I just spent a few hours tinkering around with LinCity-NG:
Review for LinCity-NG
I had a lot of high hopes for this SimCity clone. It's been a while since the last SimCity of any quality, and there have been a lot of areas targetable for improvement. Even if the game doesn;t have all of the bells and whistles of SC4, a good city builder would be a lot of fun to play.
Unfortunately, LinCity is neither good, nor fun to play.
LinCity-NG is actually a fork from the original LinCity which had been developed for four years, and the developers decided to take the code and try again. Well, they need a LinCity-NNG.
After playing around with it for a couple of hours, I am done with this game. Let's move on to the next one!
Like many city builders, you have to build infrastructure like trash collecting, roads, water and power. Water is easy, and consists of only building a well every so many residents, and you'll have water. There are roads labeled "track" and then higher quality roads. Trains. Power. Trash goes to something called a "tip."
No police stations, but you can build Fire coverage. You get two type of schools to choose from. You build residential areas in a 3x3 grid already set up for you. You can build farms. You cannot build any industrial or commerical areas. Instead, you can build your own buildings.
The game is very production heavy. There are some coal seams and you can build Coal mines. You can build Ore Mines, Communes - which make charcoal, and a few other things like Potteries and Blacksmiths and Mills.
The result is a weird looking town. You have modern late 20th century things like a Recycling Center and modern power options next to a blacksmith, communes, and wells. And nothing commercial at all. No gas stations, no stores, nothing.
Where are they shopping?
I built my first city, and no one moved in. I couldn't even figure out what was wrong, so I just loaded a pre-saved city already in progress and built from it.
The game's sounds are virtually midi level with very poor sounds. In the music, an ambulance goes by, and I swear, it's the worst ambulance sound I've heard. It sounds like it was played on a child's instrument instead of a real one. Yuck.
The graphics are acceptable but dated. Totally looks 7-9 years old.
As a result, LinCity-NG is not worth your time. Even though it was updated in January with release 2.0, this is not done, as far as I am concerned. The dynamics are off, the documentation is poor or missing, the graphics are older, the music is awful, the gameplay is mismatched at best and downright befuddling at worst. Ick.
I didn't even get to the winning conditions, and one is supposedly evacuating all of your people in spaceships.
Overall - 1 outta 5 for effort.