Cliff Empire

My favorite city builder I've ever played. The amount of content and interest here for $15 is so great. I feel like other publishers are charging over $100 for the same level of content with DLC packs. The game is visually and audibly stunning, even in 2025. Store screenshots can't capture the attraction and smoothness.
Also, You can turn off the lady announcing "Trading platform arrived." every two minutes. Its a check box in options. After that, its zen.

After 5 years and 500 hours, I finally feel compelled to review this game.
Excellent.
Cliff Empire is a unique and compelling mix of resource management, logistics, and base building. It is not perfectly balanced in every aspect, and success often depends on specific build sequences, but the experience is consistently rewarding.
The visual styling, soundtrack, and overall artistic composition are stunning. It feels like retro-futurism imagined from a future years past, and I love it.
If you enjoy city-builders and resource management, this game deserves a place in your collection.

I can't believe I haven't given a rating to this game yet. It is hands down one of my all time favourite city builders! The concept is unique, the visuals are stunning, the soundtrack is wonderful, the atmosphere and immersion are off the charts! You can tell how much absolute love was put into this game and it has concepts absolutely nothing else has, within this genre or outside of it. It also has feautres you would never think of and have never seen in any other game. It is a work of passion and I will be playing it forever, truly a gem which will be timeless and age gracefully. Support the dev, he deserves your money and your time, buy it, and have a drink on me later!

Love the game. It has a dystopian setting, with a utopian aesthetic, and the result is stunning.

The only issue I have is the recent update to add exclaimation marks over buildings not receiving resources. For me, at least, it has a bit of an eyesore effect when trying to view and appreciate my city (I build in sandbox mode, white plains.) I would love to have the ability to turn this off in the options menu. The same goes for the priority display, which is insanely useful, but can feel like it's interrupting the experience when just trying to look at my creation for what it is. Would like to be able to turn the display on and off as needed.

It absolutely ravages through your pc with performance issues at times but beside that and some balance issues, it's a good game. It's not breaking any new grounds with gameplay mechanics. It's a city builder in its core with a pretty cool world built around it. You're limited to building on cliffs and the more time goes by the more you unlock. Things like building on the side of the cliffs or below it. Really makes you plan ahead on how your cliff will look like as you can't really pick up a building to place it somewhere else.
Now I do agree it's somewhat soulless when there aren't people exactly moving about since bulding streets are shockingly expensive and take up valuable space. Still do recomend it mostly for the fact the game is dirt cheap for the content and the developer(s) have been updating this game every once in a while with cool new content or bug fixes.

I really enjoyed the game. Getting to prestige 30 was fun to do. In the beginning it was challenging but at the end it turned more to a waiting grind. Putting it to x7 speed helped to keep it fun.
The achievements were not so fun.

10/10
I found this game a lot more relaxing, compared to factorio or similar types of games.
In factorio i always stress alot. So much to do, so much to redo, so much to plan. Here there is little to do.
Place some buildings, make sure certain numbers dont go below 100 and your good. Personally i focus on self sustaining and making money. If some disaster comes and for example your food is low just buy it.
You just here to see number go up. And enjoy scenery.
I don't like how easy it is to remove data. Accidental click and your 1000+ day data is gone, can't fix it, only reload save.
I don't like how there is no way to see exactly how much 1 building can make of it's product. I know that there is statistics but it's overall data, not focused. You can guess or try gather data by removing every other(same) building and then writing it down. But you need to wait for i to happen.
Offices before modular buildings are kinda useless. They make little money, eat alot of energy and require alot of workers. Only bonus i found from them is they just make money out of thing air. Which is good but not a lot.
Tutorial is good but very easy to abuse. Even if you set every setting on hard you just cant indefinetely cit inside 1 task which you totally can just ignore(Town hall one, who uses it anyway, Capitol 100 times better) and safely stockpile money.
There is no inflation but Stolen money scale to the amount of money you have which is good but a problem when reaching space station. How ffs people from Space Station steal money from Cities so far away is a mystery to me.
I like how each time you reach new stage of progression it forces you to rebuild quite a lot but not everything.
Big minus from progression(Medals) is there is no way to slow it down or speed it up. I want to understand what this building goes but there is simply not enough time before it can be done. Or if i don't want to spend 6h of irl time trying to reach 25 Medals. Frustrating.
And penalty is rather odd. After you reach decent amount of money making you can simply ignore it every time. at worst it only about 2k which is like half a day of income( for me). It would be good if it was scaling with your income to about 75% of 5 day income. But it can be a bit punishing. It's like being forced to do what you dont want to do. For example sell 200 batteries. Yes i can produce 200 batteries and even have it stockpiled but 35min is not enough to SELL it. Rebuilding all of your cities because Space ships REFUSE to take more than 25 units per 1 flight:/ You have so much free space yet don't want to use it.
I'm not sure how to evaluate raiders so i'm gonna just ignore them.
Laws. Good idea but a bit pointless. Except Dietary supplements I and Increased taxation( Must have both in every city, even if fish is present, better sell it)everything else can be ignored( Overproduction is good).
There is no point in law of newborn help, because Landing pod does better job at it
Law of disaster mode is good but no use if you have United bank
Military committee is too expensive -7 for each city. Should be around -3 maybe -4
What is the point of night work shift. So expensive and so meaningless. When you have 1000 people you have to pay 50 taxation. For only 35% bonus to night shift. No go from me.
Now research
Underground delivery mode is must have. Underground storage is pointless. fertiliser is partially pointless, If it were about 8 percent then maybe but 5% for 4 tiles is a no go. I couldnt find use of drone station because undergound delivery mode does better job at it. Why not change fish research for idunno, better offices. Instead of +9 of big offices(before laws) make it +18(AS if Laws were active) and with (both)laws make +36. So much better
After you researched everything you could you can completely ignore education. 5x research as 5% bonus for any field is too small. Even if Education After all research was that be good. For example If I researched everying and have about 100 needed Education in the city make it multiply it's Education thingy. Like 100% satisfaction in each city after all general research is done is *3 for 5x*3=15% for any field. So much better than just 5x. AI datacenters too expensive. 100kWt for 0.75x. Eats 2 tiles. No go.( it would be go if it were as proposed before)
What is the point of Uranium mining if you easily can have 4 Uranium Absorbent Towers for 1 Reactor. So much better than trying to use mine+reactor+filters combo. Less expensive on the ecology too.
Why storage( the one which allows you to begin bulding city) doesnt have anymore storage research frustrates me. 100 Units for each product is little to nothing. Game literally tells you you can stockpile resources needed between disasters, but 100 for 4 tiles. Sorry, buying or overproducing is only options
Aestetics is pointless, just ignore it. People will come even if it's negative. I dont understand entertainment so i just ignore it. I tried to make Office/Entertainment focused city once and it worked yes, but income was small
Loans are difficult to find use to. I remember my first run when i didnt know you could work with all 3 cities at the same time, loans mattered because often i didnt have enough money on those two cities. Now if you expand all 3 cities at the same time just ignore loans.
I would love to write more but i didn't reach last stage and gave up when reached space station. Goddamn Stolen mechanic( I lost like 2*10^6 in a month) :(
I will play more and I Recommend buying it. If you enjoy slow paced game where you need little to no stress(other than moments when you get new buildings) you are likely to enjoy it.( My prefference is Hexa, Way and i forgor name of 3rd one)
I didnt talk about disasters because if you have enough income you can ignore them. Yes idea of your power plants stopping it's work because of Earthquakes, droughts that pretty much remove your food production and etc. is interesting but i dont know how to feel about it. Same as with raiders. They are here and its good but nothing else