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.”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…
