The first thing that tends to strike everyone about NewCity, is how massive its cities are. They make Cities: Skylines metropolises look poky, and cities from 2013’s SimCity look like quaint little villages. There’s no doubt about it: NewCity is all about urban sprawl, and actually comes close to being able to replicate the terrifyingly massive size of actual, real world cities. Indeed, in the later stages of the session I played with it, I kept zooming out and having the uncanny sensation I was looking out of an aeroplane window.
Looking out of an aeroplane window with a migraine, that is. Because for all its wonders, NewCity is, as it stands, a fairly ugly game. It stutters a bit, at least on my PC, when speeding up time in a decent-sized city, and it feels very feature-sparse, to an extent where in the early game I wondered if I was missing some menus. Its UI is bleak, and its music is – with profound apologies to the composer, who I’m sure has done much better work in other genres – horrendous. But this is early access, friends! And early early access, too, as the game’s only been up on Steam a couple of weeks. NewCity’s problems, therefore, don’t concern me, as they’re all fairly peripheral set dressing issues. The game’s core, on the other hand, feels like the foundation of something really special.