Best City Building Games
[Updated: April 2019]
There aren’t many games that include themselves in the city builder genre. It’s a simple premise: you take on the role of planner, and mayor of a city. You look down upon your creation from above, and you are entirely responsible for its growth and management. City building games are exceptionally time consuming, and each game can go on forever—or at least until the city you are working on gets stale and you make a new one for different challenges.
City building games have been a fantasy for most and the larger it is, the better fun you get out of playing it. Hence, Cities XXL brings to you a game which combines your building and management skills to make and manage your city as you want it to. The 14 Best City Builder Games You Should Play in 2019 1. Cities Skylines. Surviving Mars. Life is Feudal: Forest Village. Rise of Industry. Simcity Complete Edition. List of city-building video games. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries. This is a comprehensive index of city-building games, sorted chronologically. Information regarding date of release, developer, platform, setting and notability is provided when available. The table can be sorted by clicking on the small boxes next to the column headings.
Despite originally established in 1989 with the release of Will Wright’s SimCity, city builders haven’t had all that many releases in their 24 years of existence. In addition, they aren’t all that similar to each other in gameplay style.
Because it’s a genre full of duds and great titles are few and far between, we’ve compiled a list of the ten best city building video games. Likewise, we’ve included some bonus titles at the end.
#18 Cities XL 2012
- Developer: Focus Home Interactive
- Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
- Platforms: PC
- Release: October 2011
Made by Focus Home Interactive, Cities XL 2012 is the third and latest game in the Cities XL franchise.
Upcoming City Building Games 2019
Unlike SimCity and its strong focus on multiplayer, Cities XL 2012 places a singular emphasis on single-player mode and includes new structures, maps, and a starter guide to ease players into the game. Earlier versions were considered very difficult to get into due to their complexity.
As of this writing, the game’s a couple years old, but it remains one of the better city building sims out there.
#17 SimCity 2000
- Developer: Maxis
- Publisher: Maxis
- Platforms: PC, SNES, Sega Saturn, PSX, N64, GBA
- Release: 1993
SimCity may have been the foundation of the city building genre, but it was SimCity 2000 that brought the genre to my attention. The game, as it was, was sophisticated but not too complicated for a twelve year old to grasp—nor did it ever give me the impression that it was “made for children.” If there was one thing I hated about games when I was younger, it was being pandered to with a game clearly made for kids—like the SimTown, also from Maxis, which came out a year or two after SimCity 2000.
SimCity 2000 is a game which allowed me to pretend at being a civil engineer. It let me construct a city which I’d have been proud to live in, made up of neat little grids with buildings placed in an ideal donut shape—not unlike the layout of Barcelona. It’s a game that taught me the broader impacts of pollution, traffic congestion, and what happens to a city when you reduce the subsidies to your police force and fire stations.
In other words, the game gave me a pretty decent understanding of how the world works, at least on a localized level—a topic that The Wire, a HBO series, took to an even more personal level.
I’ll be the first to admit that the game is an abstract simulation, but it’s one which encouraged me to think while other games only encouraged me to jump when instructed or shoot at the target in my crosshairs.
#16 SimCity 2013
- Developer: Maxis
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Platforms: PC,
- Release: March 2013
SimCity might be regarded by many as a dud for its smaller environments, restrictive DRM, and host of limitations, but it is by no means a bad city builder, or even a bad game. It’s a good game that’s only getting better with the passage of time and the release of more and more updates based on suggestions and feedback from the community.
What SimCity brings to the table in terms of improvements is expansion. Previously the games focused more on controlling the game at-large. The new game incorporates some degree of micromanagement as well. While it’s not Sims level of control, we are able to interact with the citizens. Basically, there’s multiple things to keep in mind whenever you’re building something, regardless of what it is.
Also in the new SimCity are interconnected cities, which are called regions. This allows you to use friends to better manage your own city. For instance, you can build a city where your citizens work, another friend builds a city where they live, and another friend can have a city where they go to have fun. All parties involved would benefit and this would allow players to focus their efforts in specific ways—should that be of interest. Unfortunately, the region system is tied into the game’s online DRM, which makes it impossible to play offline and forces players into a pseudo-online mode.
The game is certainly a step forward for the genre in some ways and a step backward in others.
Our editors independently research, test, and recommend the best products; you can learn more about our review process here. We may receive commissions on purchases made from our chosen links.
The Rundown
Best for Politics:Urban Empire at Amazon, “You will not only focus on building cities but learn to adapt to and manage technological breakthroughs and ideological uprisings.”
Best Prison:Prison Architect on Steampowered.com, “Will please any city-building fan with its layers of complex gameplay in micromanaging every little detail.”
Best for Colonizing Space:Planetbase at Steampowered.com, “You’ll guide a group of space settlers in hopes to ultimately set up a base colony that can operate on self-sufficiency.'
Best for Building A Mall:Another Brick in the Mall at Steampowered.com, “Carry out your fantasy of designing, building, and being in charge of your own super mall.”
Best Futuristic City:Anno 2205 at Amazon, “Sci-fi, city-building game puts you in the role of a CEO whose goal is to expand an enterprise while facing unique challenges.”
Best for Survival:Frostpunk at Amazon, “A survival-based, strategic city-building game where every decision you make comes with a lasting effect.”
Best for Dinosaur Amusement Parks:Jurassic World: Evolution at Steampowered.com, “Build and manage your own dinosaur amusement park from the ground up.”
Most Difficult: Dwarf Fortress at Bay12games.com, “Construction/management game that involves taking a band of dwarves to build a miniature civilization.”
Our Top Picks
Best for Politics: Urban Empire
Urban Empire deals with the nitty-gritty of politics where you will not only focus on building cities but learn to adapt to and manage technological breakthroughs and ideological uprisings. Every decision you make will directly affect both the civil infrastructure of your growing utopia and the price of politics that comes with it.
You’re the mayor, and you come from a background of one of four ruling dynasties with specific history and traditions. For the next 200 years, it’ll be up to you to establish city districts, debate in governmental decisions at city council meetings, and even blackmail and bribe your political adversaries for leverage.
Through time, from the years 1820 to 2020, you’ll research technologies in five-year increments, deploying electric trams, antibiotics, and even video games, all of which will affect the happiness of your citizens. Urban Empire has over 1,000 dynamic events that challenge players to make crucial decisions involving everything from child labor, raising taxes, and what to do with the hippies.
Best Prison: Prison Architect
Prison Architect is all about managing and constructing your own private prison while detaining as much chaos as possible and turning a profit. The top-down, 2D, cartoony, visual sandbox game will please any city-building fan with its layers of complex gameplay in micromanaging every little detail.
You may need to read up on the Wikipedia page of Prison Architect to feel fully confident in your multiple approaches of management. You’ll first start off slow by building pathways to cells, and then gradually incorporate more patrols, CCTV cameras to break through the fog of war when guards aren’t looking, construct an isolated kitchen to avoid inmates potentially acquiring knives, and so many other subtleties that’ll go a long way in ensuring the flow of order.
On top of all this, you’ll need to find a way (or not) to meet the various needs of your prisoners, including sanitation, food, and clothes while stomping out fires, seizing, contraband, breaking up gangs, and ultimately, expanding out your prison. Even a clogged up toilet can start a riot, so you’ll need to be prepared for everything.
Best for Colonizing Space: Planetbase
You're headed to space on a mission to colonize a remote planet in the city-building and management game Planetbase. Upon arrival, you’ll guide a group of space settlers in hopes to ultimately set up a base colony that can operate on self-sufficiency.
Planetbase has you commanding a group of colonists who construct numerous buildings and structures like wind turbines and solar panels that’ll provide oxygen and water for an ever-growing population. Your space settlers all come with different roles, including biologists who will look after food with armed security guards to defend it, engineers who can repair buildings and build components for robots who’ll do your dirty work, and medics who’ll heal people like your damaged miners that collect ore. You’ll need to brace yourself for disasters, too, including pirates who’ll ransack your turf and meteor impacts that can take out important supply depots, which can mean the difference between life and death.
Best for Building A Mall: Another Brick In The Mall
The cleverly titled Another Brick In The Mall lets you carry out your fantasy of designing, building, and being in charge of your own super mall. You’ll have your selection of various shops, supermarkets, restaurants, and more while hiring and managing a well-trained staff to keep everything in order.
You’ll start from the ground up in Another Brick In The Mall, optimally laying out every road with designated parking spots for customers and deliveries while building up each wall, tile floor, door, and more before you jump into the goods and services markets. Ultimately, you’ll want to turn a profit, which relies on seeing the finer details in the bigger picture like how well your staff performs while balancing their satisfaction, checking which items sell the best, and making sure you satisfy every customer because they may not ever come back if you’re charging too much on hotdogs.
Accounting is paramount in Another Brick In The Mall, and you’ll have thousands of characters and vehicles on the screen that, when zoomed out, looks like an ant colony.
Best Futuristic City: Anno 2205
It’s the 23rd century and you’re ready to erect the foundation of a futuristic city with eyes on the moon in Anno 2205. The strategic, sci-fi, city-building game puts you in the role of a CEO whose goal is to expand an enterprise while facing unique challenges, including stomping out competitors and meeting investor demands.
Anno 2205 has you starting out on Earth where you’ll gradually build houses and clear land for farms while acquiring resources such as purified water, energy, and minerals and upgrading the tier of your working class populous to operators, executives, and investors. As you thrive, you’ll enter new zones like the arctic where you’ll build science outposts that’ll eventually lead you to construct shield generators to protect your industrious moon factories from space debris.
Anno 2205’s complex economy and interstellar supply lines will keep you busy juggling a staff of thousands while jumping between your three settlements of your expanding corporate empire.
Best for Survival: Frostpunk
You are in charge of the last bastion of humanity in Frostpunk, a survival-based, strategic city-building game where every decision you make comes with a lasting effect. It’s up to you to spark both fires of warmth and hope in your civilization in order to bear a worldwide volcanic winter.
Frostpunk will draw you in with its outstanding story using a unique presentation of animation detailing a climate change catastrophe that plagues the late 1800s. You’ll rely and call upon your finite number of workers — all with their own needs and who prefer working on sunny days — who’ll trudge through the snow to gather resources while you push your limits in judgment calls over what vital life-saving structure to build next.
A number of ambiguous tough decisions will pop up as you write the law, shaping the fate of your society and leading to long-lasting consequences like whether you left the gravely ill to die or stretched food supplies by making a bad soup that everyone has to eat.
Best for Dinosaur Amusement Parks: Jurassic World: Evolution
Childhood dreams come alive with Jurassic World: Evolution where you’ll get to build and manage your own dinosaur amusement park from the ground up. You’ll be in charge of maintaining the safety and entertainment of your customers while creating a livable environment for your sensitive and needy dinosaurs.
Jurassic World: Evolution has you taking contracts from three factions as you start out with plotting your land and sending expedition teams to dig up fossils for DNA to make your own dinosaurs. The more different types of dinosaurs you have, the more customers you’ll get, but you’ll need to carefully balance both of their safeties by dividing them with electric fences and gates, making sure they’re not crowded, and having plenty of things to eat. You’ll get to tinker with building management, including adjusting prices of items and employing ranger stations to take care of your dinosaurs and contain them just in case any of them decide to escape and eat everyone.
Most Difficult: Dwarf Fortress
Dwarf Fortress (which inspired the second best-selling game in history: Minecraft) is considered to be one of the most difficult games in existence, but with that, comes the challenge of both conquering and cherishing its every moment. The construction/management game involves taking a band of dwarves to build a miniature civilization while managing resources, delegating jobs, reserving goods, building and using structures, and defending against goblins.
Each time you play Dwarf Fortress you’ll randomly generate an entire world with a passage of geological time, history, drainage and erosions, mineral deposits, Dwarf personalities, and so much more, which will all be factored into where you first set up your base.
From there, you’ll assign tasks to each dwarf, accumulating wood and food, crafting pickaxes, and eventually burrowing into a mountain where you’ll set up your fortress. Dwarf Fortress is open-ended and plays out like a book. Despite its graphics (which can be altered with graphic packs), a lot of the game is imagined in your head as you read a scroll of text about everything that occurs in the game.
City Building Game 2018
What to Look for in a City Building Game
Complex systems - The best city-building games are elegant on the surface but hide underlying complex systems. If you’re looking for a great city-building game that will keep you occupied for hundreds of hours, choose one with gameplay that’s easy to pick up, but takes time to master.
Innovative settings - The city-building genre isn’t just limited to mundane city planning. If you’ve had your fill of Sim City and Cities Skylines, why not check out a game that uses similar mechanics in a totally different setting, like a mall, prison, outer space, or even fantasy world?
Open-Ended vs. campaigns - Most city-building games are open-ended (letting you do whatever you want), and many don’t have any conditions for winning the game at all. If you want a little more structure to your play, without taking away from the fun and creativity, look for titles like the Anno series, which give you the option of playing through single-player campaigns while you build your cities.