Memoriapolis Early Access review: A city-builder across three ages

More Cities: Skylines than Anno

5PM Studio

Games mostly portray history as a one-way road towards progress: When you research the next epoch in Civilization or Age of Empires, you’ll get access to new units and technologies and all of your buildings get an immediate facelift to look more impressive. That’s not really how our history works, but it’s a necessary abstraction to make players feel like the investment in a new age is a worthwhile one – and, naturally, we’d like to flatter ourselves by thinking that our time is the target all of history has worked towards.

Memoriapolis, a city-builder by 5PM Studio, is looking at history through a more realistic lens: It’s not all progress all the time – things get forgotten, fall into ruin, and get bulldozed over. An entire town may move locations over time, despite being founded nearby in ancient times, as it strives to gain more resources and building space. 

Memoriapolis simulates these aspects with an age system akin to that from Civilization: You start in antiquity, enter the medieval age, and finally the renaissance. These epochs have hard time limits, but you can also enter them earlier if you fulfill some conditions, in which case the remaining time from the age you’re leaving behind will be added to the next one. Whenever a new era dawns, you get to place a new town center on the map, gradually expanding the area your city covers.

This isn’t a 1:1 representation of history, naturally. Some towns moved position, but most towns simply built over their predecessors – try digging a hole in any older city of Western Europe and you’ll inevitably hit the Roman layer. However, it’s the first city-builder – to my knowledge – that even attempts to incorporate this as a mechanic and it works pretty well. Towards the end of an epoch, you will usually struggle for building space. It feels like your town is suffocating and on the brink of starvation – natural reasons for why the citizens would want to expand their boundaries.

Another key feature of aging up is that some of the public buildings you’ve constructed – from your markets and amphitheaters over to workshops hewing statues – will decay. They will lose their function and need to be restored – expensively so – if you want to have their bonuses. Again, the intention here is to simulate that much knowledge was forgotten over time – many buildings lost their original functions and were either scrapped for materials (the Colosseum stands testament to that) or dedicated to other things. Many Roman temples and market halls became churches (hence “basilica” becoming a word associated with houses of worship).

In this town, a medieval cathedral and ancient structures coexist. In reality, the cathedral would probably incorporate the amphitheater into its facade. / 5PM Studio

Memoriapolis doesn’t go quite as far – but perhaps it should. I’d love it if I could take the husks of my non-functioning buildings and give them a new life outside of simply restoring them. I applaud the developers for running with this concept, despite it feeling somewhat counterintuitive from the player’s perspective. You don’t want to get punished for advancing to the next age, right? It feels a little weird, I will admit, but then consider it a carrot and stick type of deal: You get more space for building as well.

This soft reset happens in other areas as well: Things like Memoriapolis’ political system need to be unlocked by constructing an age’s political center, so a city senate for antiquity, for example – which means that gameplay systems get stripped away from time to time without an immediate replacement. Again, this is wholly appropriate for what the devs are trying to simulate here, while feeling unusual as a player.

I feel like this entire setback approach would work better if there was more to do for players from the get-go. Memoriapolis is not a city-builder with a deep economic system like Anno. It feels like a very casual version of Cities: Skylines. The only resources you actively produce are building materials like wood, stone, iron, and so on, and food. This is somewhat expanded in later ages, but you’ll never get a fully simulated economy here in which you can track resources from point A to B to C and see them refined into commodities to sell.

Citizens still have needs, of course: They want to eat, feel secure, and have a dependable community. You fulfill these needs by placing public structures and then attract people to the area, leading to them automatically building a new district of homes there. It’s a somewhat passive approach, as you simply balance a couple of need bars on the screen by building with the biggest challenge being resource and space management. More management is required to keep order and peace between all the different factions settling in these districts, but this is tied to the political system. You can also import and export resources to balance your reserves.

Memoriapolis isn’t short on such subsystems to buff out the rather shallow city-building, but – as described above – these get stripped away from time to time, leaving you with nothing much to do. Sure, you can watch the hustle and bustle of town, but that’ll only make you chuckle at some of the pathfinding the citizens take.

Not keeping the peace between factions may lead to fires. / 5PM Studio

Memoriapolis leaves some potential untapped, both thematically and in terms of gameplay. Take water management, for example: It’s non-existent. It would be a good addition to the city-building tasks, giving the player a little more to do than wait for the resource counters to tick up, but it’d be an incredible lens to look at Memoriapolis’ take on history – you could have great water management tools in antiquity thanks to aqueducts, but these would erode as time goes on, leaving players with a water crisis to solve in the medieval age. Abandoning districts that can’t be supplied with wells or even moving the town’s core to a location with more accessible groundwater could serve as a better motivator to spread out your city. It would connect the theme of historical setbacks and losses much more tightly with the gameplay on top of, well, offering more gameplay.

At the moment, too many of Memoriapolis systems are too shallow to be engaging for long, and that’s unfortunate, because I really appreciate what the developers are trying to achieve here – it’s a pretty unique representation of history for a video game. I’m very keen to see where development goes throughout Early Access.

You can find Memoriapolis on Steam.