There wasn't even anything else to build, except basic zones, until I got to (I think) 5,000 residents. By the time my city had 1,000 residents, it was already the size of a good-sized city in another game, with an actually realistic-seeming sprawl of farmland surrounding it. You make your quaint little starting town, with its carefully planned road layout, neat farm cluster and tiny commercial district, and. Expanding in NewCity, by contrast, is like growing a massive lawn. You build the core of your city, then add to it slowly over time, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, stopping periodically to spend ages tinkering with road layouts. Because while the basic elements of the game are all borrowed from elsewhere, the way they play out in practice is impressively original.Įxpanding in Skylines, which is pretty much the gold standard for this sort of thing right now, is a gradual business. And to be fair, this is probably one of the biggest obstacles NewCity will have to overcome, as in its early game it felt so much like a particularly barren SimCity clone, released decades too late, that I almost quit in disinterest. It speaks the green-blue-yellow zoning language of SimCity fluently, and can manage a decent conversation in OpenTTD besides, to the extent where anyone familiar with the general territory can play pretty much by instinct. I don't feel like I need to explain the basics of NewCity because they are, ironically, nothing new. A baby city, newly hatched from its concrete eg. The game's core, on the other hand, feels like the foundation of something really special. NewCity's problems, therefore, don't concern me, as they're all fairly peripheral set dressing issues. But this is early access, friends! And early early access, too, as the game's only been up on Steam a couple of weeks. Its UI is bleak, and its music is - with profound apologies to the composer, who I'm sure has done much better work in other genres - horrendous. It stutters a bit, at least on my PC, when speeding up time in a decent-sized city, and it feels very feature-sparse, to an extent where in the early game I wondered if I was missing some menus. Because for all its wonders, NewCity is, as it stands, a fairly ugly game. Looking out of an aeroplane window with a migraine, that is. Indeed, in the later stages of the session I played with it, I kept zooming out and having the uncanny sensation I was looking out of an aeroplane window. There's no doubt about it: NewCity is all about urban sprawl, and actually comes close to being able to replicate the terrifyingly massive size of actual, real world cities. They make Cities: Skylines metropolises look poky, and cities from 2013's SimCity look like quaint little villages. The first thing that tends to strike everyone about NewCity, is how massive its cities are.

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