Citystate Review (PaperCake)
Citystate: Intergalactic Colonialism
Does it count as colonialism if there's no one on the planet when I get there? I guess the corporate exploitation is a form of colonialism but they willingly chose to join the colony named after a Star Wars reference that I didn't get to choose. The spice must flow, but instead of fueling a jihad, it's fueling the IMF.
While many city builders get more and more complex in their interpretations as time goes on, there's a certain point where you can feel a fuse in your brain pop. In-between organizing a bauxite mining operation or getting to the late stage of a HOI game where tactical nuclear strikes become mandatory. Aren't you interested in a city builder that takes it back to basics? Basics that are fun and enjoyable? Citystate almost has that. Until you leave the game running while you go warm up some coffee, accidentally miss 2-3 events on policy decisions and lead to a disaster spiral that leads to the young city state of Thug Huntopia to collapse into civil war. Your fault for not pausing, you idiot.
Citystate is an interesting twist on your generic city builder, operating both simplistically in terms of your city layout and what you can build as well as a heavy interest in policy making. On one hand, the gameplay focuses mostly on the usage of simple roads and plots. It's very Simcity 2000 in approach in comparison to the Simcity 4 model of "COLOR THE SPOT NEAR A ROAD IN" or the Tropico planting of a building, with you mostly plopping zones in a 2-3 block radius of a road and watching it slowly build up from a trailer park into a solarpunk abomination building. Or in my case, a trailer park that I ignore, and come back to find has become a high rise. This is what I get for zoning out for five minutes fighting a war against my citystate's encroaching unemployment crisis.
In place, you have the policy system that allows you to dictate what your town does or doesn't allow in local laws, alongside a court of "advisors" who exist to do two things. Elect the Austrians to tell you that you should ignore anything that doesn't help the free market and establish Rapture on dry land. Or use the Keynesians who exist to radically centrist your way into flip flopping between Socialist Welfare State and Liberal Welfare State because you passed an edict that banned the punching of cattle. It's a fun way to guide your policy, and the game does allow you to fix it later on, in case you felt like maybe cranking all of your options to max and establishing a Juche Paradise in the middle of your wider nation. You also get to play a balancing act of stability and public popularity, keeping you from Tropico maxxing. Even in this world, you need proper approval before raising the low income taxes to 40% gets you lynched like Gaddafi.
Managing the city as a whole amounts to standard battles of land values, trade and immigration. The first is solved with a relentless campaign of strategically placed parks. The second is mostly through gambling on land surveys to find out if you're able to turn an idyllic mountain range into the Iron Range and go full Brazil on the rainforest for gold. And the third is solved by either being insanely paranoid and getting a military to use solely on protesters and immigrants. Or you accept the nonstop flood of terraforming barrios that will defy all rhyme or reason to build a slum on an island that you can't reach yet. Or turn every scenic beach and mountain range into a favela. It's astounding. At a certain point I just let it happen because it lets me deal with an annoying lake by just waiting for the Brazilians to do it for me.
Basic? Absolutely, it's why I come back to play it every so often. And in comparison to the sequel, it was released in a finished state so you can actually completely enjoy this game. There's not a lot of elaborate larp to this game, from the libertarian paradise state to the socialsit dictatorship, you can make any kind of little state work if you're willing to put in the effort for it. Or in my case, rely on the space exploration minigame to help funnel intergalactic heavy metals into the IMF to offset the deficit of my mistakes. If it worked for the British Empire, it can work for the United States of Stankonia.