MEMORIAPOLIS Review

In the past few years, city-building games have seen a resurgence from the stale formula developed by games such as Banished and SimCity. Games like Manor Lords have sought to shake up the genre, developing different styles to make them stand out in the sea of city-building games. New games with creative ideas are being released every now and then, MEMORIAPOLIS among them, bringing a fresh and innovative niche into the city-building genre.

MEMORIAPOLIS is a pleasant mix of city-building reminiscent of Cities Skylines and, to a certain extent, 4X games like Civ. In essence, the game lets you design a city, not like an engineer, where you thoroughly plan out every minute detail, but instead, as a gardener who sows the seeds that guide your city throughout the ages. MEMORIAPOLIS has been developed by 5PM Studio, an enthusiastic French Indie developer.

 

You manage, develop, and grow your city, encompassing different eras that span hundreds of years. 5PM Studio offers you all that and much more in this nuanced take on the city-building genre. With its organic growth mechanics, where your city and its citizens develop and expand independently, and six different and unique ruling styles, MEMORIAPOLIS will surely offer you an unforgettable experience and ample replayability.

You start by selecting one of six ruling styles from each cultural facet for your dynasty, setting up your ancient camp on the map, and watching as roads weave and connect to your new city center. Yes, MEMORIAPOLIS automatically creates roads and paths connecting different city parts. Not only that, but you also don't build houses or manage resources; they take care of themselves.

Your citizens start building around the camp by themselves. These residential buildings, or civilian quarters, as I like to call them, are split into districts. As you collect resources, you can watch your people collect them and distribute them automatically. Hovering over the resources at your top bar highlights the areas on the map that contain those resources.

Resource collection is proximity-based, so you don’t have to place them exactly on top of the resources. There are also some specific quirks to resource collection. Farms don’t have an exact size; instead, you place a main building around which the farms are built procedurally. You can change the size of this area as well. So, placing the farms in large open areas maximizes efficiency.

On the other hand, the small quarry can collect different resources, including clay, sand, and stone. But the catch is that you have to pick one of these to be collected first in an area, and once you select it, you can’t change it until all of these specific resources are collected. In addition to requiring resources, buildings need workers; you get these workers naturally as your population grows.

 

Sometimes, the territorial expanse of your city might not be enough to reach certain resources; in these cases, you have two options. You use these prospector’s towers to lightly expand your territory or build the Macellum. The Macellum is a service-building type, and it lets you connect to trade routes with other cities to import or export resources. There are other service buildings, such as the Horreum, which provides you with a large storage capacity, or the Senatus, which we will elaborate on shortly.

Make sure to maintain the satisfaction within your city as it expands. Satisfaction is split into sub-types, presenting dilemmas such as plague outbreaks, fires, and so on if untended for too long. Certain buildings, such as production buildings, will annoy your citizens, reducing satisfaction, while others will increase their satisfaction.

The principal way you achieve this is by building cultural buildings with six types, each representing the six cultural facets your city can embody. They are Production, Military, Religion, Education, Commerce, and Politics. You unlock these cultural buildings with blueprints. These buildings influence the districts around them, increasing satisfaction while fostering the growth of factions.

These cultural buildings shift the overall beliefs of your people and give bonuses. However, they also bring factions with them. In MEMORIAPOLIS, factions have their desires and ideals, and to ensure they remain happy, you have to build the cultural buildings they like. Each faction also gives you small bonuses, such as if you let them into your city and inhabit and control a certain district.

As they gain popularity, you will unlock newer and better cultural buildings. Eventually, when you build the Senatus, you can pass policies to appease disgruntled factions, give you bonuses, and so on. These policies are split into the six facets of culture that the factions are based around, and once in a while, you will get new factions to take power in the Senate.

 

Remember, not all policies are liked by everyone, and factions can vote to oppose or side with them. Thankfully, there is a system to bribe them to ensure your laws and policies pass. A little corruption never hurts anyone, does it?

This unique ruling style system and faction dynamics make MEMORIAPOLIS a game that will keep you engaged and intrigued, always striving to keep your citizens and factions happy. Sometimes, certain factions will outweigh any benefits they provide, being unhappy and clashing with other factions. In these cases, you may expel these factions from your city, for better or worse.

As your city grows, you will note that you are running out of space to build on, and your production buildings cannot handle the strain of your increasing needs. Upgrading your city center will expand the territory you control, but that will only get you so far. Remember those blueprints we talked about? This is where they come in.

MEMORIAPOLIS's tech tree uses these blueprints to unlock higher-tier and newer cultural buildings. These buildings offer improved resource gathering rates and storage at the cost of resources that you need to upgrade the buildings themselves. The blueprints you get are limited until you level up your main center to a certain level.

After this, you unlock the architect’s office, which then continuously generates blueprints. You can also unlock higher tiers for the architect’s office to boost your blueprint generation. The tech trees for some resource buildings have two branches; these let you specialize your resource buildings further, allowing them to access other types of production.

With the added boost in resources, you eventually get enough to upgrade your city center, giving you access to new buildings, resources, and mechanics until you eventually either fulfill all objectives or run out of time and enter a new era.

As you transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, you will lose out on almost all of your cultural buildings as they become abandoned and establish a new city center. This process is what we refer to as a 'soft reset.' It's like starting a new chapter in your city's history.

You will also get locked out of other mechanics for the time being. As you upgrade your center, you will return newer versions of many of these mechanics, such as the 'Reserve,' which are essentially similar to the trade mechanic you get in antiquity. Similarly, you will get to unlock and reset parts of the tech tree, specifically those dealing with cultural buildings and wonders.

Upgrading your center will unlock service buildings such as the Belfry, Library, and Master Builder’s office and give you access to mechanics like the 'Urban planning rules' and 'Know How'. These mechanics are crucial for your city's efficient management and growth in its later stages.

Urban planning rules allow you to set specific guidelines for your city's development, while 'Know How' provides advanced knowledge and techniques to overcome challenges. The Belfry lets you manage an offscreen army and send troops to conflicts, returning with fame and resources if they succeed.

At this stage, you can still repair and evolve many of your ancient cultural buildings by upgrading them with those of your Middle Ages cultural buildings. You also have to extract increasingly more resources, expanding from the usuals, such as timber, stone, and clay, to iron, gold, and steel.

Eventually, in MEMORIAPOLIS you will build wonders, great buildings that offer many boons and are necessary to increase your city's standing in the world. But beware: Building takes a lot of resources and time, making it a decision you should not take lightly.

 

MEMORIAPOLIS has a lot of features and mechanics. And when we say a lot, we mean it. There are about a dozen different mechanics, ranging from politics and alliances to trade. These make the game incredibly complex and give you many things to do and care for. However, it is also clunky and, at times, underdeveloped. You should know this, as it can affect the overall gaming experience.

Still, in MEMORIAPOLIS, this is twisted a little, with the soft resets incurred after aging up. While to the average player, this might seem frustrating, we can understand the developer's goal in making a truly historically realistic game and experience. We can also appreciate the lengths the game goes to make you feel like you're a part of the wider world with its world events involving key historical civilizations.

While MEMORIAPOLIS lacks polish and refinement, it shows immense potential for future development and improvement, especially given its early access status. This should excite any player about the game's future and its possibilities.

On the other hand, MEMORIAPOLIS is a visual masterpiece; the visuals seem handcrafted, and the game already appears iconic. This makes a lot of sense if you know the background of some developers behind the game. Each building looks beautiful, and the organic growth complements this; sometimes, we just ponder how good things look instead of addressing the fire burning through the old parts of the city.

You can be a little frustrated at the inability to remove roads or civilian structures, zoom in, or even the small font size. However, things like these can often be attributed to still being a work in progress. We do not doubt that many of these nooks and crannies will eventually get hammered out.

We also feel that a large part of the appeal for such a remarkable game and memorable experience, MEMORIAPOLIS, lacks atmosphere and sound design. The use of lo-fi beats and almost generic music detracts from the experience, and the inability to zoom in makes your city feel empty and lifeless. Overall, the sound and atmosphere leave a lot to be desired.

It should be noted that the game was only released a short while ago, and the developers have already addressed much of the feedback, stating their intent to look into things.

MEMORIAPOLIS offers fresh new mechanics and innovative ideas that would put games like the Civilizations series to shame while offering stunning visuals. The game might just turn into a city-builder RTS gem with its current foundations, in time at least. However, it needs a few rounds of cutting and polishing and some supporting elements to truly take place in the annals of great city-building games.