I understand that this is an EA title, but I honestly cannot recommend this game in its present form. At first glance, it looks great. Pleasant graphics & soundtrack, a storyline and world lore in development, plenty of resource chains and a research tree!

Then you start playing it and realize that the research "tree" is time gated by requiring knowledge points (earned over time) and resources earned by previous research topics to such a degree that the "tree" is basically a point A-to-B straight LINE. In addition, you can't move between research eras without finishing all the research topics in the current era, and meet a certain population threshold. There's no player choice, innovation, creativity involved in choosing how to progress. This game is not Frostpunk where your choices MATTER. I don't even know why they bothered with difficulty settings because it's not like you can DO anything different should the game be on a more difficult setting.

Growing your city population is achieved by natural birthrate and the arrival of immigrants based on the desirability of your settlement, which itself is based on the goods and services you provide your residents. Good, right? Yes, in theory. In practice, you're constantly moving workers around your buildings as the production efficiency rate changes based on your worker happiness. You never have enough workers to go around. On the plus side, the production reporting is fairly robust, so keeping track of what you have a surplus or deficit of is pretty easy.

Then there's the power consumption aspect of this game. Almost every building requires it. Inexplicably, you only have a basic windmill for 3 eras, and due to the linear research tree, you can't beeline for a more powerful power production building. So, you're stuck spamming windmills to power your buildings to the point that this game is not so much a city builder as a windfarm simulator.

For the record, I have something like 200 hours into Banished and at least 600 into Frostpunk. I really wanted to find a new survival sim to play, but I'm not sure this game even has replayability.

TLDR 3/10 was expecting a survival sim, not a renewal energy simulator

Even though this game looks promising, it has a long road to go. Right now, there are a lot of resources and buildings in the game. However, the balance is far from being decent. Some of the buildings or systems are a bit useless (like outposts), especially with the dome requirements. Sadly, if some of your people die, your resource income will be dreadfully affected. Therefore, your economy will collapse with a domino effect. For some reason, there is a time limit for end game which is not fun and events are not really interesting. Unfortunately, some of the systems do not work properly like transporter belts or roads, while there isn’t much need for them with time limitation. Other than that research tree is a bit annoying with instant research and proceeding too quick that you cannot build the previous systems, before unlocking new technologies. One of the most annoying things for me was the tutorial. There is no real tutorial for complex systems, only videos which I hate. I am not going to study some videos to learn the game and if I wanted to do that I would do it via professional/psychotic players to learn the most efficient systems. Lastly, as you can imagine, game works your graphics cards a lot.
P.S. I am going to check the game later for the things like water or balance and update my review, if I change my opinion.

At this point the game is just too clunky, production chains too unclear, mechanics not smooth enough to recommend.