The city-building genre is not one that I’m particularly good at. Things start out fine but I always get too stressed. Too many things to manage! Too many buildings! My citizens are all unhappy! And now they’re starving. I started my new city-building journey in Town to City this week and it’s been smooth-sailing so far, though I’m 100% sure I’ll eventually reach that stressful breaking point. But damn, is it a good-looking game.
Developed by Galaxy Grove and published by Kwalee, Town to City does what it says on the box. Your task is to watch over a gorgeous 19th century Mediterranean town and help it grow and flourish into a city. To do this, you must build residences for citizens looking to move in, keep them well-fed with stalls, entertained with shops and other recreational facilities, and make sure that all these places are well-stocked at all times.
Things start off simply enough, as they always do. Build some houses, then click and drag your cursor around to draw roads that correct said houses to a nearby train station. This allows you to immediately move newcomer citizens into the houses, and you’ll then be able to put them to work. Then, you set up some food stalls (fruits, vegetables, cheese, you name it), which require workers, and are also required for feeding your new citizens.
Simply keeping your people alive isn’t enough, though, and this is where I knew I was hooked. You see, building placement isn’t the only method with which to decorate your little hamlet with. You also get to place actual aesthetic decorations around the area to beautify the place. For instance, you can create a little playground area with a wooden slide and sprinkle some flowerpots in there. You can brighten up your streets with streetlights, place water wells near the residences, along with benches for free seating. Don’t get me wrong; all of these decorations play a utilitarian purpose whereby you can appease certain families by placing them in brightly lit houses at their request and increase the overall happiness level for your citizens. Yet I was a fan of how granular you could get with the decorations.
At some point, the decorations became more stylistic than functional for me as I grew obsessed with making my town look as cozy and lived in as possible. I absolutely needed to sprinkle those streetlights everywhere because I wanted my people to be able to walk around at night safely. I needed benches because I had old folks up in here who might need to take a rest every now and then. As someone who’s obsessed with min-maxing and optimization in games like Manor Lords and Frostpunk, this felt like a welcome change of pace. It definitely helps that Town to City is such a criminally pretty game, with lush lighting and comfy autumn hues that make it feel like home. You just gotta do everything you can to make it look even prettier, y’know?
After expanding your citizen count to a certain number, you’ll get to upgrade your little dwelling and unlock even more features. Before you know it, you’ll be building your mayoral estate where citizens can start sending mail with feedback and requests. There’s also a research facility, as these types of games often do, where you can accrue research points and use them to unlock new things to build in your town. Eventually you’ll be able to start building shopping stalls and upgrade existing residential buildings to accommodate more citizens. Like with most other games in this genre, you’ll fall into that zone of just focusing on that loop of recruiting and upgrading, resulting in an almost zen-like experience until you realize you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
I realize that up to this point, I’ve made Town to City sound like a pretty idyllic experience. For the most part, it is. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that this game is all vibes and no challenge. As your city gets bigger and your citizens come to you with more requests, you’ll find it’s harder to strike that balance between happiness and efficiency. While you won’t necessarily be making fate-changing decisions like in Frostpunk (send the children to work in the mines, always), Town to City is pretty good at lulling you into a false sense of security before overwhelming you with more things to do.
That being said, Town to City still feels like it falls a little bit on the easier side, which is absolutely fine by me because I’m just here for the coziness and the joy of watching a small town flourish. There are some niggles here and there, such as the game not being very good at explaining why your stalls can only cover a certain area when placed here instead of there. But generally speaking, I found that the game was quite good at telling you exactly what you’re lacking and how to fix it. Hovering over a problematic building placement will bring up a tooltip explaining what’s going wrong there, along with possible reasons for it. I found this immensely refreshing, especially having sunk a good amount of playtime into last year’s Manor Lords and coming away feeling slightly frustrated at its obfuscation.
Ultimately, I suppose it all comes down to what you love about city-builders. If you’re here for the bone-crushing challenge and tough decisions, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Town to City probably isn’t going to be it for you. There’s still challenge to be had here, but Town to City is far more concerned with creating a warm, welcoming vibe that envelops you like a loving hug with arms that sometimes feel like they have thumbtacks on them. Gotta keep you on your toes, huh?
