Citizens: Distant Lands soon on Steam – city building meets strategy puzzles

The next city-building project is coming up on Steam – but Citizens: Distant Lands is, according to the description, a rather unusual game with equally unusual graphics.

What is Citizens about?

According to the developer, two genres are mixed in Citizens: turn-based city building and strategic puzzles. The player creates cities, manages resources, plans long-term investments, trades with foreign peoples and takes care of the satisfaction of his subjects. Explore the island and solve difficult problems – the player must choose his next steps carefully, so that it is not his last. You can also do it on Steam download a demoshowing early game mechanics and the basics of combat and trading.

The area of ​​city building should offer three campaigns with quests and different levels of difficulty. There are over 50 buildings spread over numerous production chains and 30 different resources to extract, process and craft. Plagues, fires and weather affect the game. In addition to trading with other civilizations, there are also battles with enemies. According to the description, you can visit old temples or trade with outposts – or you can defend yourself against plundering Vikings. But not only barbarians are the enemies, fire and plague can also throw a spanner in the works.

If you want to be left alone and prefer to build peacefully, such as in Dorfromantik, you can try the Free Build mode. This allows buildings to be placed on a procedurally generated island without restrictions. The developer promises “endless fun with random level generation”.

Citizens’ demo comments point out that it’s a resource-managed city-builder – and the resources aren’t infinite. The concept of limited time was also well received by the previous players. The developers should only work on getting started, because at least in the demo from autumn 2021 there was a lot of learning by doing.