I am a big fan of city builders, but the vast majority of them focuses on building a city in a very specific era. Be it in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, or modern times, you usually tackle just a very specific point in time, and rarely see your town grow alongside the world surrounding it. This is what made me look forward to playing Memoriapolis. At its core, a traditional, straightforward city builder, but one that presented players with the possibility of seeing the same town being developed from Ancient Greek-Roman times up until the Industrial Revolution.

Powered by an algorithm that basically takes care of building residences, roads and supply lines while you are left planning other aspects such as extractivism points and wonders, Memoriapolis wants to give you the opportunity to see your town evolve with the times, with old buildings automatically being demolished in favor of more era-appropriate residences, for instance. While that might seem to make the overall gameplay loop feel a bit too passive, there is still a lot of stuff that you need to do in order to ensure that your city will even make to the next era, as there is always a ticking timeclock alerting you that you only have a specific amount of time before you lose this save.

No need to worry about things like roads, water, housing. While a neat timesaver, it also reduces the amount of things to do in Memoriapolis.

Progressing from period to period is straightforward: you need to have built specific buildings and have a set amount of resources in stock. Most resources sound straightforward enough to be collected: wood comes from trees, money comes from citizens paying taxes, food comes from farms, and so on. Some other resources are a bit more obtuse to be obtained, such as the three ones you get from a quarry. Depending on where you decide to place your quarry, you might just get stones, sand, clay, a combination of them, or none at all.

And this is one of the issues seen in Memoriapolis: if you end up placing your buildings in a wrong location, and if you’ve already run out of the amount of “radio towers” that allow you to, ever so slightly, expand your maximum buildable terrain, you might actually not find the resource you need in order to progress to the next “level”. Furthermore, commerce isn’t a feature that’s available from the start, being unlocked in later eras for some illogical reason. That results in a mere hiccup or lapse of judgment being enough of a reason for your entire savefile to be ruined.

Reaching a more modern era is easier said than done.

Memoriapolis doesn’t do a good job teaching you any of its mechanics, with just the very occasional window popping up to (very briefly) explain you a new feature. The map variety is near nonexistent, and I legit had to double-check I wasn’t playing an early access build, which would have given the game a mere excuse for such paultry amount of content. Even if it’s gorgeous to look at (though quite demanding for your hardware), there is just not enough visual variety in here.

I really tried to enjoy my time with Memoriapolis, especially with how good-looking it is, but constant soft locking scenarios and a lack of map variety resulted in me losing my interest with it fairly quickly. It’s out of Early Access now, so I truly expected it to have just a bit more content, maybe some randomly generated maps, and a less punishing lack of resources. I really love the premise, and wanted to witness the growth of tiny Roman village into an eighteenth century European powerhouse, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be. I’m hoping more content will be added further down the line, as there is potential for a good city builder to come out from here. As of now, however, I don’t think Memoriapolis is worth your time.

Memoriapolis is available now on PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of Memoriapolis was provided by the publisher.