you are, the game opens up into an open-world, top-down survival game without direction. I really mean without direction. There are no quests pointing you towards any landmarks, no real objectives given to you by the starting NPC, and really no restrictions keeping you from heading out into the world. You are told that any food you eat in your temporary guest lodging must be replaced and that you have three days to stay there before getting kicked out.
What you do next is based utterly on your own priorities, with the assumption that not starving to death, becoming dehydrated or losing a place to sleep will be at the forefront of your mind as you head out into the nuclear ruins of City 20.
While the gameplay is incredibly similar to Kenshi, down to the free-form gameplay, the crafting and basebuilding, City 20 stands out in a few ways. Namely, gathering plays a much larger role in this game than in Kenshi, with trees and other natural resources dotting the landscape compared to the barren wasteland that is Kenshi. In fact, the game even allows you to deconstruct most of the props around the map, acquiring even more resources than before. It is safe to say that an industrious player will have a small base and farm up and running far sooner in City 20 than they would in Kenshi, should they get the hang of the ropes early on; a somewhat difficult challenge but one I’ll go into more detail about later.
The second big difference, obviously, is the setting. While both are apocalyptic, the desert setting of Kenshi is swapped out for the ruins of a nuclear tragedy somewhere in Eastern Europe. The setting is a unique one for the genre and one that fans of games like Stalker and Tarkov will immediately feel at home in.
The game also arguably focuses more on interacting with NPCs than Kenshi does, with more unique dialogue across the game’s inhabitants. Since City 20 is a relatively small place, you are not going to find NPCs who are unnamed or generic, with each one instead having unique tidbits about the lore or their lives to share with you when you talk to them.
I specifically really like the game’s court system. When you commit a crime in any of the tight-knit communities of City 20, you will be reported and expected to pay a fine at the courthouse of the respective faction that reported you. It’s a small system now, but I’m excited to see how this expands as the game progresses.
City 20, in its current state, suffers from an even worse version of an “issue” (arguably a feature by some, including myself) that Kenshi also suffers from; the complete lack of direction that comes with the game’s open nature can also be a supreme detriment to new players attempting to learn the game.
It took me a long time to realize that I could, in fact, craft items from my inventory, which I only discovered thanks to the handy review guide provided by the developers. It took me even longer to figure out how to gather all of the miscellaneous materials required to craft my starting recipes, with plant fibre/grass being the hardest of all to figure out.
This issue is partially due to my own incompetence, but I can absolutely see City 20 being a frustrating game to start for many players, especially those new to the genre.
While I don’t think a strict, hand-holding tutorial is really necessary to address this problem, I think steps can certainly be taken to make future versions of the game more approachable.
An easy first step would be improving the game’s UI, which is, frankly, not very good in its current state. The developers were clearly going for a sort of gritty, grimy, low-tech approach to the UI to match the game’s setting, but I frankly just find it hard to navigate and even harder to read. I’m not a graphic designer, though, so if you asked me why it didn’t appeal to my eye, I couldn’t tell you. I struggled to understand what the icon for the crafting menu was, even though, in hindsight, a hand holding a wrench should have been obvious to me. In the moment, it simply failed to jump out at me.
I think the map could also use some serious improvement. Despite the game using a realistic, coordinate-based map navigation system and even providing you with a HUD that displays your current coordinates, I found myself getting lost frequently. A big part of this is due to the fact that you can’t navigate the map HUD beyond your immediate surroundings, which I simply don’t understand. When you look at a paper map, which is what the map screen is designed to be, you aren’t forced to push the paper up against your face and only drag it along as you travel.
Beyond approachability, City 20 suffers from a lack of polish that could reasonably be expected from any game entering Early Access. I occasionally encountered a freeze, and there was a lack of content to keep me interested for as long as a finished game would. Despite these issues, I believe in City 20, and I think the game can really shine once it finishes its Early Access development cycle.
Pros:
- Open-ended, non-guided survival gameplay
- An interesting setting
- Unique NPC behavior and community systems
Cons:
- Poor UI and map navigation
- It is a difficult learning curve to understand the game’s features
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