MEMORIAPOLIS
Last updated: 2025-05-17
- Visually appealing and immersive city-building experience.
- Engaging political and faction systems present.
- Unique historical setting with era evolution.
- Game feels unfinished and lacks content.
- Repetitive and boring gameplay loop.
- Poor tutorials and unintuitive user interface.
Verdict
Mixed
Summary
Positive 71% Ā· Negative 29%. Score: 29 / 100
Positives:
- Reviewers consistently praise the game's beautiful graphics, pleasing aesthetic style, and overall visual appeal. The game is often described as relaxing, enjoyable, and visually stunning, making it a treat to watch the city grow. The art style and attention to detail contribute to an immersive and captivating experience.
- The game features organic city growth where districts and buildings develop naturally around key structures. This creates visually appealing and unique cities, giving a sense of a living, breathing world. Players find it satisfying to watch their cities evolve and expand without the constraints of traditional grid-based systems.
- The game incorporates engaging political and faction systems that add depth and complexity to city management. Players must balance the needs and desires of different factions, make impactful story decisions, and navigate historical events. This creates a unique and replayable experience where choices matter.
- The game strikes a good balance between complexity and accessibility, offering a relaxing yet engaging city-building experience. It avoids excessive micromanagement by automating certain tasks like road and housing placement, allowing players to focus on strategic decisions and overall city development. The resource management system is robust and requires careful planning.
- The game introduces innovative and fresh ideas to the city-building genre, setting it apart from traditional titles. Reviewers appreciate the developers for trying new things and creating a unique gameplay experience. The game's core concept and mechanics show promise and potential for future development.
Negatives:
- Many reviewers feel the game is unfinished, unpolished, and lacking content, especially for its price point and/or early access state. They cite missing features, placeholder elements, and a general sense that the game was released prematurely. Some reviewers explicitly state that the game feels more like a demo or alpha build than a complete experience.
- Many reviewers find the gameplay repetitive, boring, and lacking depth. They report a lack of meaningful choices, strategic options, and engaging content. The game quickly becomes tedious, with little incentive to replay or continue playing after the initial hours.
- Numerous reviews criticize the game's tutorials, explanations, and overall UI/UX. Players find it difficult to understand core mechanics, resource management, and faction interactions. The UI is often described as clunky, unintuitive, and lacking essential information, leading to frustration and a steep learning curve.
- A significant number of reviewers report frequent crashes, bugs, and performance issues. These technical problems range from minor glitches to game-breaking crashes that can lead to lost progress. Optimization is also a concern, with some players experiencing lag and slowdown even on high-end hardware.
- A recurring complaint is the lack of control over city planning and layout. Reviewers express frustration with the inability to remove roads, demolish districts, or freely place buildings. This inflexibility leads to chaotic city layouts and limits player agency.
Gameplay:
- The core gameplay loop involves placing buildings, managing resources, and progressing through distinct historical eras. Cultural buildings play a key role in attracting citizens, influencing faction power, and unlocking new technologies. Players must adapt to new mechanics and building types as they advance through the ages.
- The game blends elements from various city-building and strategy games, such as Civilization, Cities: Skylines, and Anno. This hybrid approach aims to offer a unique experience, combining familiar mechanics with innovative features. The game also evokes the feel of board games like '7 Wonders'.
- Resource management is a key aspect of the game, requiring players to balance production, consumption, and expansion. Upgrading production buildings expands their range, allowing access to more resources. However, resources are finite, necessitating careful planning and adaptation as they deplete.
- The game features a production chain similar to Anno games, but simpler. Managing resources is straightforward, but balancing food production with population needs is important. The game requires managing food production to feed the population.
- The game features an age mechanic with a time limit, which may force players to miss out on features from other ages as they progress. The game mechanics remain consistent throughout, with some significant changes. The game plays pretty quickly, which is a pity when trying to play out 2000 years of advancement.
Performance:
- Many users report performance degradation, especially in the late game with larger cities, even on high-end hardware. Frame rates can drop significantly, and some users experience overheating. This indicates a need for optimization to handle complex city simulations.
- Several visual bugs and glitches are present, including graphical artifacts, map flickering, and issues with object rendering. These issues detract from the overall visual experience and immersion.
- Adjusting graphics settings does not significantly improve performance unless the resolution is lowered considerably. Some graphics settings, like DLSS and depth of field, may even worsen the visual presentation or have no noticeable effect.
- Some players have encountered issues where the camera spins uncontrollably or the turn clock freezes, requiring a restart of the game session. These bugs can disrupt gameplay and cause frustration.
- Positive feedback on the game's audio and localization. The French translation is well done, and the soundtrack is pleasant.
Recommendations:
- Many reviewers are torn on whether to recommend the game in its current early access state. Some suggest waiting for more content, bug fixes, or a sale before purchasing, while others recommend it to those who enjoy city builders, are interested in following the development, or want to support the developers. The game's value is often tied to its price and the expectation of future improvements.
- Many reviewers acknowledge the game's potential, solid foundation, and promising start, expressing excitement for future development, new content (especially additional eras), and the full release. They believe the core gameplay is already enjoyable and that the game has the potential to become a standout title in the city-building genre. Some recommend wishlisting or purchasing to support the developers.
- The game is recommended for fans of city-building, resource management, and strategy games, especially those who enjoy seeing cities grow and evolve. However, some reviewers caution that the game may not appeal to those seeking a traditional city-building experience or those who prefer a more casual or relaxing playstyle.
- Reviewers express excitement for the addition of the remaining ages and plan to explore different modes and optimize their gameplay in the early eras. They are interested to see what new features and challenges the future eras will bring to the game.
- The game receives strong positive recommendations and high scores from some reviewers, indicating a very enjoyable experience. These reviewers consider the game a real gem and highly recommend it to others.
Miscellaneous:
- The game incorporates hand-tailored maps and story/lore elements, introducing a historical component through long-term choices made by the player.
- Reviewers appreciate the visual details, such as buildings degrading as eras change, and express anticipation for more detailed buildings and dynamics in future ages.
- The game's music is described as a relaxing ambient genre, although one reviewer found it strangely frightening.
- The second era experiences severe inflation, but it becomes manageable after the mid-game. This could be a point of frustration for players early on.
- Many advanced production buildings are mission locked, potentially restricting player freedom and progression.
