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With little or no information to base these decisions upon, a series of choices meant to provide some colour - not to mention a sense of agency - to Urban Empire's relentless historical march, is rendered moot. More often than not you're left to look for contextual clues in the accompanying text, which would be fine if these were consistently available: once, while researching gas I was asked to pick a model for our street lighting between the Anglosaxon, the Parisian, and the Viennese one, without any further clarification.

Sometimes, letting the mouse pointer hover over each choice will show you their effects sometimes it will show the effects of only one of them sometimes you get nothing. During your research (covering both technological and social advances) you're usually presented with a number of choices on a specific focus for your current subject. It's hard to discern whether it's QA failure or willful obfuscation, but it's an attitude that persists throughout the game. At one step you're being tested on your grasp of the (entirely typical) camera controls, at the next your planned expansion is blocked because of an “illegal district shape”, even though you've gone for that paragon of Euclidean respectability, the rectangle, and there's no suggestion forthcoming on what would constitute a legal alternative. Early instructions oscillate wildly between handholding and obscurantism.

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What the tutorial also inevitably reveals is one of Urban Empire's major flaws a striking indecisiveness on how to divulge information. Initial choices made, the campaign tutorial starts laying out the basic principles of building and improving your city: designing districts, outfitting them with necessary infrastructure, and providing them with the various services like schools and churches needed to keep the population happy.

There are three different starting locales to found your city on and four families to play as, each with their own particular leanings: the Shuyskys, for example, start out as typical 19th-century aesthetes, wealthy art patrons with little experience in politics, while the Kilgannons are a working class lot with strong ties to labour movements. The aim of the game is to build and expand a city that connects the capital of the newly-formed Austrian Empire to the Adriatic, then retain its mayorship for the next couple of centuries, from 1820 to 2020. To keep things personal Reborn wisely opts to restrict the scale of the project. As an astute commenter observed in our preview of the game, Urban Empire should ideally play like a two-hundred-year long Show Me a Hero simulator. Here, instead, there are intimate, scripted stories. Yes, Crusader Kings II has done the whole line-of-succession thing before, but these were mostly emergent narratives projected by players gently prompted via shrewdly orchestrated sets of statistics. What is original about Reborn Interactive's offering is the way all the scheming and negotiating, all the breakthroughs and the setbacks, are enmeshed with the personal histories of the members of the political dynasty we choose to play as during western Europe's wild scramble towards the 21st century. In the past, genre heirlooms like Balance of Power and Shadow President have catered for players who prefer their turn-based strategy with a dash of Machiavelli. This focus on politics instead of city-scale bookkeeping isn't entirely novel. Urban Empire attempts to place you in the role of a politician, cheerfully navigating webs of diplomatic intrigue, cajoling and backstabbing to preserve your rule, and - only if circumstances permit it - attending to the secondary task of actually improving the livelihoods of the citizens that have elected and/or tolerated you. But how does this more personal and political approach to urban management work? Well, it's unlikely to win the popular vote.Ĭontemporary strategy games are typically so obsessed with the minutiae of resource management and budget allocation that the business of leading, whether a town, a nation, or a galactic empire, often resembles the work of a lonely deskbound mathematician slaving away at facts and figures. Placing you as successive members of a dynasty, each acting as the mayor of a city developing against the backdrop of the previous two centuries of European history, it's about votes and influence as well as taxation and construction. Urban Empire is a city-building strategy game about politics and people rather than residential zones and monuments.