izigame.me

I'm really glad that this game exists. It takes a brave stab at some topics that city builders should have been looking at years ago and I hope that this game is an omen for where city builders are heading. Being first to the party comes with drawbacks though and Citystate II has clearly bitten off more than it can chew.
The game feels like it should still be in early access for another year or two (March 2022). In trying to be both a society simulator and a city builder the game ends up doing neither particularly well.
As a city builder it falls way short on what we should expect from the genre in 2022. Placing roads are incredibly finicky and simple junctions and connections are simply not possible. Even if you build a liberal utopia there remains an absolutist ban on any curved or even diagonal roads. Not since simcity 3000 has city building been this restrictive. But even here Citystate II takes things a step further with only 2 sizes of zoned lots allowed making this feel like one of the most restrictive city builders i've ever played. The joke is that all these restrictions make all your cities look very monotonous and generic, for a game that 'allows you to build everything from a workers paradise to a capitalist nightmare that's a massive problem. The game also gives you very little information, not a single sim used the extensive railway system I built or the freeways I set up but all instead clogged my sideroads without giving me any indication of how I can fix these problems/bugs? Lastly on the city building front there is just very little to do. There are very few service buildings etc to build and core things like harbours are just missing.
On the society simulator side, what society you end up making has very little impact on the look and feel of your city, something that for all its faults a game like Simcity Societies did very well showing us that it is possible to tie these themes together. I demolished some homes to widen a road after which my 'stability' indicator got stuck at 0. The only effect of having a city at literally 0 stability for years was that I couldn't pass new laws...Laws which felt like they made no real difference to how my city ran anyway. It felt like the game gave me cool law buttons and stability values that I quickly realised I never have to look at.
This game feels like a reddit wishlist for what city builders should be thinking about and I think the kind of things the game tries to include is spot on. It's just a shame that it forgot to also include and integrate all the basics that make city builders so much fun in the first place.
Thank you for trying Citystate II. I hope the next game that tries to do even some what you tried can learn from your mistakes and get it right. I look forward to playing that game.