• Playtime: 25 minutes

• Played: 2026

• Context: I liked Sim City and Tropico 4/5 but bounced off most other city builders.

Review

For me the draw of a city builder is making a nice looking city, doing some quests and maybe even enjoy the story. Mini Settlers has none of these things. All you do is place coloured blocks with an icon and build roads so icons can move between these blocks. The only things you have to take into account are space and roads, there is no money, no pollution, no crime, etc. Not only is it infinitely more basic than Sim City from 1989, it also looks worse.

And on top of that buildings are needlessly gated behind population counts. You can't even build a small storage until you reach 100 pop, let alone anything other than the handful of starting buildings. So you can't even create a proper layout until you have waited for your houses to grow big enough, which takes a while even on max speed.