I have been playing a City Builder recently, but not the one aforementioned: rather, I've been playing Frostpunk, a game of depressing authoritarianism, victoriana, big steam robots, and a lot of cold. Like, a lot of cold. The low temp point that you have to survive to win the main scenario (which I've now completed once) is an astounding minus one hundred and fifty degrees celsius, which is arguably a bit silly and unarguably really quite nippy. Enough to kill someone from southern England in a few breaths, or get a northerner to get the big woolly jumper out.
I was glad I played it. It leant really, really heavily on the grimness of the setting, probably too much: the setting was for the most part so unrelentingly grim that it sort of ended up numbing you to the human tragedy of the decisions being made, whereas playing up some of the moments of joy and hope in there would have let the tragedies feel more real. There are lots of city-builders where that wouldn't matter, but it feels like Frostpunk really wants you to care about the morals of what's going on, especially in that part of the game's outcome narration focuses on how far you went down certain parts of the tech tree and whether you "crossed the line" to discard too much of your humanity in the pursuit of survival. As such I think that it needed a bit more on the roleplaying and emotional texture element: an easy win would have been the ability to name particular buildings and areas of town, because having the Coal District with St. Barnabas' Infirmary For The Woebegotten in it would be much more engaging and indeed easy to remember than "uh, there's that cluster of buildings up top near that pair of mines". All that said, whilst I think the narrative could have landed harder, on a purely aesthetic level it absolutely nails the job: the UI is good, the soundtrack will be rolling like a winter storm through my head for weeks, the whole thing looks the part very nicely, and so on.
In terms of the gameplay and core narrative, the story of the main scenario is simple but effective, and the gameplay is pretty harsh but that actually usually helps hammer the point home, especially on resource scarcity. It does a bit less well with the social mechanics, because a lot of the "hits" to those feel pretty arbitrarily forced by game conditions, and effectively designed to try and force you to use whichever of the authoritarian paths you chose, which doesn't really feel like it ought to be necessary when you're actually running a completely tight ship economically, everyone is eating well, warm, has good housing and healthcare, etc. I'd have been interested to see Purpose paths for Popular Will (get hope via a more demanding democratic populace, at high material costs: the more extreme use of the tree has citizens banish others and demagoguery/populism) and Technology (get hope via technical enhancements, but with more and more ultimately being done by the Engineer class potentially at the expense of the workers) as well as Faith and Order.
The general mechanics were really smooth and I got on well enough with them: I enjoyed the exploration elements, the cutscenes were very pretty, and the range of challenges was generally good. The "faction challenge" section in the middle was my least favourite because, again, really arbitrary penalties - I thought the storm section at the end felt like a pretty good finale even if the -150 temperature felt a bit OTT. I may well try some of the other scenarios, though I think I'll possibly play something else first - we'll see.