I played Sim City on PC some time back in the previous century - this was the old top-down one, not the fancy 3D one.
For no particular reason, I have an urge to build a city. I’m sure things have moved on a bit since the 1990s, so I’m looking for suggestions. Platforms available to me are an Android phone, a Chromebook, an iPad, and an Apple Mac with Steam (with integrated graphics, so not a gaming monster). I don’t really mind which of these systems I play on if the game is good. I don’t mind spending a few quid on a good game.
I’m probably more likely to enjoy a casual game than anything hardcore and highly complex, and something with the freedom to build a city my way rather than one ‘right’ way to win would be great.
Cities: Skylines is the gold standard for freeform city building games. Get it on Steam to gain access to the huge number of free user-made content and improvements through the Workshop.
SimCity Buildit is on the Google Play store for Android as a free download. It kind of depends on having a wireless connection, but it works if you’re wireless, you just don’t make money as fast.
Zeus: Master of Olympus (2000) - Perhaps the best of the older pre-21st century city-building games. Sim City 4 (2003) - Classic game. Has a not-so-great review score on Steam, because it’s not designed for modern systems, but works fine after making a couple of tweaks. Hearthlands (2017) - Nice-looking game, fun game. Haven’t played finished version.
*Cities: Skylines* - Looks great, but I have my doubts about how well-designed it is under the hood.
Although it’s about building a base rather than a city, Rimworld (2018) is similar to a city-builder in many respects and a modern classic.
I have Surviving Mars. It is good, but has a lot of bugs that impact gameplay in severe ways. It needs at least one patch, maybe more. I’d hold off, but it has oodles of promise, and even with the bugs I’ve enjoyed playing it.
I’ve been playing city-builders since the original SimCity came out on the Mac. In my opinion, the best in the interim was SimCity 4. I wasn’t that impressed with Cities: Skylines (too derivative). A really cute older game was Take the A-train. But I imagine that, even if you got ahold of the old Maxis version, it would be hard to get it to work on a modern machine, and probably would seem clunky and old.
My off the cuff suggestion would be Cities: Skylines. It’s pretty much the name in city builders now. Yeah, it’s derivative of SimCity but it’s also the game that made a decent modern city sim after EA/Maxis completely dorked up the SimCity franchise and ran it into the ground. “Like SimCity only it works and is fun” is a feature, not a bug in my opinion. It can definitely be played casually and most of the things that get more dedicated fans annoyed, like pedestrian walking patterns, aren’t likely to ping your radar if you’re not trying to build a ‘perfect’ city. Plus, as mentioned, it has a seemingly infinite amount of free content (extra buildings, pre-built complicated road intersections, etc) available on the Steam Workshop.
I will warn you against Cities XXL which is basically a buggy knock-off of the same formula.
Not yet mentioned is the Tropico franchise which is sort of a City Sim crossed with Empire Sim. You’re on an island so your city is pretty much your empire (plus some tourist beaches and plantations). There’s additional aspects like needing to remain in power, choosing between open democracy and totalitarian regime and even sending the secret police to whisk off dissidents so it may be more in depth that you want if you just want to paint streets and residential neighborhoods.
I’d love to hear more Doper thoughts on this game. It has pretty middling reviews right now; I read somewhere that it feels kind of sterile at the end of the day.
I’ll second the Tropico series; it’s one of my favorite games and I’m looking forward to Tropico 6 being released later this year. There is a campaign mode in which you ‘build to win’ and also a sandbox mode where you can just dabble with building your city.
Be advised that too many growable buildings (i.e.: Residential, Commercial, or Industrial) from the Workshop will bog down the game.
Some interesting maps on there as well, I’ve been playing on one (can’t remember the name) on which I’ve zoned a mountain top for tourism; the west side of the mountain has highway connections and the east side has cable cars down to a train station. Vanilla maps don’t seem to much use for cable cars’ ability for vertical traversal but Workshop maps sure do!
I don’t think sterile is a fair assessment of the game. I feel that the game has a great feel to it, and really captures the imagination of humans of Mars. The only real problem is that it needs some patching. The UI is insufficient and the gameplay bugs can be severe. On yesterday’s stream, the devs made it clear that the problems with the game are their fault and that they were sorry that the game released in the state it was released. They really didn’t consider the issues (particularly with the UI) that have been pointed out, and they feel the community is mainly correct. They’ve fully committed to fixing the issues, they highlighted they issues they’re currently looking at (and everything stated were things that need addressing); furthermore, they announced that one of the graphical DLCs would be free instead of paid DLC for all owners of the game. All in all, I’m very happy with the stance the dev team is taking. I’m happy with the direction they’re heading.
So, all of that being said, should you buy it today? Well, I’ve played it for 40+ hours and had a pile of fun. That’s pretty impressive given the flaws and really speaks to the quality of the underlying game, that kernel of gameplay. I think it is completely justifiable and perhaps even wise to wait for a few patches to ensure that the flaws are addressed. There was a patch today that fixed several issues, although not the most critical (in my opinion anyway).
By the way, I also recommend City: Skylines. I own it, I’ve not played it as much as it deserves to be played, but it is a very good city builder. If you’ve not played Tropico then those are also great and I’ve played all of them to death.
I love variety so I initially subscribed to a whole bunch of RCI buildings. I’ve since cut that to only a couple of pages’ worth, the rest are service-related: hospitals, schools, police, fire, parks, etc. Parks that are several squares long but only one square deep are sorely needed for filling in empty areas.
Bless your cotton-pickin’ heart. That site is one long walk down memory lane.
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Stunt Friggin’ Island!** I bought my first computer at Sears just so I could play that game. I think it was a 386 with 512k memory and a 5MB hard drive. Cost me around 3 grand. I was forced to learn how my computer worked because I had to figure out how to access virtual memory just to play the game. But damn did I log some hours with that game. I produced some epic movies. The editing suite in that game is still the best I’ve seen, the shit graphics not withstanding.
