Nice City

Introduction

Nice City, released 14 February 2026 by solo Chinese developer Nie Yuxing, is a GTA-inspired open-world sandbox: drive, shoot, and wander a large, visually striking city while following an absurd, tonally unpredictable story about a simple, honest place that turns out to hide stranger things beneath the surface. It sits Mixed with a sample of 125 reviews split across English and Chinese, and reading across both language pools reveals an unusually clear, cross-language consensus on exactly what's holding the game back.

Real charm in scale and absurdity

Reviewers in both languages find genuine things to like here. The sheer scale and visual quality of the open-world city draws specific, repeated praise, with reviewers describing real enjoyment simply driving and wandering through it in the tradition of early GTA titles, before the series added heavier structure around its open worlds. The story's absurd, tonally unpredictable humor — serious narrative beats suddenly interrupted by ridiculous turns — draws real appreciation from multiple reviewers, even those otherwise critical of the game's technical state. At least one detailed reviewer specifically frames the current rough edges as understandable given the scope of what a single developer took on largely alone.

Optimization failures that dominate both language pools

The single most consistent, most severe complaint in this review's research is performance. Reviewers writing in English and Chinese independently and repeatedly describe severe stuttering and frame drops that make the game difficult to play smoothly even on capable hardware, with specific reports of multi-minute loading times and camera movement described as jumping rather than panning smoothly during stutters. This isn't a complaint confined to one language community or a small vocal minority — the same specific problem recurs across dozens of independent reviews in both pools, making it the dominant, unavoidable theme of this game's current reception regardless of which language sample is examined.

Specific, reproducible bugs beyond raw performance

Beyond general stuttering, this review found concrete, reproducible bug reports. Multiple reviewers describe save-and-load failures specifically tied to health and item-durability systems, with at least one detailed account describing character stats becoming corrupted or reset incorrectly after reloading a save. Vehicles and aircraft draw specific criticism for handling poorly or, in the case of at least one reported aircraft, failing to start at all. Separately, multiple reviewers report fast-travel functions crashing the game outright, and unskippable phone or story sequences interrupting gameplay pacing at inconvenient moments.

Incomplete localisation and reused voice acting

For non-Chinese players specifically, localisation draws its own repeated complaint. Multiple reviewers report missing translated text and entire interface sections, including inventory screens, remaining in Chinese regardless of the language setting selected. Separately, Chinese-language reviewers specifically criticise the voice acting for reusing the same performer across multiple distinct characters, describing it as a corner clearly cut given the game's overall scope and ambition.

A rushed sequel, according to reviewers who played the predecessor

A specific, pointed complaint recurs among Chinese-language reviewers who played the developer's earlier release set in the same world: this game is reported as a rushed sequel released before the predecessor's own optimization problems were properly resolved. One detailed reviewer specifically criticises the decision to sell this as a finished, full release rather than through Early Access, arguing the current technical state doesn't match what a full-price commercial launch should deliver. This review reports this as a specific, attributed complaint from reviewers with direct experience of the developer's prior work, offering useful context for why the optimization complaints in this sample read as a continuation of a known pattern rather than a one-off launch issue.

An extraordinarily detailed critical review worth engaging with directly

One particular Chinese-language review in this sample stood out for its sheer specificity, and this review found it worth engaging with in detail rather than simply summarising alongside the others. Framed as a structured, numbered list of complaints after roughly eight hours of play, that reviewer lists ten distinct problems: an intrusive companion character blocking sightlines during combat, fast-travel crashes, poor vehicle handling and aircraft that won't start, unskippable phone sequences, reused voice performances across multiple characters, a non-functional in-game time-skip feature, mid-loading crashes that can only be resolved by reloading and risking death, what that reviewer considers a creative dry spell in the writing compared to the developer's earlier work, an item-consumption limit they consider overly restrictive, and specific save-corruption issues affecting the health and stamina systems. This review cannot verify every individual claim independently, but the sheer specificity and structure of this account — ten named, distinct technical and design complaints rather than a vague general complaint — reads as considerably more credible and useful than a simple negative rating alone, and several of its specific points echo complaints independently raised by other reviewers elsewhere in this same sample.

Weighing genuine ambition against genuine dysfunction

This review's final position tries to hold two things true at once, because both are well supported by the evidence gathered here. The underlying creative vision — a large, absurd, GTA-inspired sandbox built substantially by one person — is genuinely ambitious, and the specific praise for the city's scale and the story's unpredictable tone comes from reviewers who clearly aren't simply being generous to an indie underdog. At the same time, the volume, consistency and cross-language corroboration of the performance and stability complaints documented above are too severe to treat as ordinary launch-week jank that will resolve itself with time, particularly given reviewers' specific reports that this exact pattern already went unresolved in the developer's previous release. Both of these facts inform this review's score, rather than either one alone.

Final Verdict

Nice City has real, specific charm in its ambitious city scale and absurd, unpredictable tone, and multiple reviewers across both English and Chinese find genuine enjoyment simply exploring what a single developer built. What holds this score down is a severe, cross-language, near-universal performance problem that dominates this game's current reception, compounded by specific, reproducible bugs in its save system and vehicle controls, incomplete localisation for non-Chinese players, and reviewer reports that this exact pattern of unresolved optimization problems continues from the developer's earlier release. Wait for significant patches before buying; the underlying ambition here is real, but the current build's technical problems are too severe and too widely corroborated to recommend without serious reservation.