izigame.me

Dystopika is the third sandbox city builder I've played recently and is unfortunately the most frustrating one to use. It's entertaining to recreate scenes from Blade Runner and other stereotypical cyberpunk media, but the aesthetic options are so narrow that it doesn't maintain staying power for me. Adjustment controls are projected from the camera, making adjusting buildings and props more difficult than it should be, and there's limited building-to-building interactions. Overall it's fine, but it doesn't have the creative depth of Tiny Glade or even Townscaper. I don't see myself coming back to it because I'm frankly out of ideas for cities to build already.
There's three building districts with about eight buildings each to paint the environment with, including "upper", "commercial", and "lower"-class structures. There's also two megastructure districts, Omega and Alpha Corp, that are keystone buildings with unique "spawned" buildings surrounding them. While the creative complexity in Tiny Glade and Townscaper comes from finely detailed building interactions based on location, height, or color, the buildings in this game will spawn smaller buildings around them, depending on proximity and height adjustment. The difference here is the scattering tends to create uncontrolled visual clutter that usually clips into other buildings, requiring constant readjustment and clean-up if you plan on taking photos or videos of your work.
Another major issue with the creative tools is how roads are placed: unlike most city builders that use a brush to "paint" roads, you instead drop a road prop and then move control points to position it. This often leaves you with dead end roads that can't be connected; while curved roads can be looped, all straight roads, highways, and railroads terminate in obvious dead-ends. A lot of the tools here, especially building placement, feel like you have to work around them, forcing you to design the city for a specific camera angle to hide clipping and the shortcomings of the props.
Fortunately the camera tools here are the best I've seen recently, even outside of sandbox city builder games. Photo Mode lets you lock the camera position, allowing you to freely move the camera in Edit Mode for further clean-up and improvements. The camera itself has a great deal of control, including sliders for roll, pitch, height, FOV, exposure, and lens dirt. Environmental controls in Photo Mode, in addition to the time of day and weather tools in Edit Mode, give you a great amount of creative control over fog, type of weather, time of day, and sunlight intensity and color. Other lighting effects give you full control over the light streaks and glow of the neon lights in your scene, along with over a dozen filter options for different colors and saturation schemes. In addition to screenshots, you can also record A to B camera animations for short videos of your city without outside tools. Tiny Glade had a lot of similar camera options, but the controls here are more precise and more robust.
Of the three sandbox city builders I've played recently, this is my least favorite. This is a mild recommendation; If you're a fan of the aesthetic, you'll get some mileage out of it, but there's just not enough tools for creativity here. For a first project game release, this is a great accomplishment, but it still needs some work to iron out the bugs and to clean up the visual clutter. Worth it on a sale or in a bundle but, if you're just looking for a relaxing sandbox city builder, you're better off going elsewhere.