'Brutally honest' city builder Microlandia gets brutally honest crime simulation: 'It's a spectrum of consequences that can become a death spiral every single day'

A screenshot of a newspaper generated in Microlandia, with the headline "Petty Thieves Go Big" and an image of a police car.

(Image credit: Information Superhighway Games)

Most city-builders are creative toolsets with an optional management sim attached, canvasses for the imagination with a budget you might glance at occasionally. But Microlandia is built different. The city-builder developed by Information Superhighway Games is designed to be "brutally honest". Roads are expensive, traffic jams can cost your citizens their jobs, and uncontrolled rent prices can trigger a homelessness crisis.

One area where Microlandia wasn't quite so forthright, however, was crime. Illegal activity was only simulated in the broadest terms within textureless cityscapes. But that's all changed. Microlandia's recently released update 1.5 makes crime vastly more complicated and, as a consequence, vastly more challenging.

In a Steam post, ISG introduces the update in characteristically bold fashion: "Cities are not clockwork, they are chaos machines with a mayor attached. Most of what breaks your plans is not the ordinary day, it is the ugly little surprise that arrives precisely because you acted as if it could not," the studio writes. "Version 1.5 leans into that reality: crime is no longer a single checkbox; it's a spectrum of consequences that can become a death spiral every single day."

Microlandia 1.0 Trailer - YouTube

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The update breaks down crime into seven different categories, namely armed robbery, break-in, larceny, destruction, grand theft auto, violence, and major crime. These crimes can affect your profitability at different levels, from individual residents, through specific businesses, right up to kicking your entire city in the swag sack.

More complex crime brings with it more complex law enforcement. Players can now build a police HQ that houses 50 cops, who will patrol and respond to crimes within a specific radius of the building. The update also reworks police brains to produce "smarter" behaviour, with officers making "realistic decisions about where to patrol and how to respond to incidents."

All of this is apparently propped up by a rigid "statistical backbone". ISG says that Microlandia's crime frequency, police clearance rates, and zonal moving out behaviour are all modelled according to real-world publications on the subject, like the FBI's Crime in the Nation statistics from 2023, and Laura Dugan's 1999 paper 'The Effect of Criminal Victimization on a Household's Moving Decision'. I love it when a developer shows their working.

Alongside its major crime revision, update 1.5 makes some more general changes to Microlandia. Players can now build movie theatres, vineyards, premium condos, and two-storey houses. Both the UI and visuals have been given a clarity pass, and performance has been improved so that "large cities should feel less like punishment."

Microlandia continues to be a fascinating project. If you fancy giving it a go yourself, you can grab it on Steam for a very reasonable $7 (£5.89).

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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