Cityconomy: Service for Your City was initially released for the PC on December 2, 2015 via Steam. It’s a new simulator game published by Astragon Entertainment and developed by Nano Games. I was given a free review copy of the game, though this doesn’t affect the rating.

It’s been a long while since I’ve gotten in deep with any sort of simulation game. I’ve delved into them on Steam, but these days, it’s really not a genre where I jump into the latest release. I know that there’s a growing group of gamers who really love these sorts of experiences. Anything from driving trains, guiding big farm equipment, and being a mechanic is all possible within the simulation genre, so there’s definitely a lot that you can get into if it’s your thing.

Cityconomy has a decent premise at first. I thought it might be entertaining to get to do some of the city service type of jobs in a simulator. Since I rarely play the genre, I thought it could diversify my play a bit, but honestly, this just ended up being a terribly frustrating experience.

I have a pretty strong graphics card (an R9 390X G1 w/ 8GB DDR5), and even with that I’m lucky to pull in 20 FPS with this title. Lowering the settings (which shouldn’t be necessary) doesn’t help at all. Further, the low framerate makes the game look terrible and play even worse. The controls for driving the vehicles are already really tight and hard to work with (on keyboard and controller), and the lack of any sort of first-person view of the cab (as far as I’ve seen) is really, really a bad idea.

The controls are one of this game’s greatest weaknesses and make what could have been visually nice (had the framerate kept up) to play even worse. Even the most minute task like picking up a trash container is about the most monotonous chore possible.

The lack of any sort of music only makes this experience worse.

It’s rare for me to so greatly dislike a game, but this is one you really should stay away from. Really. I’m not even that big into sims these days, but there are PLENTY of other simulation games out there that would be far more worthy of your time.

Sadly, I have to give this game a grade of: