This is an open page about my experiences with a new "Early Access" city simulator, called NewCity. Long had I searched out such a title as a true SimCity 4 successor, in a 10+ year journey filled with false prophets, false prophets like Cities XL, SimCity (2015), and of course, Cities: Skylines. I had even started a real effort to write down what should be in city simulators and how they can be done in a modern sense.

NewCity was not a looker, it did not even look as good as Metropolisim, a product promised on Steam but with a thin-skinned developer who eventually went silent, which itself was not as good looking as Cities: Skylines, which in itself had issues. NewCity, from screenshots, just resembled small buildings with lights linked together with featureless roads. But I saw it improve, and eventually I bought it soon after it hit Early Access.

What I saw was a wonderful concept with someone who actually put thought into the way cities work (some of them I felt that the developer was on my wavelength) that was unfortunately marred by a number of bad design choices. The difference between "Bad" and "Ugly" is not just semantics, if I think a feature is "Bad", it's a feature that I find annoying and hope I can get fixed in future versions, "Ugly" is something very bad that causes disruption in-game or a serious design error.

As it stands right now, I can't recommend it unless you want to support the developers by giving them a $20 donation and in return getting a playable proof of concept as a thank you gift. I hope that in six months from this writing, all the "Bad" and "Ugly" sections are largely corrected.

The Good As a whole my hour of the game I experienced I saw a lot of things that I really liked about it and could come to see to maturity.

The game was about 770 MB, which is more than acceptable since Cities: Skylines is a bloated mess that takes up a minimum 4 GB.
There's an option to have the sun sync with the system time. As of this writing, I keep a night shift schedule, so if the sun starts rising in-game that's a bad sign. From what I observed in-game the sun starts to rise around 4am and set around 4pm. That makes sense on an equinox scale, but when I played Pokémon Gold (which used a real clock) the world went dark fairly early (6 pm), especially during the summertime when the sun stayed high in the sky until around 8 pm. Meanwhile, the sun rises (in-game) at 4 in the morning!
Buildings can be empty without abandonment. The whole "abandoned building goes grey" even in Cities: Skylines is a carryover from SimCity 2000. Reality: there's a lot of empty buildings that can be empty without abandonment (and even with abandonment, many buildings, especially commercial ones, go through some degree of maintenance if only to keep up with city code).
Buildings have a build date. Whether that's window dressing that can provide a neat time capsule into your city or affects the tax rate is unknown.
Buildings can have multiple tenants and mix zone types. This is a GREAT feature, as it allows for (theoretically) accurate things like strip malls, apartments, office towers, malls, and mixed-use buildings yet still allows for single-type zoning (a simple house or a fast food restaurant). I don't know of any limitations currently, like to keep a restaurant always a restaurant (of some sort) or a supermarket always a supermarket.
There's actual true 3D with an option up to 120 degrees. Driving a car around a city of your very own creation can finally be achieved, in theory.
The game seems to have taken a page from modern games like Prison Architect and Factorio with blueprints and included it in the game.
The map is HUGE. While a city on a 1:1 size to Los Angeles, Houston, London, or New York City may be unplayable from a simulated city perspective, it certainly ignites the imagination and "big buildings" like airports or refineries will actually be possible to scale.
The roads can be renamed and actually be consistent, but it seems that the "St" is fixed and you can't give them names that I commonly see on a variety of roads despite their actual width (Road, Avenue, Street, Circle, Way, Court, Loop, Parkway, Drive, Place, Expressway, Highway, Tollway, Freeway...).
The property tax is realistic at 1% and not something absurd like 7%. The 7% property tax is mostly to account for all the permits and other ways of funding that old games like SimCity 2000 couldn't reasonably simulate, yet newer games stuck with that.
Businesses have opening/closing times that are independent of each other. This is a pretty cool mechanic, as once your daytime businesses (offices, etc.) close, restaurants can stay open until late night, bars stay open until last call, and you could STILL see activity through 24-hour convenience stores and diners before the city slowly reopens in the morning again. Again, that's all in theory.

The Bad I hope that the "bad" parts get ironed out in future releases. Still, these are annoyances, and most of them might end up going away. I also hope that the fixes are largely native fixes instead of trying to outsource it to modders while adding irrelevant gimmicks like Cities: Skylines did.

I don't think I can complete this little review without giving criticism to the buildings themselves. Everything looks incredibly ugly, literally little more than poorly-textured cubes with roofs. While this should be easiest to fix (Cities: Skylines has some great-looking modded buildings but that doesn't solve its bigger problems), I'm still throwing that out there. I hope that even without modding, some more attractive buildings do appear in the final product.
For a game that wants to be 1:1 there seems to be a curious lack of anything resembling driveways or parking lots. Again...that could be chalked up to the game being essentially an alpha version.
Roads look really weird, built up on embankments. The game has a feature to build trenched roads, embankments, and viaducts, but it's all for naught if regular roads at grade zero look strange (and even trenching roads still had the embankments). And while I do love the idea of easily making roads different levels and making viaducts for, say, giant rail yards, please don't serve dessert until I've had the main course.
There's no music choice, unlike SimCity 4 or SimCity 3000. I wasn't impressed with what little I heard.
The trees are basically small green cones on sticks, yet they still react to the wind. Having the trees be oversimplified (not to mention disregarding the option for different types of trees) really doesn't inspire confidence in how the final game will look.
The road creation is done by dragging out lines to form points, rather than the tile-based placement of SimCity. This is probably because NewCity has no grid but it still feels very awkward.
Even when using the default "snaps" blocks aren't fully filled out, and there's no way to tell how deep any item (like farms) is going to be.
Streets are too slow at 15 mph (I've only seen 15 mph streets in places in alleys, not even residential streets). The roads are set at 30 mph. The good thing is that this can quickly become a great feature because they don't seem to set, as there's a "Speed Limit" and "Safe Speed", so you can have a road that has a speed limit very high but no one could reasonably drive that due to reasons...too many driveways or curves...or a speed limit that's artificially low that people might drive 10 mph higher, depending on how busy the police is.
"Roads" (4 lanes) have no median, just two lanes in each direction. Truth be told, I only see that in reality on older roads where things like turn lanes are sacrificed to provide traffic flow because there's no way to widen it.
It's not clear which trees are part of zoned areas and which ones are wild.
The game still isn't handling lane narrowing visuals that well.
Where's the power lines? I know the developer mentioned it wasn't interesting ("no power, no city") but I think a modern way to handle it would be to tap into the existing grid before you start building plants (traditionally, the only way to deal with power plants would be to place a polluting power plant near the city center or spend a good chunk of money transporting power across the map).

The Ugly

SimCity 2000 had a floating menu bar that not only had options for viewing the city (as well as the budget, etc.) but 15 colorful icons for what you could place in your city, with only a few dummied out (rewards and dispatches) at the start. NewCity is just a few tiny black and white icons in the lower left side of the screen.
There doesn't appear to be true differentiation in the wealth levels of citizens, which has been a thing ever since SimCity 2000. In that game, wealth was based on land value, so a low land value area would produce small and crummy-looking rental homes while good land value would produce nice-looking houses with swimming pools. By SimCity 4, there were distinct wealth levels in houses (and jobs could employ various types of workers from different classes), as well as having the opportunity for said houses to "decline". As bad as City Life was, it took the three wealth levels of SimCity 4 into six distinct classes spanning four wealth levels. This was not particularly well-implemented in a game that was quickly forgotten about, but put the most thought into wealth levels in a city.
Like Cities: Skylines, zoning "sticks" to the side of the road and does not give an option to go deeper or wider (or stretch beyond a road's boundary). This also prevents a diverse strategy of planting strategic commercial spots along a main road, or slowly replacing an entire strip with commercial.
This can be rectified by "splitting" the road points (which costs money in-game), which creates a visual gap in the road and doesn't look good. It's almost a worse solution to an already bad problem.
For some reason, graphics are rendered this bizarre interlacing effect that brings back bad memories of when our old iMac G5 had a problem with capacitors to create this blue interlaced effect on the desktop and black boxes (or worse) on games or anything 3D. The graphic options gave nothing on how to fix this, and it was really distracting.
I spent a full hour and saw no option to add ANYTHING beyond basic roads and zoning types. Rewards are nice but don't drip-feed me like Cities: Skylines does (and by the point of population of NewCity, C:S had given me schools). At least show me a preview of what's available later.
For what is a well-thought out city simulator in many aspects, stoplights look to be just decorative with no option to make them function better (change to "smart" lights, just blink red, etc.)
The size of a tile is 25m x 25m (source) is a buzzkill. Now, I admit SimCity 4 had its own fuzzy logic when it came to scale (particularly when trying to model larger buildings), but 16m x 16m allowed for at least residential home lots to look accurate, but 25m x 25m precludes all sorts of potentially interesting features like small buildings or tight railroad right-of-ways.