Urban Empire

Urban Empire is a city-building and political strategy simulation game where you guide a city through 200 years of history, from the 19th century to the modern day. Unlike traditional city-builders, the game emphasizes political maneuvering as you must navigate the complex demands of different political parties, pass laws, manage civic projects, and win elections to maintain power and shape your metropolis. The challenge lies in balancing economic growth, technological progress, and the happiness of your citizens against the backdrop of a dynamic and often unpredictable political landscape.

Urban Empire: A City Ruler’s Burden

In the annals of city-building and political simulation, few games dare to tread the precarious line Urban Empire attempted to walk. Released in 2017 by Finnish developer Reborn Games and published by Kalypso Media, it promised a revolutionary fusion: a “City Ruler,” not merely a city builder. It was a bold thesis—to place the intricate, often frustrating machinations of democratic politics at the core of urban development. Years after its release, it stands not as a forgotten failure, but as a fascinating, deeply flawed artifact—a game whose ambitious vision was ultimately hamstrung by opaque systems, repetitive gameplay, and an identity crisis that left it satisfying neither city-building purists nor political simulation aficionados. This is the story of a game that reached for the stars but remained firmly grounded in the mire of council chambers.

Development History & Context

The Studio and The Vision
Urban Empire was developed by Reborn Games, a Finnish studio founded in 2012 and originally known as Fragment Production Ltd. Prior to this project, the team’s pedigree consisted of the Rescue: Everyday Heroes series—emergency services simulation games. Crucially, the studio was founded by several former members of Colossal Order, the creators of the acclaimed Cities in Motion and, later, the genre-defining Cities: Skylines. This lineage is vital to understanding Urban Empire’s ambitions; it was crafted by developers intimately familiar with the intricacies of urban simulation, yet yearning to break new ground.

The gaming landscape of 2017 was dominated by two titans: the deep, creative sandbox of Cities: Skylines and the charismatic, dictator-centric satire of the Tropico series. Kalypso Media, the publisher behind Tropico, saw an opportunity to carve a new niche. Their vision, as articulated in developer FAQs and promotional material, was to create a “City Ruler”—a genre hybrid that would force players to navigate the political quagmire of a democratic system to achieve their urban planning goals. You wouldn’t be a god-like figure; you would be a mayor, accountable to a council, forced to bargain, bribe, and blackmail your way to progress.

Technological Constraints and Ambition
Built on the Unity engine, Urban Empire aimed for a scope that spanned 200 years of European history, from 1820 to 2020, divided into five distinct eras. This required a dynamic event system boasting over 800 scripted occurrences, a complex “Wheel of Life” simulation governing citizen and political party desires, and a multi-generational dynasty system. For a team of around 17 developers, this was a Herculean task. The technological constraints are evident in the final product: a visually competent but often sluggish game, with a user interface overwhelmed by data and a simulation that frequently buckled under its own complexity, leading to crashes and performance issues noted by players at launch.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The Dynasties and Their Stories
Urban Empire’s narrative ambition is one of its most compelling, yet undercooked, aspects. The game frames its two-century campaign not through a single city, but through the lens of four playable political dynasties, each with a unique worldview and five characters—one for each era.

• The Von Pfilzens: Militaristic, conservative aristocrats who believe in a rigid social hierarchy, tradition, and stability. They are the embodiment of the Blue Blood and Moral Guardians tropes, often clashing with progressive change.
• The Sant’Elias: Tech-savvy Italian innovators and risk-takers with a disdain for conservatism. They are classic Emperor Scientists, viewing mayoral duties as secondary to scientific progress.
• The Kilgannons: A working-class Irish family, heavily involved in labor movements and populist politics. They are the Working-Class Heroes, championing social justice and workers’ rights.
• The Shuyskys: A family of Russian-Jewish immigrants and patrons of the arts, representing cultural sophistication and, later, the complicated position of being a Russian family during the Cold War—a clear nod to the This Is Gonna Suck trope.

The game uses these families to explore Deliberate Values Dissonance. Events force players to confront the social mores of each era. In the first era, your heir falling in love with a lower-class woman isn’t a romance to be celebrated; it’s a problem to be managed, with options only for how coldly to break it off. Later, you might grapple with edicts on homosexuality or witness a Von Pfilzen committing Domestic Abuse, with choices affecting your political standing. The newspapers frequently engage in It Will Never Catch On humor, mocking inventions like trains or telephones that history would prove revolutionary.

Thematic Execution and Shortcomings
Thematically, Urban Empire attempts to critique the deterministic march of liberal European history. As noted by critics like Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the game’s “incessant march towards the present is not an ongoing process actively shaped by individual players, but a foregone conclusion.” This creates a fundamental tension. While you can roleplay as a staunch conservative, the game’s systems and event outcomes often inherently favor progressive policies, making it exceedingly difficult to maintain power with a right-wing agenda—a fascinating, if frustrating, commentary on historical inevitability.

However, the narrative depth is undermined by repetition. The unique family stories and events provide initial flavor, but across multiple playthroughs, the political parties and event outcomes feel predictable. The roleplaying potential is vast on paper, but in practice, it’s diluted by gameplay systems that don’t adequately support divergent political paths.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Core Loop: Council Chambers and The Wheel of Life
At its heart, Urban Empire is a game of menus and council votes. The core gameplay loop is thus:
1. Identify a city need (e.g., more residential space, a new police station).
2. Draft a proposal and bring it to the city council.
3. Lobby political parties before the vote using a limited set of actions: Plead, Demand, Threaten, or later, Blackmail (via espionage).
4. Hope the vote passes. If it fails, use accumulated “Goodwill” to override them—a risky move that damages relations.
5. Manage the city’s budget and research new technologies in the “Progress Cloud” between votes.

This is the “City Ruler” concept in action. It’s a stark departure from the god-like power of SimCity. Every significant action requires political capital. The intention was to create a tense, strategic dance of diplomacy.

The simulation is driven by the “Wheel of Life,” a system that measures eight needs for citizens and political parties: Happiness, Social Life, Security, Environment, Health, Personal Growth, Money, and Fun. Your success is tied to balancing these needs.

Critical Flaws and Opaque Systems
This is where the game’s most significant flaws emerge. Critics and players universally panned the game’s utter lack of transparency. As IGN noted, “Tooltip use is unfortunately sporadic.” The PC Games (Germany) review stated, “Urban Empire geizt mit Informationen” (Urban Empire is stingy with information).

• Unintuitive Feedback: The Wheel of Life displays needs as numerical offsets from an era’s target (e.g., “-4 Health”), making it impossible to know the actual values. Players are left guessing what actions will move the needle.
• Unpredictable Politics: As GameStar’s reviewer lamented, “It is not clear how the citizens choose their parties.” Voting outcomes often defied all logical predictions based on party alignment, turning the political layer into a frustrating guessing game.
• Simplistic City-Building: The city-building itself is shockingly simplistic. You don’t zone individual blocks or design road networks. You place entire pre-defined districts and adjust sliders for their density and composition. There is no fine-grained control. As Save or Quit’s review concluded, this aspect is “bland” and makes the city feel like it “builds itself.”
• Repetition: The constant cycle of lobbying and voting, without deeper systemic variation, quickly becomes monotonous. The 4Players.de review perfectly captured the fatigue: “You eventually spend hours just bribing and realize that’s all you’re doing.”

The game becomes an exercise in fighting its own UI and opaque mechanics rather than engaging with its compelling premise. Winning conditions (Science, Economic, Political, etc.) exist, but the journey to them is often more exasperating than exciting.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Aesthetic Consistency and Historical Flavor
Urban Empire’s visual and auditory presentation is arguably its strongest suit. The game presents a handsome, if not technically groundbreaking, depiction of a Central European city evolving over two centuries. The art direction effectively sells the transition from soot-covered industrial revolution slums to the gleaming glass of a modern metropolis. The districts are dense and detailed, with a vibrant color palette that helps different zone types pop.

The user interface, while informationally flawed, is aesthetically clean and styled with appropriate period touches for each era. The council chamber, where so much of the game takes place, is a nicely rendered, if static, backdrop for the political drama.

Sound Design: The Unqualified Success
The soundtrack, composed by Tapani Siirtola, is a masterpiece of ambiance and thematic reinforcement. Tracks like “Birth of the City” for the first era are stirring and perfectly capture the hope and grit of founding a new municipality. The music evolves seamlessly with the eras, incorporating new instruments and styles to mirror the technological and social progress. The sound design during council meetings uses tense, quiet buildups to accentuate the importance of votes. Even the most critical reviews, such as the one on Save or Quit, singled out the “excellent” sound design as a high point that complemented the solid visuals.

Atmosphere vs. Interaction
The world looks and sounds alive, but it often feels static. Citizens are simulated in the abstract through the Wheel of Life, not as visible entities with routines. The world-building is therefore more of a picturesque diorama—a backdrop for the political menu navigation rather than a living, breathing city you interact with directly. This creates a dissonance; you are managing the soul of a city you can never truly touch or shape creatively.

Reception & Legacy

Launch: A Tepid Response
Urban Empire launched to a mixed-to-average critical reception. It holds a Metascore of 62 and a Steam rating of “Mostly Negative,” based on 35% positive reviews from nearly 1,750 users. The critical consensus, as seen across sources from IGN (6.4/10) to GameWatcher (7/10), was remarkably consistent: a brilliant premise undermined by poor execution.

Reviewers praised the novel concept, the dynastic roleplaying, and the soundtrack. However, they universally condemned the opaque systems, lack of player agency in city-building, repetitive political gameplay, and numerous technical bugs. It was seen as a game that demanded patience and forgiveness its design did not earn. As ChoicestGames concluded, it was a “rather restrictive and confusing city builder, with a rather bland political layer.”

Lasting Legacy: A Cautionary Tale
Urban Empire’s legacy is not one of influence but of caution. It did not spawn a new genre of “City Rulers.” Instead, it serves as a case study in the perils of over-ambition and under-explanation. It demonstrated that layering complex political simulation onto a city-builder requires an unparalleled commitment to clarity, feedback, and player agency—commitments the small team at Reborn Games could not fulfill.

Its influence is perhaps most felt as a negative example. Games like Tropico 6 continued to refine the formula of charismatic autocracy, while Cities: Skylines doubled down on creative freedom. Urban Empire stands alone, a bold experiment that isolated the exact mechanics needed for such a hybrid to work and, in failing to execute them, showed just how difficult they are to get right. It has found a small, niche audience among players fascinated by its ideas, but it remains a title recommended only at a deep discount for the most curious and patient strategy fans.

Conclusion

Urban Empire is a game of profound contradiction. It is a title brimming with ambitious ideas—a 200-year dynastic saga, a deep political simulation, a commentary on historical progress—yet it is delivered through some of the most opaque and frustrating mechanics in the genre. Its heart is in the right place, seeking to simulate the true cost of democratic governance, but its brain fails to communicate its rules to the player.

For every moment of satisfaction earned from pushing a contentious policy through a divided council, there are hours of confusion, battling an interface that hides crucial information and a simulation that feels arbitrary. Its excellent art and sound design build a world it doesn’t allow you to truly inhabit or creatively shape.

Ultimately, Urban Empire is not a bad game; it is a disappointing one. It is the blueprint for a masterpiece that was never built. It proves that a great concept alone is not enough. It requires execution, clarity, and a deep respect for the player’s time and intelligence. For that reason, Urban Empire’s place in history is secured not as a landmark, but as a fascinating footnote—a beautiful, broken monument to what might have been.