I have tried a few different City Builders themed around ecosystems before and they never quite do it for me, and this one also missed the mark for me. It is designed in a way that you’re always kind of fighting with yourself for how you allocate resources, where new upgrades are constantly unlocked so it kind of requires you to constantly erase what you’ve made in order to build something new on top of it. I don’t mind that loop coming hours into a game, but this happens in the first 10 minutes. Everything is limited by a small map size, forcing you to build ‘tall’ very quickly. The game is a little puzzle box constantly folding over itself. Not the worst game design but it’s not what I seek in a city builder. I get that it’s trying to make a political statement about the finite nature of the planet or whatever, but the systems would benefit by giving you a bigger plot of land to work with.

The resource constraints also put you under pressure to make decisions quite slowly and not at scale. Like instead of placing 5 windmills before placing the plant dispensers, the game really wants you to set up one windmill at a time and dispensers then move on to the second one, etc. If I’m geo-engineering, want to plan ahead so I can minmax the area of effectiveness. Instead you’re going to be inefficient by design and buildings can’t be deleted, only ‘recycled’ for other purposes. The idea is cute but I’m not a big fan.