Top 10 Addictive City Builder Games

While we would have figured running a city in ancient times to be easier than its’ modern counterpart, this mythological inspired entry proved us very wrong. Successfully building a city throughout the seven different campaigns requires a careful balance of food production, resource management and of course, defending your city from the ancient monsters roaming the countryside. It just wouldn’t be Greece without them. Complex enough to be challenging, but lighthearted enough to keep us building, Zeus: Master of Olympus hits all the notes we expect from a good city sim, but doesn’t do any of them spectacularly.

The graphically more powerful follow up to the first entry in the series has a lot to offer to anyone looking to break into city-planning. While it perhaps doesn’t have much in the way of groundbreaking new features or innovations on existing ones, Focus Home Interactive did a good job in making the world feel like a living and breathing entity. From the constant buzzing of traffic at street level to the management and trading of citizens to neighboring corporations and cities, every person and city block feels crucial to the overall snapshot of the city. With over 50 maps, hundreds of building and a variety of industries, there’s plenty on offer keeping us busy to this day.

A dark, gritty take on the genre that’s right in line with today’s current trends, this small scale city builder had us appreciating it for whole different reasons. Trying to lead our small band of villagers to survival through the harsh winters, we were constantly buffeted by the disease, starvation, and inevitable death of our local tribesmen. While hazards and population control are a key aspect when trying to manage a city’s wellbeing and happiness, the small scale and much more realistic nature of this game had us surprisingly upset at each passing as we scrambled to plug up the societal holes they left behind as best we could.

As frustrated as we might get when our buses or subways aren’t on time, this complex public transportation simulator showed us it’s not always an easy fix. In charge of everything in the city from bus schedules to subway lines and connective terminals, you’re responsible for the mass transit experience of cities that can grow disturbingly large. Aging vehicles and breakdowns are all too common problems we constantly had to tackle, and after only a short while we could feel our standards start to slip as we let more and more people run late throughout their day. The next time it happens to us, we’ll be a little more sympathetic to the poor guys in charge of the system.

Taking city building to the future and into space, nothing really quite compared to the experience we got playing through this sci-fi economy simulator. With gameplay varying depending on whether you find yourself in the different climates of Earth or outer space, the experience never gets stale as you modify your strategies around the region specific structures. Causing us to be glued to our screens for hours at a time, Anno 2205 has a distinct advantage over the rest of the field. While in other games too many lapses in realism can sour our experiences, this entry escapes those traps by letting our imaginations run wild. After all, it’s not every day you get to build colonies on the moon.

It’s hard not to be immersed in the Baltic world of Patrician III as you sail across the sea to the various coastal cities, trading and peddling your wares. While trying to satisfy the market needs of the Hanseatic league as a novice trader with just a ship to our name got a little slow at times, it was extremely rewarding watching our reputations grow, expanding our economic and political influence through more and more of the games historically themed cities. The pirates and competitors provide stiff competition at first, but once we persevered long enough to be named mayor of our little town, expanding and fine-tuning it were well worth the struggle.

Allowing us to take our expertise to the hilly countryside of Rome, this painstakingly historically accurate sim let us live our dreams of developing a city for one of the greatest empires ever. With beautiful 3d landscapes and tons of options at creating an efficient, appealing layout, our job leading the cities through the ages of the Republic and Empire through dozens of assignments had us feeling like we were really there. Featuring two different methods of playing through the game, Caesar IV provided everything we needed to feel like Consul for a day, including unfortunately, the Gauls.

Taking control of El Presidente on our little communist dictatorship of an island is one of the most fun experiences we’ve had building up and managing a city. From the lighthearted humor of historically themed foreign diplomats, to the crime ridden slums of our local workforce, Tropico 4 doesn’t pretend to be a serious take on the simulator genre, and we love it for that. Exploiting and exporting the natural resources of St. Clara to pad our Swiss bank accounts provided the perfect balance of realism and quirkiness that allowed us to comfortably sit back and enjoy our reign of terror. That is, when we weren’t dealing with the rebels and tornadoes of course.

Everything the SimCity reboot should have been and more, Cities: Skylines is the prototypical modern city simulator. In charge of building from the ground up, the game gave us all the tools we needed to zone out the different city sections and complete our vision for the town, providing us complete control over how to structure our highway, water, and energy systems. Whether you’re a micromanager or a more casual gamer, running anything from a wind-turbine powered super city to an environmentally gutted, polluted industrial nightmare is as easy or complex as you want it to be thanks to the intuitive, almost second-nature interface.

Was there ever any doubt? The series that defined the genre has its rightful place on top of the throne. Having been expanded and innovated on from their predecessors, the features riddled throughout the game still hold up as being extremely impressive for their age, allowing anything from simple casual slums to replicas of some of the largest cities on Earth. No matter how many hours we poured into our city, the game never ceased to be downright fun, even when things started to go wrong. Providing the framework for almost every single city simulator to follow, SimCity 2000 stands out as still the best example of its class, allowing you to create, and destroy, anyway you see fit.

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