Urbek City Builder: an organic city builder

[Dutchdragon 74]

If you're looking for a city builder with a focus on organic, authentic looking neighbourhoods, look no further than Urbek. 

You start from humble beginnings: you zone some farms and houses, build some roads and lumberjack cabins and manage their respective resources. As your city grows, you'll get more things to build and more resources. Because all buildings require resources from each other, you get a sense of the complexity of a city. It's somewhat like a puzzle. You can't just expand on one aspect of the city without tending to others. It's possible to organically create anything from quaint farm villages to polluted slums with rebel houses, from religious neighbourhoods to gentrified areas with wine bars, and so on.

On top of that the graphics are great. From the default orthographic view it looks like a 2D sprite game, but it's actually fully 3D with charming voxel models. If you want to experience walking or flying around in your town, you can!

After having played only SimCity and Cities Skylines, this game is a breath of fresh air.

[Rachelkin 2]

On 4/4/2023 at 1:04 AM, Dutchdragon said:

If you're looking for a city builder with a focus on organic, authentic looking neighbourhoods, look no further than Urbek. 

You start from humble beginnings: you zone some farms and houses, build some roads and lumberjack cabins and manage their respective resources. As your city grows, you'll get more things to build and more resources. Because all buildings require resources from each other, you get a sense of the complexity of a city. It's somewhat like a puzzle. You can't just expand on one aspect of the city without tending to others. It's possible to organically create anything from quaint farm villages to polluted slums with rebel houses, from religious neighbourhoods to gentrified areas with wine bars, and so on.

On top of that the graphics are great. From the default orthographic view it looks like a 2D sprite game, but it's actually fully 3D with charming voxel models. If you want to experience walking or flying around in your town, you can!

After having played only SimCity and Cities Skylines, this game is a breath of fresh air.

It sounds like Urbek offers a unique blend of strategy and creativity for city-building enthusiasts. The emphasis on interconnected resources and the potential to develop diverse urban areas is intriguing. The voxel graphics add a charming layer, making the exploration aspect more enjoyable. Since you've experienced SimCity and Cities Skylines, how does Urbek's approach to resource management and city planning compare to these titles? Does the transition from 2D to 3D enhance your gameplay experience?

[Dutchdragon 74]

@Rachelkin
Like Cities Skylines, Urbek has resources present on the map like iron and wood. It has only three zoning types: residential, farming and logistics. There is no money system. Instead, each building provides and consumes resources. The only resources at the start are food, labor and wood, produced by farms, houses and lumberjack cabins respectively. As your city grows you'll unlock buildings which provide and consume other resources like skilled labor, power, coal, etc. giving your city more complexity. With the enactment of laws you can influence the output of certain buildings. There are also some less straight forward "resources" like connectivity, pollution and self-organization. Those provide some pretty interesting buildings like parking lots, shanty towns and anarchy bars. For example if "connectivity" is low in a certain area parking lots will eventually spring up and claim valuable space where houses once stood. To combat this you can build bus stations but these require iron, so it's really puzzle-like.

I definitely recommend it! 

[Atur_Official 19]

Such an underrated 2022 Sleeper Hit smh

[Badfish301 60]

I bought Urbek and found it interesting for a while, but it's almost more of a puzzle game in how the model is applied than a city builder most people might recognize.

I found it fun for a bit, but then that pretty quickly wore off when I realized every building is just kind of used to "stack" density, and it fell short for me.  You could argue the same is done in SimCity, but it was much more obvious here.

Some people like it, but it's not really what I was looking for. I prefer the SimCity 4 type city growth model/city simulation.  Also, voxels in the right setting are fine, but I think I am expecting more from graphics with what we have today.

Not to be a downer, or take away that you enjoy it, but that was just my experience with it.

Also, aren't they trying to sell trains as a DLC? 

[Dutchdragon 74]

@Badfish301 After a few months I can say SimCity has more staying power for me as well, but I still like Urbek. I haven't tried the trains DLC. Looks a bit weird since railroads don't translate well due to the lack of curves in Urbek.

[Badfish301 60]

On 1/7/2025 at 9:59 AM, Dutchdragon said:

@Badfish301 After a few months I can say SimCity has more staying power for me as well, but I still like Urbek. I haven't tried the trains DLC. Looks a bit weird since railroads don't translate well due to the lack of curves in Urbek.

Yeah, that's another issue I have with Urbek... and the ANNO games for that matter. 

It's now 2025-  We need more angles than just 90 degree angles for roads and rail.  SimCity 4 had 45 degree roads and that was a while ago now.  I just can't play a game anymore that does the 90 degree angles everywhere thing. To me, games that don't have at least a 45 degree angle for roads and rail are just being lazy at this point. It isn't "cute" anymore, it's just lazy.

That said- I did not like Cities Skylines 2 very much, even though the roads were amazing, because the city simulation wasn't there, and they didn't understand what City Building fans were mostly looking for in the challenge of getting taller buildings and higher wealth.   I would rather play A-train to be honest.

New City did a great job with density and city simulation, with ok graphics, but the road layout mechanism was great- it had most of the less than 90 degree angles you would want, and a pre-existing kind of grid layout that helped with laying out larger blocks etc.  It also had a great map generator, not to get off topic here.

The main issue I had with Urbek though was again that it is more of a puzzle game than a city simulation game, albeit in an urban setting.   There wasn't a city-center effect really, as much as requirements in order to get density where you had to kind of "stack" grocery stores etc. to get taller buildings.  Also, I'm not from Chile, so the buildings weren't really what I was looking for either.

That said, I do try and buy any city building game that doesn't take place on the back of a wandering enormous animal, so I am not trying to talk others out of trying Urbek, and it is inexpensive.

[Paolo80 268]

Hi guys,

is there a forum dedicated to Urbek City Building with mod to exchange? I began to edit some mods for this game.

Thanks

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

18 minutes ago, Paolo80 said:

is there a forum dedicated to Urbek City Building with mod to exchange? I began to edit some mods for this game.

It's not common enough yet to have its own forum here. Same for no STEX category.

Prolly the best way to start would be to create a new thread in this same "City-Building Games" forum and call it something like "Urbek: Downloadable Mods" and then attach them to posts. You could use the first post like a table of contents where you can have clickable links to other posts as you expand the number of mods. (As the topic starter you'd be able to edit that whenever you want.)

Later, if we see a massive amount of activity then we could consider giving Urbek its own section.

Or, you can create a Club for the game and then you have your own version of the board software with Forums and a Files section and such. 

[catty-cb 4,392]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Or, you can create a Club for the game and then you have your own version of the board software with Forums and a Files section and such

Yes that's what we did for Banished if you want to take a look at how that looks