Do you want to make a city? Want to run the lives of thousands of people and make their worlds the way you want? It’s a city-building game you need!
Games where you build a city are the best.
You can make a city appear out of thin air and watch its people go back and forth. Or, you could build a village and help the people there get through the cold winter months. You could also just put buildings in the middle of an endless ocean for fun.
It is a type of game that has its roots in building and management, but it includes a wide range of games. So, here are the eight best games about building cities that you have to play.
1. Cities Skylines
Cities Skylines, made by Colossal Order, is the best city-building game right now. It is amazing, frustrating, and huge.
Although Cities Skylines first launched in 2015, it’s still top of the pile more than seven years later. A big reason for the game’s success and longevity is its huge army of modders. These are the thousands of people who work hard to add new assets, styles, maps, lighting schemes, and so much more to the game.
In this way, the game in 2022, when this was written, is very different from when it came out in 2015. Many people would say that playing the vanilla version of Cities Skylines on PC (the console version can’t be modded) is a waste of time when there are so many improvements to the game’s quality of life in the Steam Workshop.
But the modders don’t do it on their own. The Airports DLC for Colossal Order came out in 2022. It was the ninth major DLC for the game, but there were also a lot of smaller content creator packs, radio stations, and other things.
2. Townscaper
Townscaper is unlike any other game you’ve played because it lets you build everything from sprawling cities with mass transit to small, artistic towns.
Oskar Stålberg’s Townscaper has “No goal. There’s no real game. Just a lot of buildings and a lot of beautiful things.” The developer does a great job of describing the game, and you can spend a nice chunk of time putting down buildings in the watery starting scene to make them come to life.
Some people are turned off by the lack of direction. But the fun of Townscaper is figuring out how different buildings work together, changing their colors, and making ridiculously cute towns one block at a time.
3. Frostpunk
Frostpunk is a survival-combat-city-builder game made by the same people who made the critically acclaimed This War of Mine. It can be a brutal game where your survivors have to live through a harsh volcanic winter.
The cold comes in and stays there. You’ll have to find a way to keep your survivors warm and, well, alive while also making sure that your civilization grows and spreads. You’ll quickly learn that insulation and stockpiling are key to keeping your generator running. If you don’t have it, you’ll have a bad time.
In Frostpunk, you’ll also have to make hard choices about politics, working conditions, and even the laws about working children. It’s not a fun time building a city. It has sickness, death, and worry, but it’s a great experience all around.
Want to know what’s the best thing? Developers 11 bit studios are working on Frostpunk 2!
4. SimCity 2000/3000/4
Before Cities Skylines, there was only SimCity when it came to games about building cities. The first SimCity game was great, but it wasn’t until SimCity 2000 came out in 1993 that the series really took off.
SimCity 3000, the sequel that came out in 1999, was praised by critics and got great reviews everywhere. You can still find new user-content releases for modern buildings more than 20 years after the game came out.
Then, with SimCity 4, the game switched to a fully regional design. You can now build many different kinds of cities, combining sprawling cities with regional industry, farming zones, power generation, and much more. SimCity 4 is still a good game.
The last SimCity game, just called SimCity and released in 2013, was a flop, even though people were excited about it before it came out. EA chose to release SimCity as an online-only game, so you couldn’t play or access your single-player cities without an internet connection and a connection to an EA server. At launch, there were so many people trying to play that the servers were full, so hundreds of thousands of people couldn’t play. Then, there were big problems with the game’s pathing and routing, delays in patches to fix these problems, and a lot more.
The SimCity franchise died because it didn’t do well overall. EA closed the Maxis studio and has only made one free-to-play mobile game since then. Still, a list of the best city-building games can’t be complete without SimCity. If you can find the old games or a way to play SimCity online, you should do so.
5. Banished
When Banished came out in 2014, it stood out for more than one reason.
First, Banished was made by just one person, Luke Hodorowicz, even though it was a big project. Work on Banished began in 2011. Second, and this is related to the first point, Banished’s city-building mechanics are complicated enough to keep you playing for hours as you try to turn your small village into a thriving city.
The focus of Banished does change as you get more resources. In the beginning, you have to focus on harsh survival, but as your world becomes more stable, you can focus on managing your resources, trading, and expanding.
No matter what, it’s a great city-building game, and the fact that it still gets great reviews on Steam years after it came out shows how deep and playable it is. Also, there are many mods and overhauls for the original game on Steam Workshop that can give it new life after you’ve played it a few times.
6. Islanders
Islanders is different from the other games on this list about building cities. In Islanders, you can’t just put down zones and manage your infrastructure budget. Instead, you have to place specific buildings in the right places to get a big enough score to unlock the next set of buildings.
Each turn becomes a tricky balancing act between making something that stands out and putting buildings close to each other that add the same number of points.
Like Townscaper, it’s surprisingly addicting. It has that “just one more turn” feel that will keep you coming back for more, which is why it’s also on our list of the best base-building and kingdom-building games.
7. Caesar III
Caesar III is the best game in the series about building cities in ancient Rome, and it was the last one made by the legendary Sierra Entertainment studio.
In Caesar III, you play the role of a Roman governor who is in charge of building up a new Roman city and making the lives of its people better. You complete missions and reach goals as you try to solve problems and make life better for your people.
It’s fun to try to figure out what will help your city grow the most. You’ll need to move water around your city so people can drink and bathe. You’ll also need to build markets for trading and barracks for defense, all while keeping an eye on the gods and making sure they’re happy.
There is a fair amount of micromanagement, such as fine-tuning taxes, building outputs, and so on. You don’t have to be involved, but it helps if you do. Caesar III is available on most gaming platforms, but you might need to figure out how to play old games and software first.
8. Tropico 6
The first version of Tropico came out in 2001, which was only two years after Caesar III. The difference in graphics between the two games is huge. Tropico was an exciting, exotic 3D city builder for many people. It had the added twist that you were “El Presidente” and your word was final.
Even though Tropico 6 came out almost 20 years after the first game, your goal is still the same: stay in power no matter what.
Tropico 6 added more islands that can be built on, put more emphasis on infrastructure, and made the simulation of each citizen better than ever. It’s a beautiful-looking city builder that is different from most. Building a tropical paradise is a nice change from Frostpunk’s wastelands or Cities Skylines’ blank slate.
What Are the Best City Building Games?
Some of the best city-building games, both old and new, are listed above. But this list doesn’t cover everything. You should also check out Happy Wheels, The Settlers, Caesar, Foundation, and Surviving Mars, which are all city-building games.
In short, there are a lot of games in the city-building genre. For as long as we’ve been playing games, we’ve tried to simulate the real world so we can control it the way we want.
