Citystate

+ Simple and fun gameplay.
+ Nice twist on traditional citybuilding by introducing governance options.
- Does not offer high replayability or diversity of buildings.

If you want a simple, no-frills city-building experience for an hour or two, this is it.

Citystate is a city-building game that came out in 2018. In many ways and in all the good ones concerning this game, it feels like a throwback to much earlier city-building games like SimCity 2000, which I think is the best game in that series.

Graphically the game totally apes Sim City 2000 to my pleasure, but I wonder if people who didn't grow up with those games think less of this game in comparison to something like Cities: Skylines? I like the look of the buildings and how keeping with the style it was going for the "future" buildings look like things we would have thought of as futuristic in the 90s. The buildings and things you construct look good and have a nice style to them, but the natural surroundings like plains, dirt, mountains, trees, etc look bad and you have fewer options for them than you do in that aforementioned series of olde. This is my biggest complaint about the game which is that even in comparison to much older City-building games, this one doesn't have a lot of building options.

I think this game has music... I have played this for at least 80 hours according to Steam and I don't really remember the sound at all.

The thing I like most about this game is the way building upgrades and city development works. I like that you don't just buy upgrades, you have to actually address issues and make positive changes to see your city develop more. This isn't really something I have seen in city-building games in the recent past, but it's a retread I would like to see more of in the genre. I have some problems with what this game considers "positive changes," but I would be jumping the gun to discuss that here.
I like the space exploration/bonus shit that comes at the end of a city and how its harshness is true to how harsh it would be to develop a thriving colony on a distant world. I think this game does a good job overall of capturing a little of the "weirdness" of a lot of early Maxis games before EA drained the last remaining bits of soul out of the company. Clearly whoever made this was a real fan of these older titles.
This game has problems those older titles did like, traffic seems like something I can never really control. Despite seemingly having many options to do so and I don't like that trams don't have to be connected to actually affect an area. I kind of expected this game to have this problem with traffic because older Sim City games suffered from the same thing. Another bad thing about these older simulators as opposed to the new ones. Is that the end game of this style of simulator is a lot of you doing nothing and having to wait for the city to grow. On some level, I don't mind that, especially when I'm initially excited about a title like this, but the more I play a game like this the more I find myself dropping a city after a certain point, just so I can start again and feel the excitement of the first few hours you have in this kind of game. I think city simulators handle this so much worse than 4X strategy games which have a lot of the same buildup and arc, but the end game is as exciting as the build-up in those games.

So this is where the review would end if I was a Steam "reviewer" and if the Gab master was paying me directly for clicks. Unfortunately for you though I'm me and I'm not reviewing this game because I wanted you to know how great it feels to play a game like Sim City 2000 again. I must now reveal the evil reasons I wanted to review this game, which of course will require me to write all that goddamn text below. *Laughs maniacally.*

The best kind of propaganda is depictions of regular life, where the presuppositions and values of your ideology are just assumed in the background and the art depicts life as if things "just have" to be this way. The more passively you present an ideology, the easier it comes to nest among other people's basic assumptions about life. If I was a disgusting foot fetishist for instance, instead of a cultured and tasteful "leg and leg accessories connoisseur," I might present a world through fiction that constantly reinforces the idea that not wearing shoes is ok and presenting your disgusting feet to the camera is as cinematic as anything else. The way Quentin Tarantino and Dan Schneider already do. A propagandist for feet would just assume their disgusting fetish is a normal way of life and people catering to them happens in a regular everyday way in which it doesn't now. You wouldn't bring direct attention to these changes from everyday reality, you would just lightly place feet and pro-feet sentiments into the story and assume their normalcy as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. If it happens enough times and people accept it as normal maybe you actually will make your society far more feet-centric than it is. You might even make a joke about it to ease people into your sick worldview. Show feet pics BTW.
Why am I saying all this in a review about this game? Well for one, because I'm stealthily trying to groom this entire site, into being my foot-doms, but I also have a dual purpose here that is slightly less important. I believe something... Is afoot in this game. Hidden within the assumptions made in this game about certain government policies and their outcomes, is a ton of unproven and oversimplified arguments and presuppositions. These might slip by other people, but I always have my nose to the ground... I mean the grindstone and I want to explore some of the things they want you to just take for granted. I'm going to go over what I consider to be three big examples of this, Immigration, Economics, and then comparing this game to other games like it for a short while. As I think the comparison will help show the shortcomings of the "developers" view of the world.

So I said all that to say, this game gets immigration wrong to the point that I'm heavily inclined to believe it has an agenda. Anything you do to increase legal immigration simultaneously and for no apparent reason causes informal or illegal settlers to skyrocket, which makes little to no sense. I'll give them one caveat, "the free work visas" option makes sense with what I just said above because a work visa doesn't equal giving a person citizenship and people flying over here with a temporary visa is the most common way an "illegal immigrant" comes to this country. I don't consider them to be that term. Anyway, they come here for work and then simply overstay their Visa, but the games informal immigration mechanics makes zero sense with "tax incentives, student exchange, and citizenship program" the one it makes absolutely no sense with.
Most countries that can afford a student/immigrant exchange program on their own don't need to come to any country informally and when a nation is doing it as charity to an undeveloped country, that usually comes with automatic integration mechanisms like they get taught the language as part of the exchange, they come here with the intention of staying and that is part of the program. They also are put into homes that can afford to take on a new person, which automatically makes them better off than most people who come to a new country alone.
If tax incentives were an indicator of informal immigration, why don't we see a lopsided trend of immigrants choosing low-tax countries and states? Why don't Ireland and Florida for instance the first two places I can think of that try to use low taxes as an incentive for growth see a disproportionate amount of informal international immigrants in comparison to their neighbors? I don't think most people who can't afford to immigrate to a place formally are incentivized by taxes. You have to have something to lose in the first place for taxes to be a concern for you. In fact, we saw the opposite with refugees from the Syrian civil war, the entire racist meme against them was that they were choosing high tax/extremely white societies like the Nordic countries and Germany to settle in. Part of that was they were the only countries to accept them but I think the reason those countries were willing to accept more of them was the fact that they had the infrastructure and the means to do so, because of their higher taxes. Low or high taxes affect and impact the lives and opinions of native citizens to a country more so than they do immigrants and in most countries that aren't America less so because they aren't constantly be grifted into believing the idea that government can't solve any problems.
The main thing that causes people to come over the border through extra-judicial means or to overstay their visas as mentioned before is barriers to entry. A country like the US where I live has one of the strictest immigration processes in the world. People in America often deny this and yet the evidence is mountainous and very apparent. Even just visually going to an airport, the international welcome parties in most developed countries is one guy chewing gum and looking at your passport. The checkpoints for planes bound for or leaving America have multiple soldiers guarding them and with guns all over the fucking place. The violent juxtaposition between how we treat borders and how most other countries that aren't actively at war with their neighbors do is insane. When times were good here, the reason people broke the law to be here, was that strictness, if they had an easier way to immigrate, integrate and ingratiate their host country they would. The most obvious reason why is that people like a path of least resistance. No one likes breaking the law and having to look over their shoulders every time a cop car goes by or worrying that their house is about to get raided by ICE. Immigrants like security and freedom as much as a standard citizen does. Maybe even more so since they know what it is like to live without it. This is why the citizenship program option is the most absurd for what I'm talking about.
As much as "weed" is a part of American culture when generously to weed consuming folks, 90% of people have a celebration most of them don't go out of their way to find a weed dealer, they just go and get alcohol and why? Because doing things that are illegal are inconvenient and dangerous in other ways. Do you think people would want to cross a dangerous series of deserts and tunnels to get here if an easier way presented itself and assured them that they can live without worry once they got here? This is why I think the citizenship program option should decrease caravans/informal immigration while increasing regular immigration. If you take out the fact that it's people, it's really no different from other "prohibition" issues, eliminating barriers to entry makes the whole process smoother and better for everyone.
I brought weed up for another reason. Immigrants don't always come in droves over the borders just for economic reasons. As the word Refugee may have already indicated above sometimes they're fleeing war-torn areas and in America's case war-torn areas, that are torn because we tore it in the first place. Over stupid drug policies, enforcing American interests in countries that are not our own and as this situation gets worse over time we will have climate refugees that are fleeing their homelands to come here. Where all the industries and goods that are causing the catastrophe to happen either originate in or get sold to. So we can't really make their lives worse at home and then blame them for coming here... But I'm sure you will anyway.

Since we talked about exchange programs, I wanted to share this story about a Japanese exchange student we had at my high school, a really tall dude named "Sho." I'm sure that isn't how it was spelled and knowing more about Japanese now, I think it was a nickname. Sho was introduced to my first-period history class by the history teacher I mentioned in my "Hollaback Girl review" and by my asshole principal who did a speech about the importance of the exchange program and our "sister school" in Japan. We also had a "sister school" in Poland, but I never saw any of those kids. Sho looked like the biggest dork I had ever seen in my life. Like literal fanny pack-wearing guy, a roller backpack, pimples everywhere, short shorts, a tye-dye shirt, hair that was long but like in a male version of a Karen-cut, and glasses that literally had tape in the middle, like he was casting for a remake of Revenge of the Nerds. Also, an odd detail I remember, he wore socks with sandals... Which foot jokes aside, is always an objectively wrong fashion choice to make. Not knowing much about Japan at the time, I wondered if everyone there was like this... Obviously, I know that isn't the case now, but it's funny to think back on how limited our knowledge of other people was just a few decades back before the internet was as ubiquitous and easy to access as it is today. Well, he went from the biggest dork I had ever seen to like an Asian gangster-ass dude in two months' time. Which at the time meant slicked-back short hair, wearing baggy pants with one leg rolled up, those small round Sean Puffy Combs glasses everyone was wearing and I think I saw a cigarette in his fucking ear at one point. Like half the kids in my school, he smelt like weed most of the time. I don't know what precipitated the quick change in his fashion and personality and I'm not going to try and guess now, but I actually do know the answer he was institutionalized into American culture the worst way possible, though it's teens. I said all this to set you up for the real story.
One day I was hanging outside that aforementioned history class, which was outside amid a bunch of "mobile" classrooms. A lot of people are walking around and all of a sudden I hear Sho start yelling "FUCK" and "SHIT" all over the place, with a really apparent Japanese twang to the words. Like when westerners do an impression of a Japanese person. He was saying "Sheee" almost instead of shit. People were laughing, some kids looked confused, a few girls even looked concerned and finally, my history teacher ran out in a fervent panic yelling "Sho-sha-sha SHO! Those words don't mean what you think they mean!" I guess assuming that some asshole had taught this unassuming, impressionable young Japanese teen some cusswords. So he and Sho quietly walked up to the class and I was standing right outside the door. The teacher walks in and shuts the door behind him. Sho just stands there face turned towards the door with a weird smile and waits about a minute and then turns to me and says in perfect English while laughing. "I know exactly what those words mean." We laughed a bit and then he went inside. I'm not sure exactly why he turned and told me this, because I didn't really know the dude aside from seeing him around school and I never talked to him after this either. An Asian-American kid I knew asked him what some Japanese characters on one of his shirts meant and Sho apparently informed him that his No Fear shirt said "Shit Dragon" on it. I remember hearing that his parents wanted him sent back before the end of his program and in his place they sent four girls that never said a word of English, but laughed at everything that ever happened at all times of a lesson. Unlike him, they didn't look like mega dorks when they first came here so I had quickly learned Japan had normies too. Which I guess is the value of cultural exchange. Actually, I learned less than nothing from that experience, seeing them around school and I think America needlessly corrupted the youth of an innocent Japanese boy. This made me think this, we always talk about how immigrants might be bad for America, but do we ever stop to think that America might be bad for immigrants? I mean aside from the obvious ways of racism and xenophobia? Being American is like being a child who knows they're in a domestic abuse situation. We see all the abuse and terrible shit going on, but we're near powerless to do anything about what is happening and things just get worse and worse. Our only hope is that metaphorical dad gets drunk one night and accidentally drives off a cliff... Do we really want to invite other "kids" over and bring them in on this situation?

For people who are reading this and for some reason have not played this game, let me explain what I mean when I say this game exaggerates the negative effects of immigration. Do I just mean that it shows up as a negative modifier on the screen? Well yes, but the more obvious sign that this game is heavily biased against immigration is that you literally see hordes of fucking people galloping across the border visually. The game calls them "caravans" in the immigration UI menu and informal immigrants create tent cities that destroy your coastline, delete valuable forestry and they will do all this right next to a refuge center/free housing you just built for them. They delete beaches... I mean come on man. I feel like the game was consciously designed to make you hate immigrants given these things I just said. I mean, I knew what the game was playing at fairly early on with immigration and it still got me a little pissed at these rampaging dots on my screen. So I can't even imagine what effect this has on people who aren't thinking about the game's depiction of immigration at all and are just passively accepting this information as if it represents some kind of semblance of reality.
I wanted to be fair to the creators of this game and try to think of a reason beyond anti-immigration propaganda for why they would make any change to immigration policies so drastic. The only reason I can think of why they did this was that immigrants become your number one priority in the end-game of a city. You need people to vote with their F E E T, by coming to your city and adding to your overall population and the general production of the city so that your buildings get their final upgrades and so you have a better running start with the space colony later. Population growth becomes more valuable than anything else, so I think they might have thought that they needed to limit the number of positives you gain from immigration by making informal settlers a much bigger drain on you and your city in the game than they would be in reality. So that you don't just open the spigot completely and have 5000 immigrants a second running into your city with no negatives. Which if that was their intention it works because it hurts to see those tent cities when I'm bending over backward to fix social problems in the game. I can understand the impulse to give negatives to something like this to make the game better, but the way in which they did is so optically bad and socially irresponsible that while I can understand the impulse. I would ask future creators of games like this to think about how it looks to release a game about city planning in a nation where immigration was the issue that decided the 2016 election and to have it work in such a way that you literally show immigrants galloping over the borders in caravans and hordes. I'm being charitable to the hypothetically naive developers but let's just say I happen to know that they don't deserve such charity because I have read their social media and Steam developer posts. I think he did intend it to come off as bad as it looks:

This is a quote taken from the Steam page written directly by the developer which is one guy named Andy: "The game mechanics are based on today’s world economy. Policies’ effects try to mimic nations of the modern world and their intrinsic differences. Citystate is often politically incorrect and possibly biased." One might take that statement as maybe a bit flippant, but not particularly bad yet... Unfortunately, I looked into the developer of this game, because as I have shown above the way it depicted immigration made me suspicious, and oh boyo... This was one rabbit hole I wasn't prepared for.
The developer of this game and its upcoming sequel has stated numerous times that he wants to create the most advanced economic simulator possibly ever in his own words. That is what he says in the headline of his Twitter in English. If like me you know enough French to read it... His twitter quickly devolves into your angry Fox news viewing uncle's timeline of horrible takes. His Twitter is filled with statements supporting Trump, despite the fact that he is French. He likes quotes from Hayek and the laughable Gary Kasparov, who is paid to be an idiot since he got his ass kicked by Bobby Fisher whose brain was melting at the time. He engages in constant climate change disinformation and he supports the horrible practice of fracking. He recently cited videos by Prager U as intellectual inspiration... My line on Prager U has always been that I'm still disappointed it wasn't a pregnancy fetish website. The one thing you really need to know about him though is that like all right-wingers in their modern iteration he is heavily, heavily, heavily against immigration. While he is a white man who lives in the Philippines and is pro-Duterte... I wish I invented this character to be a parody, but I didn't. I'm sad that I know enough French now to have read his tweets and be this disappointed in his existence. As for him creating the most advanced economic simulator, fuck around reading and find out:

This is one of those games that have the misconception that *Richard Wolff voice* "Socialism... Is when the government does stuff." So basically if a government worker uses toilet paper at their office that is socialism, because the government paid for that toilet paper. If you walked from one place to another with no interference that is "capitalism" in this person's mind. Notice that neither of these things involves an economic interaction at all on the individual person's part. So even from the perspective of dumb guys who believe individual transactions matter for some reason in economics, this wouldn't even work.
You might ask, how do I know this is their definition of these ideologies/economic systems and the answer is rather simple. Any minor government increase in this game, even if it increases individual freedom and/or overall well-being is considered socialism. If it in any way decreases the size of government even if the policy is not one pertaining to economics you edge more into capitalism. There are even bugs in the game with certain policies that allow you to manipulate the socialism/capitalism scale by choosing them over and over. Or at least that would be my answer if we all didn't know the political inclinations and ideology of this developer.
The problem with definitions like this for economic systems is kind of like the problem of people citing the current weather outside as proof of climate change not existing. An economic system describes the context and background of the world we live in more so than it describes individual actions or in this case transactions and government policies happening within a system. Capitalism is happening in the world whether a government acknowledges it or not. Being part of a global financial system has made this as inevitable for you as it is for the Chinese, Brazilians, Russians, and even for people living in the wilds of Madagascar who don't understand ideas like trade and debt. The world has an assumed economic preset now and all most individual governments can do is knob twiddle and try to either mitigate or exacerbate the problems of capitalism. Capitalism is also a historical development, societies weren't always like they were today and the world was once much less integrated. Capitalism was not happening during hunter-gatherer times or during Feudalism. There are always parts of the world that engaged in international trade and we even had very advanced sea trade routes amongst countries long before I'm sure most people would assume these were a thing as a guess, but capitalism also required modern industrial manufacturing and the division of labor on a global scale. The religion of free trade and the end of the idea that imports abroad and protectionism at home is the best way of doing business with the outside world is what brought capitalism in the forefront over mercantilism. Capitalism was an advancement and a development over previous ages and it became the assumed norm in all transactions in life. That's why it doesn't make sense to have minor changes in an individual government's "economy" be reflective of an entire economic system(s). So in a way, a game like this is impossible to make because governments can't really choose their economic stance. They can choose policies and stances that affect things in their individual nation economically but the changes that would require an end to capitalism either forward or backward would need to happen on a global scale. Even governments like Juche Mane in the north of the Korean peninsula that is more closed off than most others from the rest of the world are subject to the outside forces of capitalism and free trade. They have been sanctioned by most of the world. They can't make big changes because they might anger China to their north or South Korea... To their south or they might anger Sho to the slight east. This is basically saying they would anger America again. Those resources to build that gigantic weird pyramid hotel in the middle of Pyongyang came from foreign investments and development deals. They didn't come from workers owning the means of production and radically changing the dynamic between people and the products they produce. So even though aesthetically and in rhetoric, they proclaim to be communist they're actually an undeveloped capitalist nation, that is stuck somewhere in time between the end of the Korean War and the 1990s. They just aren't a very good capitalist country because most of the world is barred from trading with them.
So instead of talking about socialism yet. Let's say a government chooses to be mercantilist again, I don't know why any individual state would, but for the sake of argument, lets say a government wanted to tank its economy back to a prior preset. Given what I have shown above, you should already know this to be a silly pipe dream. A person almost has to imagine an entirely different world and mindset, one can even say an "ideology" to live back in times where a mercantilist conception of the world made sense. They would also have to deal with a world that is entirely against them and their conception of how things should work. Mercantilist aims were nationalist in their endeavors, despite peoples belief that Capitalism and nationalism are compatible they aren't because capitalism requires constant growth and wide acceptance of the belief that opening markets to investors, even ones outside your country and general geographic area is a good thing. To go forward from capitalism and this is what makes life hard for people like myself who do want to see us advance from this stage of economic reality, is even more difficult because you have to imagine a world and ideology that has not yet existed and yet also has the task of replacing the status quo preset of capitalism we have now. You can't do this with one city-state-sized government as you do in games of this nature. You couldn't even do it in our reality with some of the largest countries on earth proclaiming to do so because they were subject to the whims of the rest of the world, amongst a sea of other problems.
It's hard for anyone to understand the scale and pervasiveness of all aspects of capitalism, especially when we as people are within the thing we're trying to examine. The ideology of capitalism itself also has morphed in such a way as to limit the imagination of things beyond it. To such a degree that people were declaring the end of history and capitalism the uncontested winner of economic reality in perpetuity. A game that properly simulated this and the mindset it develops in people would almost have to be as complex as our world itself. Even games like World of Warcraft and EVE Online that have massive "economies" really aren't a comparative enough facsimile of economic reality, they don't even come close and I would know I'm gold capped in WoW on three characters and I own the Long-Boi/2 mil gold spider mounts. On a basic level, all games are doomed to never be truly good at recreating material conditions because they can't even simulate an innate desire for the need to be economically viable in order to survive on an individual level. Let alone the global scale of capitalism and all of the economic, sociological psychological and political effects it makes on nations and everyday people.
So what I'm saying with all this is games like this are bullshitting you when they tell you that a government can individually change their economic stance and that such a thing rests on an easy to define spectrum of choices between government intervention and non-intervention. Governments have a better chance of controlling the weather at this point than they do their own economic fortunes. For a key example of this look at the recent history of Greece which has tried basically every possible response to an external problem and yet their example has shown the limits of what individual governments can do when the rest of the world doesn't want to acknowledge changes, you want to make. Those other governments can't acknowledge the changes Greece wants either because the entire legitimacy of the existence of their markets rests on the idea, that debts are important and everyone and even nations should be individually responsible for misfortunes that happen to them. While simultaneously being part of a massive network of transactions that they have little to no control over. A paralyzed object has met an immovable contradictory cosmic force.

I do love ahistorical, uneconomical stances, like the ones this game presumes like capitalism always existed and government has always been socialism. Even if we accept the absurd idea that capitalism is freedom from government action and socialism is government action. We can see through historical examples how quickly this idea becomes totally ridiculous. Those Bushmen tribes in Africa that rely on a gift economy and roving bands of loosely familial groups. That is capitalism and the families are socialism. Medieval feudal lords that are indistinguishable from a private military and simultaneously a public service, with lands they lease to peasants and merchants within their castle walls... That is capitalism and socialism. Russian Serfdom under the Czar, you guessed it socialism and capitalism. Leopold the 2nd, running the Congo like a vicious business even though he was a king, that is social-capitalism. In fact all imperialism is socialism, even though it was done to expand markets and expropriate goods for a burgeoning capitalism. Yep, The two biggest companies in history the East India Company and The Dutch East India Company was socialism...
It's a wonder that anyone likes either of these economic systems when they can be applied to this many situations and scenarios this broadly. I would like someone with a worldview like this to write a book about the French revolution and all of its stages up to Napoleon being sent to the second island in isolation. I think their head would explode from giving out citations for socialism and capitalism before they even get to the death of Louise XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Even as a socialist I believe capitalism is more resilient and more appealing of an ideology than is usually depicted in games here. I mean there is a reason it was successful to the point that it supplanted all other forms of economic systems. Yet games and people on TV would have us believe that it is so flimsy of a system of economics that even the most minor of taxes can put the entire economy into a downward slide towards the next stage of our economic realities. It is unstable and it has contradictions like what happened with some of the nations above, but the reality is individual governments and their policies have nothing to do with whether capitalism, socialism, or communism is happening.

Now that I have needlessly dunked on these game developers, let me be a little sympathetic here to hypothetical developers that would actually deserve sympathy. I might be a stick in the mud for realism, but I understand at some point games have to make a compromise. I don't think a game can ever really depict economics in a realistic way that truly shows the scale of economic systems and how they affect people's lives or could possibly do so in the future. The way capitalism and socialism are depicted in games cheapens them both, but games are usually just a sad reflection of misconceptions that already exist in reality. When it comes to these ideas. Most politicians, political media class journalists, and pop economists, especially if you have the misfortune of living in the states are as dumb in their depictions of economic systems and reality as these games are. So I can understand the penchant for oversimplifying economic systems which would mean massively different realities for people, not just in the practical sense we all think of like who owns the means of production, but also how changes in material conditions and the possible future abolition of all hierarchies would affect our minds. It would be hard to even depict the minute changes that would need to be made on the road to such a reality. So let's put everything that I just said above aside for a little while and instead evaluate this dumb depiction of economics against other dumb depictions of economics in similar games. Those are allegedly far less realistic than this amazing economic simulator.

A clever commentator might note a general conflation here between micro and macroeconomics and they might come to bludgeon my poor old head with the accusation. That me a dumb fuck is mixing the two up. I can only say in my defense that I'm only conflating the two as to work out the games and general society's problem of conflating the two together. I only have two hands and two glorious feet. I can only push against the grain so much on my own, without it seeming like I'm falling into the same traps as them. It's hard to walk through this world, when your eyes are always scanning the ground... Worried about how ants might react to micro-economic tax policies. Oblivious to the macro-thunderstorms over your own head.

This game is supposed to be realistic, as opposed to other unrealistic city sims. Well, I'm not a big city simulator, but I reckon I had more options for all kinds of governments/economic systems in unrealistic city sims like the Tropico games and SimCity Societies. Granted those games aren't perfect either, but neither one of them was touting their alleged "realism" and they didn't have a maker of the game claiming to be a PhD in immigration and economics in the community sections of their steam profiles like this game did. Now for my impressive credentials. I'm technically a college dropout, that wasn't even studying either subject when I was in college and I read Wikipedia articles in between playing games and jacking off. So you should take my opinions with the weight and seriousness of a sensually booted foot on your neck. Actually, you should probably never read this review and/or take it seriously. I mean, I didn't even write "signified and signifier" all over the place letting you know I'm vaguely aware of what semiotics is. Try to pardon that omission. For my pea-sized brain, this is the most amount of effort I could put into a review. Intellectually I'm just down here, with the rest of you plebs, and by down here, I mean groveling at your feet... Which I absolutely take no pleasure in. None at all! No pleasure.
In all seriousness I am not an expert in economics, I know enough to know what I don't know and what I don't know is a lot and yet the maker of this game who is allegedly a PhD on the subject seems to know less than that.

For a game that claims to be realistic, the options for government and economic policies and how they reflect upon your city are laughably similar. The socialist/communist options in general, stop at Soc-dem and maybe lightly into Dem-soc, but they don't really go beyond that at all. There aren't any options for workers to really own the means of production. There aren't even options to support workers' co-operatives and/or union-run factories. One thing I would like to see in games like this is options for the scientific computer-run socialism that was about to be tried by Salvador Allende as elaborated on in the book Towards a New Socialism by W. Paul Cockshott. There are a lot of things I would like to see from the lore of socialism and communism reflected in these games. What about a Hoxha-inspired scenario where you have to have fifty percent or more of your buildings be bunkers or you lose at the end of the time limit? Rojava outer-heaven scenario?
Purely for the sake of argument, let's say I wanted to go the dumb guy's idea of what communism is and really embrace the full Uncle Joe "Holodomor was a misnomer" vibes. The problem is that the game's options don't really allow you to do many dictatorial actions aside from implied ones. So again even in comparison to dumb games that embrace their dumbness like the Tropico series, there are far fewer options and your impact on the people can never be as direct as those games. Even though on the surface the number of issues you can make a decision on would make you think otherwise.

I couldn't really find a good place to put this but, I find it funny that when you make an anarcho-capitalist society the only people who want to live there are the super-rich and informal immigrants that can't afford the houses. So basically all of your cities become Dubai when you try this but without any of the state development and oil money that stops a place like that from imploding.

In another game, I might suspect that the lack of your ability to really differentiate a play style as a mayor with wildly different ideologies here might be accidental or a mistake, but given the two big problems I outlined and the developer's beliefs, I think it's at least partly a reflection of the game designers personal philosophy that most of these options other than the ones that are the current flavor of right-wing hogwash around the globe can't be reflected much in the cities that you build. The negatives of immigration are over-exaggerated in this game and play into right-wing fears. Economically it plays into all the dumb misconceptions and myopia of pop-culture center-right takes on the economy. Where any minor increase in taxes will destroy all of society and new government programs are unfair to the rich somehow. The only governmental increase the game seems to view favorably at all is national healthcare. In every other regard, the game penalizes you immensely for any increase in taxes or any amount of government spending. Some of them do show positives on their implementation screens but the amount of negatives that rack up quickly if you even just minorly implement a nordic model of social democracy quickly implodes the society and yet we don't see that happening in real life.
This doesn't make sense if you're a normal well-adjusted person with both feet firmly and beautifully planted on the ground. But it does make sense to the right-wing mind because they think anyone slightly to the left of them is all the same. Stalinists are the same as anarchists. Marxism and Post-modernism are the same things. Atheists are Muslims. Mexican Catholics help Islamic terrorists get over the border. Leftists are Democrats. When you know that right-wingers think that way, the fact that so many non-right wing playstyles all play the exact same way in this game makes absolute sense. I mean it doesn't make sense because none of that is true, but I'm sure you get what I mean.
Given my big critique of the game's views on economics and how they're virtually the same as my uncle who watches Fox News all day and about as shallow as that from a supposed PhD on the subject. I think they can't really reflect the differences that should be reflected in this game because they can't properly recreate economic systems as they exist in reality. Not even in a way that would be acceptable to someone like me who would be charitable in knowing that such things are so complex that you almost need to recreate the entire fucking world and the circumstances we have built up to here to properly do that. Which they can't do these things because they don't understand them. Their inability to understand economics is reflected in their inability to properly recreate the effects of other simpler government actions in the game. This is why everything from mild liberalism to full-blown "communist dictatorship," looks the exact fucking same on the screen. This is probably the worst overall assumption the game imbibes to the player passively, that all these options don't really matter that much because the end result is the same. All positive roads lead to your country becoming bankrupt and barren. You might as well not even walk with those glorious oblong extremities, because there is no difference in the outside world. If you want a vision of the future through the lens of this game... Imagine a foot-stamping on my- I mean, on any positive change forever.