Imagine Earth

I went in expecting a breezy city builder and came out two sessions later genuinely stressed about rising sea levels on a fictional moon. That tension is the core promise of Imagine Earth, and for the most part it delivers. You are a colony manager for a small corporation competing against larger, greedier rivals across nine distinct planets, each with its own biome quirks and resource mix. The setup sounds familiar, but the pressure mechanics are not: overpollute and you trigger a cascade of natural disasters that eat into the landmass you need to expand; pull back on industry too hard and your population shrinks, starving your income. The game does not let you table that decision for later the way Civilization 6 lets you ignore a struggling city. The structural backbone is a three-mode package. Campaign walks you through six increasingly complex scenarios and functions as both story and tutorial, drip-feeding new mechanics at a reasonable pace even if it front-loads references to the tech license system before that system is actually available. Competition mode drops you onto a planet with rival AI corporations fighting for economic dominance, and the share-buyout mechanic, where you purchase stock in an opponent's colony until you can absorb it entirely, adds a layer of economic warfare that most city builders skip entirely. Endless mode is pure sandbox, no objectives, no rivals, just you and a planet at your own pace. The license system itself is the most original gear in the machine: instead of a standard research tree, most technologies are already patented by larger corporations, so you gain free licenses by raising your civilization score past set thresholds, creating a constant incentive to grow responsibly rather than just efficiently. Upgrading facilities, from basic coal plants toward wind farms and solar arrays, generates meaningful forward momentum across every session. For genre newcomers, the on-ramp is friendlier than it first appears. The spherical planet maps are condensed and readable, built on a triangular grid rather than a flat hex plane, which keeps colony footprints manageable. The real-time pace can be bumped to high speed during stable stretches, then dialed back when a methane disaster is approaching your eastern districts. What does blunt the entry experience is the tutorial's habit of mentioning systems several planets before they unlock, and the UI can get cluttered once you are running three city centers simultaneously. The visual noise complaint from the community is legitimate: late-game dense colonies blur together in a way that makes reading adjacency bonuses and pollution spread harder than it should be. On the technical side, PC players in the Steam release are in a more stable position than console ports, which drew criticism for crashes during rapid camera rotation. The Steam Workshop tag means community scenarios and maps exist, which extends replay value past the base content. Forty or fifty hours with the campaign and a handful of competition runs will not feel padded, and the endless mode adds an indefinite ceiling for players who enjoy optimizing their build order once the pressure of objectives is gone. Voice acting and NPC writing are functional but flat, characters hover at the robotic end of the dial. The soundtrack leans into a calming retro sci-fi register that suits the slower build phases and shifts dynamically when things go sideways, a small production win for a two-person studio. Solid without being exceptional is the honest summary. The sustainability theme is woven into actual mechanics rather than bolted on as a narrative flourish, which is what keeps it from feeling like a message game wearing a city builder costume. If you have a save file in Cities: Skylines and fond memories of Alpha Centauri, this is a comfortable next step with enough original friction to matter.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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