MEMORIAPOLIS Download GAMESPACK.NET

I feel compelled to leave a positive review, because the 1.0 release is receiving more muted reaction than I feel it deserves. I first played this game in its demo state about a year ago, and I found it to be really quite dull—very “paint by numbers”, not much of a game. When the paid early access dropped, the reviews seemed to reflect much of the game still being this way, so I didn’t bother. But I was enticed by the big claims they made in announcing the overhaul that went into this full release, so I checked it out. I’m very impressed! There’s still a LOT to work on, and still a little tedium that I trust will be ironed out, but as far as the core gameplay loop goes it’s a very singular experience already. I’ve played a number of city builders that have tried to capture an ancient-modern progression, but this is the only one thus far that felt meaningful in presenting it, and felt like it was giving me a real and palpable sense of the evolution of a city.

The mechanics and design philosophy seem to be very considerately put together, by a dev that I get the impression finds similar things interesting about city builder or historical strategy games as I do. I can see a lot of places where the difficulty might be seriously frustrating to people, but personally I really enjoyed how much future consideration it felt like my actions warranted. Some of the things that come to mind as far as my thoughts on what could be better:  The faction power system is a little bit broken. Not in a way that makes me utterly infuriated, but it seems like factions reach the 90/100 power threshold far too easily, blocking age progression until you get it below 90. That isn’t too big of a deal since the option to take -30 off a faction’s power gives you more than enough time before the progression to the next age to work that out, but it does make it rather tedious to deal with when that time comes. Conquest Dark

Aside from that consequence, there does not seem to be much in the way of consequences for letting a faction get too powerful unless you’re royally pissing them off, and even then the consequences seem slight. Having factions establish territory in your city provides a lot of room for feeling your city develop a particular character, and I feel like said factions also having ways of making that territory end up serving that faction much more than they serve the city as a whole would go a long way. More ways than “this neighborhood has barricaded itself”, anyway, which almost feels like a bit of a stop-gap system. Also, I wish factions had more historical progression. Unless you’re exiling/banning a faction, they’re there to stay. I don’t think it should be a “this faction is locked to a certain age(s)” type thing, but having a distinct rise and fall of a faction’s trajectory would make a lot of sense, to make it so (unlike right now) it isn’t essentially inevitable for the largest and most venerable factions of your city to still be hoplites and plebeians by the turn of the industrial age.

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