Cliff Empire

Cliff Empire is a city-builder for players who like stacking systems on top of systems: power, housing, logistics, research, and resource chains all have to line up. By our assessment, its main strength is the vertical setting, which gives the whole project a different shape from the usual flat grid of the genre. The downside is the familiar one for this kind of game: once the production web gets large, small mistakes in supply or planning can ripple through everything, and the game expects steady attention. In practice it is a slow, methodical sort of building, closer to balancing a machine than decorating a skyline. Against bigger city builders it is more specialized and less about spectacle. Cliff Empire is for people who enjoy compact management problems, and it does not pretend to be a relaxed toy for casual drifting.