Urban Empire - Kalypso, "City Ruler, not City Builder"

Oh sorry. Ok I posted somewhere else about this. I put in 30 hours and probably done

The political model is interesting at first but very weak. If budget good, 95% of decisions will pass. There’s a handful that are difficult to pass without political influence: mainly the healthcare issues.

So what you’re left is a simplified city builder where you control districts as opposed to an individual square as in Simcity/Skylines etc. It would be fine, except the economic model seems … strange and difficult to wrap my head around. Even after 30 hours I can’t tell if there’s some sort of population-demand curve linked to the year or not.

I had fun figuring out the economic systems but it’s frustrating because of the lack of transparency.

Between this thread, various reviews, and other reviews, I managed to get a Steam refund for this without ever even launching it.

I think the developers jumped ship as this game headed toward the iceberg.

Seriously no updates since release week? And as expected the negative Steam reviews are showing up now.

Anyone still playing? I think I might remove this from my wishlist.

It already struck the iceberg. And sank. The bodies have been collected, the search called off and fish have shat on it.

The Steam ratings were only at 50% or so after the first week and the lack of a patch has them dropping further. At this point I am not sure I would pay one tenth of the current asking price.

Kalypsoed.

Just a mess of a company, a trainwreck of an ongoing consumer/business strategy. Time and again this company does this stuff–interesting game concept, flawed execution, abandoned code.

Compare them – unfavorably – to Paradox, especially Paradox circa 2006 or so. Both companies release interesting-sounding games with flawed execution. In the case of Paradox, however, they continued to iterate and patch their games. Did that make HOI 1 or Victoria 1 great games? No. But because they didn’t abandon those games and worked them, Paradox built this incredible fan base that they were able to tap into to refine their game designs, UI, AI, and overall game presentation. Paradox used those experiences to learn how to make better games, and now they’re raking cash.

Kalypso just shoves stuff out the door, and then abandons their games to the detriment of consumers and dev teams alike. There’s no game publisher I’m more actively rooting for to fail and go bankrupt than these weasels.

I always think of them as more of a successor to JoWood (The Guild, Gothic) who also promised more than they delivered.

Right, thus the “unfavorable” comparison. I wasn’t trying to show what they were most like, which is JoWood, but rather why they didn’t need to be that way and could follow another European publisher out of the deep weeds.

We’ll always have Tropico 3 and 4.

[raises mug] Hear, hear!

I love Tropico. I still think they need to give the series a rejuvenation shot after 5, but I’d be onboard with 6. I keep crossing my fingers for a better Patrician too.

You are not alone.

Tropico 5 is such a turd. Still mad about that.

Seems a patch and free DLC was dropped on May 31st. No one noticed! :p

Free DLC:

2 new scenarios
22 new dynamic events
23 new edicts
2 new institutions
5 new parties
19 new inventions

But do they make the game any better?

This is infuriating. If they had put this much effort into just fixing the game, maybe they could have salvaged something playable out of it.

It’s on sale now for $9.99. Is it worth that, or is this a $5 game?

I wondered, myself. The Steam user reviews are brutal, and consistently so.

It’s totally broken, so if you’re looking to actually enjoy it as a game, it’s worth closer to $0. They had a lot of interesting ideas, so maybe it’s worth paying a little just out of curiosity, but don’t expect that any of those ideas are actually implemented in a way that works.

Dev’s abandoned ship shortly after release and due to probably poor sales numbers.

Shortly after release and long before they had actually made a playable game.