Laying Down Better Asphalt
Roads make or break games of this sort, and Colossal Order made sensible choices with the pavement tools. You place a basic two-lane street, and water pipes and electric cables snap under the surface automatically. That alone cuts out hours of tedious underground piping. Curved avenues lock into place cleanly, roundabout tools drop onto intersections without fuss, and the grid tool lets you map out several neighborhood blocks in two clicks.
When you widen an avenue later, existing buildings adjust or clear out without tearing up the entire district. It makes early town zoning far less stressful. You can sketch out small industrial parks, hook up power lines from an outside connection, and watch commercial shops sprout along the avenues without juggling separate utility trench menus every five minutes.
Managing the Ledger and Upgrades
The town economy relies on a straightforward flow of residential, commercial, and industrial zoning demand. You watch the little colored demand bars fill up, carve out land for workers, and then bring in services to keep citizens content. Individual service buildings now take modular add-ons directly on their lots. Instead of dropping down four separate elementary schools in one suburb, you slap an extra wing onto the back of the original school, or add a garage extension to your local clinic to house extra ambulances.
This upgrade path runs dry when your basic budget hits an early wall. In my third district, I tacked a training wing and an extra garage onto my central fire station, only to watch my upkeep costs spike so high that I had to shut off street maintenance entirely just to keep the city treasury in the green. Once you exhaust those modular building attachments, you still need to build duplicate facilities across your outer towns anyway because service vehicles get caught in standard traffic queues.
The Hardware Squeeze
The scale is large, but getting the game to run smoothly on PC is another matter entirely. The simulation chugs heavily once your population climbs past a few modest districts. Camera pans stutter over downtown areas, and zooming close to a busy roundabout causes noticeable frame drops, even after disabling depth of field and turning down volumetric fog in the settings menu.
The interface has full English text support, which keeps budget sheets and zone heatmaps easy to read, though there is no English voice work here. The presentation relies entirely on audio chimes, road noise, and on-screen charts. When the game runs at a crawl during dense rain showers, reading through those municipal menus becomes an exercise in patience.
Room to Build Without Enough Polish
The sheer land area available for expansion gives your town planning plenty of breathing room. You buy map tiles in loose clusters rather than rigid squares, which lets you follow coastlines, mountain ranges, or riverbeds naturally. Laying out highway interchanges between separate farming communities feels rewarding when the supply lines hum and goods roll into your commercial centers.
Yet the rough edges keep interrupting that satisfaction. Pedestrians occasionally bunch up on curbs for no obvious reason, garbage trucks ignore full dumpsters across the street, and the heavy hardware demands sour the enjoyment of watching your skyline grow. The underlying management simulation has good bones, but it asks for a lot of patience right out of the gate at fifty dollars.
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fair dinkum, watching those service buses get stuck in a loop reminded me of my year eight class after lunch. strewth, the pathing is a mess. the modular upgrades are no drama though, i like not spamming clinics on every corner. gave me a fright when my rig started chugging.
am i bad at zoning or are the ambulances personally avoiding my hospital? also why do my buses drive in circles like theyre dodging homework. fair enough on the road tools though.
first three hours felt like the city builder i waited years for. then the traffic AI decided intersections are optional. now i just stare at a frozen skyline waiting for a patch that might never come. looked incredible until hour five.
the service vehicles basically wander around chasing fires or trash and miss half of them anyway. modular upgrades help save space early on, but the brutal lag as your city gets bigger ruins everything.
first three hours felt like the city builder i waited years for. then the traffic AI decided intersections are optional. now i just stare at a frozen skyline waiting for a patch that might never come. looked incredible until hour five.
y'all really charged fifty bucks for this slideshow. named my mayor after cousin dale and he quit by Tuesday. fixin to uninstall.
rn my fps drops every time i place a road. u need a nasa pc to run this smooth. imo wait for a sale or a fix.
bought it day one, refunded by noon.
fair dinkum, watching those service buses get stuck in a loop reminded me of my year eight class after lunch. strewth, the pathing is a mess. the modular upgrades are no drama though, i like not spamming clinics on every corner. gave me a fright when my rig started chugging.
@pjh81am i bad at zoning or are the ambulances personally avoiding my hospital? also why do my buses drive in circles like theyre dodging homework. fair enough on the road tools though.
I tried to care about my citizens like characters in a gacha story, but there are no arcs here. Sorry for being sentimental. Forty nine ninety nine is too much for this much stutter on my rig. I will not be preordering anything from Colossal Order again.