City 20 is a damn ambitious game and despite its significant teething troubles, it is one to look out for.
October rolls on by, and we know what that means! While it usually involves Halloween decorations, spoopy things, and eating loads of chocolate, it also marks my preparations for my annual GOTY list. There are 120 games on my spreadsheet so far this year, and with so many big releases still to come, I will have to maintain my mid-November cutoff point in order to complete the series in time.
I also want to thank those who come and read the reviews here! Google’s changes have devastated most gaming sites over the past year, and we are badly affected too. Not sure yet how things will go over the coming months, but I’ll update when I know more. Serious hat is taken off now, so let’s talk about City 20!
City 20 takes a lot of inspiration from the STALKER franchise, offering players a large, dynamic open world to explore and survive. Set after a nuclear apocalypse, the world is a degrading, fractured mess. Survivors found a place to call home in City 20, but after being abandoned by the government, even this place is collapsing. It is every man for himself, and City 20 focuses heavily on player choice.
After waking up in a run down shack, I got lectured by a grumpy bloke for several minutes. While he offered me shelter and food, it came with stark warnings: replace any food I eat, or face consequences. Imagine my surprise when he killed me for disobeying! It is nice to pay for my decisions, and it is a great way to introduce players to a game’s rules organically. Surviving requires all the usual things like food, water, managing health and energy, and so forth. City 20 is a brutal place to do that, and I appreciate how the folks at Untold Games approach sandbox gameplay. There are missions to provide some level of direction, but you are free from the beginning to try whatever you want.
With the many game systems at play, this turns City 20 into an impressive example of emergent gameplay. I was initially tasked with grabbing fuel for my new friend/landlord/murder companion, which took me out into the wilderness looking for resources. With no easy access to a map, you have to keep track of your exploration yourself, and with limited resources you really need to be careful. Twice I nearly got killed by rabid animals, forcing me to use my only medical supplies to avoid death. Finally I reached a settlement with people who would give me fuel in exchange for food. I had no food as I had eaten it during my expedition, so I got desperate. I located their private fuel deposits and stole some, only for them to catch me.
I was well and truly cooked until another band of raiders attacked the settlers chasing me! I was able to return to my starting shack but bled out before I could sleep (and save my progress). While that whole adventure was engrossing to play, it highlighted one of the problems. You can only save when sleeping in a bed. This in itself is fine, as it provides an immersive challenge. Could I return safely to a bed after a trip out for supplies? When the game is more stable, this will be less frustrating. Restarting due to bad decisions or injuries is reasonable enough, but losing progress to bugs was a major issue.
As City 20 is relatively early in its Early Access cycle, performance needs some work. You’ll need a powerful machine to play this on high settings, and even with my RTX 3060, I had to turn off ray tracing to keep settings around 60fps. A lot of work has gone into bug fixes and performance patches, though I experienced a few crashes to the desktop and one instance when my character got stuck on a wall, unable to move. I had no option but to reload my previous save. While these bugs were annoying, it is something to expect by something this ambitious. That does not make them acceptable, and I hope Untold Games keeps working on these performance glitches.
I’m a big fan of experimental games such as this, and despite the problems I ran into, there’s something about City 20 that draws me in. It needs a lot of polishing, but even in this early slice, there’s something worth investing into. If you are in the mood for something with a lot of immersion and game systems working together, City 20 is worth a look.
