Having bought the other dungeon tile set and enjoyed it a lot, I decided to pre-order the city set without looking into it much. My copy arrived today, and I was excited to go through it. Well as I did, and began punching out the different tiles.. I gradually became more and more disappointed with what actually came with it. The title of it made it seem like it would be ideal for creating a town environment.. like the picture on the box also implies. And maybe you can build... a.. town. However most of the tiles you get are NOT like you see on the cover. I was expecting roof tops, and big tiles to use as stand alone buildings.. and maybe like a town square or something. I was severely disappointed.
What you do get is seemingly random pieces of walls.. most of which seem to be great if you want to build a sort of 'cabin by the lake' as most of then are on water. You get ZERO rooftops like there are on the cover. On the flip side of them is a sewer setting, which I guess could be interesting.. but EVERY tile has sewer sludge going through it. The big 8x8 one has like a cross of sewer sludge.. almost entirely defeating the purpose of the huge tile.. unless you like to have your PC's jumping over sludge all the time.
The buildings I will probably use somewhat to build random houses.. but I certainly will not be making any sort of town atmosphere out of it. I may run a sewer type adventure eventually .. just to use the sewer side of them.. but creating a realistic dungeon out of it.. will almost certainly require more than is provided .. as I don't need sludge filling 80% of all my tiles.. thank you. Other than that though.. there is some neat bridge tiles.. and a couple small market stalls which I am pleased with.. but these were just kind of like slapping a little bit of icing on a cake that already tastes bad.
If this set interests you.. and you feel like you can make what I've described work, then I would suggest it.. but I would strongly suggest to EVERYONE.. that you check this out thoroughly before picking this up. Maybe convince your friend to get it.. and see it before yourself first.. or go to a game store and see if you can convince them to open one up to see it. Anyway, I really don't think this is a 'must have' set.. or even that it creates the city feeling as it implies, so.. buyer beware.