When it comes to city-building simulations there have been a pretty wide variety of takes over the years, ranging from ones that are more focused on minutia to ones that emphasize the bigger picture. Regardless of how things shake out in that area, there’s typically a balance of strategic challenges in meeting your people’s needs, ensuring you have the resources needed to survive, and exercising some personal flair in making your cities your own. Summit Kingdom does adhere to most of that formula, with its most notable change being a move to setting up your cities on much higher ground in the mountains. Unfortunately, to a fair degree it feels like what it gains in novelty is lost in overall flexibility though.

What’s nice about Laysara is that with a move to a different culture and geographic region, your needs and the means to growth are refreshingly different. The crops and livestock you’ll be working with are a departure from the norm, the majority of the resources you’ll need to keep people happy feel fresh, and in general it does at least feel like you’ll need to learn some things here rather than just start applying your typical expectations for planning to your budding towns. In general, it’s also nice that the developers seemed to understand that players would need a little extra support, providing a fair amount of direction to help explain some concerns and constraints you’ll have in getting started successfully.

Unfortunately, the change in locale has some downsides that come along for the ride that can feel limiting, if not a bit frustrating, depending on the experience you’re looking for. Unsurprisingly, up in the mountains one thing you can perpetually expect to be true is that you’ll be space constrained, so you’ll quickly learn that everything you put in place needs to be carefully considered. Complicating matters is the fact that many of your buildings need to critically be within a limited range from one another. While with some trial and error as you get started you’ll get more comfortable with how this will dictate how you lay things out, it does fundamentally change the typical city-building sim experience from being strategic into almost being more puzzle-like. Proximity mixed with a lack of space means that there will be only so many ways that you can arrange your buildings and resources, not only making the experience feel a bit more picky, but also robbing people who enjoy making their cities their own of their typical means of satisfaction as well. The result is something that’s absolutely unique, and that has value, but that also may not match up with some players’ expectations for a game of this type.