Everything you need to know about Town to City is explained in the title: by managing the needs of your population and building new structures, you will take a small town and grow it into a thriving, bustling city. With mild economic mechanics at play, Town to City has something for the city builder with a desire to carefully plan towns and manage budgets, but its real focus is on giving creative power to players to build and decorate a gorgeous little town. While cozy and relaxing, this focus may leave the former player unsatisfied for the sake of the latter, and city builders looking for a strategic challenge are probably looking in the wrong place.
Town to City is a small, voxel-based city builder set to mimic the style of 19th-century Mediterranean cities. Grape vineyards dot the landscape, accompanied by colorful stucco-walled homes, market stalls, and cobbler’s shops—all of which, of course, are placed by you.
The actual gameplay loop of growing from a town to a city is simple: the player is given limited access to buildings, shops, and decorations, and tasked with growing the population. Hitting certain population milestones grows the town up a size. Citizens need new homes to move into, and you don’t attract new citizens unless you keep the happiness level above 60%. Happiness is based on a residence’s access to its needs, with citizens at the most basic level needing nothing more than access to food to satisfy this demand. Decor also boosts happiness, population density lowers it, and some families might have specific requests for their home’s location that can contribute to their happiness as well.
As your town grows larger, so does the need of each individual home. Simple satisfactions such as access to food no longer suffice as your citizens begin to demand clothing, entertainment, and public services to be happy. Access to each also increases your daily revenue, which, of course, you need to purchase all of the game’s buildings. Research must also be done to advance the buildings needed to satisfy more complex needs or to upgrade existing structures.
If this gameplay loop sounds familiar, then you have probably played the Anno series, which I believe invented or at least popularized the style of city builder Town to City mimics. The difference is that Town to City is a far more simplified version of the concept.
See, it isn’t difficult to satisfy the needs of your civilians. While it won’t earn you the most cash, each home essentially only needs access to one building type of each need in order to be happy. While population growth, of course, means new customers, each employee assigned to a building punches way above his weight class, supplying goods to huge swathes of the population. Chances are, a building will run out of space for new homes to be built around it before you can overload the maximum amount of assignable workers. Essentially, for every three or four families that move in, you only need one more civilian to work retail to cover their needs.
Money is no object either; you generate cash essentially faster than you can spend it, which is likely why the developers had to cap the maximum amount you could have fairly low, to keep some semblance of challenge in the economic side of the game.
With that being said, the part of Town to City that requires the most thought is planning your space. Knowing that each house unlocks new demands as you grow in town size, packing a large number of houses into one area can make it difficult or even impossible to attend to their growing needs as you run out of space to place the new buildings. This, however, won’t be an issue for most players until very late in the game.
The truth of the matter is that Town to City is not challenging; it isn’t really supposed to be. The happiness mechanic exists to give a sense of purpose to your city building, challenging you to use the bare minimum amount of thought as you plan your cities.
The game’s real focus is not on planning, but on the actual building of your cities. Within the generous parameters of your citizens’ needs, you are essentially free to build and decorate a beautiful city with no fear of consequence. It’s like a sandbox city builder with some light rules and direction inserted to help keep you interested as you decorate.
Frankly, that’s all the game really needs to be. A relaxing and cozy city builder with just enough of an economy to make you feel as though your builds have actual purpose and value is something many city-building fans would call the peak iteration of the genre. While those who love decoration will have fun with what this game has to offer, those looking for a challenge exclusively will be disappointed with this purchase.
The best part of Town to City, in my opinion, is the game’s voxel style and terrain. The lack of a grid not only creates a lot of buildable freedom, but the style of the models themselves (everything appears to be made of pixels! or tiny little lego bricks), hopefully, will also open the game up to the modding community, allowing for an infinite variety of new buildings to add to your town.
Pros
- Relaxing and cozy city builder, with an emphasis on “builder”
- No grid system means a lot of freedom when placing buildings
- The light economy mechanics still give your builds a sense of purpose and value
- Tons of potential for continued dev support and modding down the line
Cons
- Shallow strategy. If you’re looking for a deep, strategic city builder, this probably isn’t it
TryHardGuides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Town to City. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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