izigame.me

I wanted a no thrills city builder after the RAM excesses of Cities Skylines, and this sort of delivers just that with some smart aspects, although with some strong limitations too. It's a "get it on sale" thumbs up for me, although because it's priced accordingly, maybe don't wait to save the 2 or 3 bucks.

PROS

- Very RAM/old machine friendly and unbreakable even with many mods
- Has all essential aspects of a city builder: region system, various biomes, RCI demand that sort of works with three wealth levels, rewards that motivate early game and with the "plugins" (workshop) you can mod it beyond recognition
- Some vanilla buildings are actually good looking (unlike CS); utilities/civic, landmarks and some RCI large factories and skyscrapers
- Relaxing music and no stressful messages or alerts, only the essential ones
- Easy to pick up quickly, no unnecessary micro management

CONS

- Graphics: although sort of on purpose, the pixel based graphics will hurt your eyes at the lowest elevations where you actually play the game. This looks somewhere between SC2000 and SC3000
- Vanilla building theme: it's all over the place like CS: ugly, too colourful, height mismatched, tries to be US/Euro/Asia without succeeding to be either. You can mod your way out of it, but still disappointing
- Mods ("Plug-ins"): not the devs fault, but this has nowhere near the depth of CS or SC4 workshops. So you run out of options quickly
- Transport: it's sort of broken (bit like CS). Industry has demented traffic, citizens don't use trains, ports are weird, motorways are too expensive and lack essential interchanges (same level clover, triangle)
- Region dynamics: cities seem to evolve in a vacuum. Hard to see (compared to SC4) how RCI or overall region development work. No incentive in building up, or build links such as rail or airports.