The new city building game is all about Voxels

Orpic City Builder It was released on Steam recently, and being a fan of any attempt at a city building game, I was eager to check it out. What I found after playing for a few days was even more surprising than I expected!

Out of the efforts of the big studios – like Cities: Skylines—A recent attempt at City builders tend to (or, to be more precise, have to due to lack of resources) Keep things simple, focusing on specific things like transportation networks.

At first glance (and for much of the tutorial), Urbek seems more ambitious than this! It’s a city builder but you also need to plan farms, cut trees, mine for coal, and set up factories, which I know sounds like a lot when you worry about the normal stuff (building houses and roads)but it turns out that the actual experience is a Many More cold.

because when Orpic Presenting itself as a reasonably complex city building, it’s actually more than a simple puzzle game, asking you to crack some basic challenges like spacing buildings and creating a certain number of them. Fulfill these prerequisites and all you have to do is just pure sandbox fun, especially since this is a game driven by resources, not money..

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I was wondering when I first booted the game up what the deal was with its voxels, since it seemed an odd art style for a genre that’s normally more at home with cartoonish takes on the real world. Playing it soon answers that question, because the main point of Urbek is that you don’t just build a city, you get to watch it evolve in front of your eyes, as your buildings morph and grow as a reaction to what’s going on around them.

Put down a house at the start of the game and it’s little more than a wood cabin. Manually upgrade it (by satisfying some other building requirements, see my light puzzles comment above) and it’s a nicer house. Build a few of them together and it’s a villa. Put a park in the middle of a few more and it’s a condo.

I know most city-builders have some degree of this, but Urbek’s malleability is so much more fluid and noticeable, it’s wild. Throw in the fact that the game is able to slightly customise its look depending on the buildings and their surrounds—so houses near the water/docks will look totally different to those near a coal mine in a forest—and you’ve got something with the potential to let you get super expressive and creative with your builds, which really is all a lot of people are looking for in this genre in the first place.

Some other cool features include progress not being an unquestionable inevitability, as some upgrades and unlocks require difficult moral decisions that you may not want to make, and the ability to pick a “biome” to build your city in creates different challenges depending on the climate.

Orpic City Builder Available now on Steam.