🏙️ Town to City – Cozy Planning With Some Steep Learning Curves
Game: Town to City
Developer: Galaxy Grove
Publisher: Kwalee
Platform: Steam
Price: $24.99 USD
Playtime: ~35.6 hours to 100% completion
Some city builders feel like juggling spreadsheets during a thunderstorm. Town to City feels more like laying out a miniature model town on a big wooden table—careful, creative, and quietly absorbing. With a structured campaign and a flexible sandbox mode, it offers both brain-teasing challenges and relaxed, build-at-your-own-pace play.
After 35.6 hours to full completion, it’s clear this one aims to sit comfortably between thoughtful strategy and cozy construction. It mostly succeeds, though a few terrain quirks slow the momentum.
🎮 Gameplay Overview
Town to City walks you through a campaign of increasingly complex city-building scenarios while also offering a sandbox mode for freeform design. You’ll place homes, services, decorations, and infrastructure while balancing coverage radiuses, efficiency, and expansion goals.
A major hook is the research system, which steadily unlocks new structures and bonuses, giving each stage a sense of forward motion. The campaign maps provide structured puzzles, while sandbox lets you turn your brain volume knob down and just build pretty things.
Performance is also pleasantly lightweight. This is a city builder that doesn’t demand a space-age machine to run smoothly.
🌟 What Works Well
Runs on Older Laptops: Optimization is excellent. Even modest hardware can handle larger builds without turning into a slideshow.
Strong Campaign + Relaxing Sandbox: The campaign offers real challenge, while sandbox mode is perfect for low-pressure creativity.
Plenty to Research: The tech and unlock tree is packed with content, giving long-term goals and steady rewards.
Clear Visual Language: It’s easy to read your city at a glance, which is vital in a builder like this.
⚠️ Where the Roads Get Bumpy
A few design limitations create friction, especially on uneven maps:
No Stair Connections for Paths: Paths cannot connect uphill with stairs, which means hilly maps often require long workaround routes just to reach nearby elevated tiles. It feels unnecessarily restrictive.
Hill Placement Radius Issues: Buildings placed on hills do not affect structures below them, even when they appear to be within radius. This breaks intuitive planning and limits vertical creativity.
Mayor Request Mysteries: The Mayor’s Requests have no built-in hints for how to unlock them, turning that achievement chain into guesswork. It ended up being the final achievement I earned purely because of missing guidance.
🧱 Final Thoughts
Town to City is a satisfying, thoughtfully designed city builder that balances structured challenge with cozy freedom. The campaign provides meaningful puzzles, the sandbox delivers calm creativity, and the research system keeps the reward engine humming.
Terrain and radius logic around hills could use refinement, and a bit more achievement guidance would go a long way—but the foundation is solid and enjoyable.
Verdict: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ (4/5)
A sturdy, relaxing builder with a few uphill battles.