This 'highly realistic' city-builder could be the first real competition Cities: Skylines has seen in over a decade

Skyscrapers glitter in the light of a setting sun. — (Image credit: 1:1 Studio)

Steam is flooded with all manner of weird and wonderful city-builders these days. Yet few of these newer games have laid their foundations in the true heartland of the genre. If you want to build a vast, modern cityscape with intensely simulated traffic and three types of zoning, you're pretty much stuck with Cities: Skylines or its troubled sequel.

Now though, Paradox Interactive might have some competition as the city-builder's de-facto mayor. City Masterplan is a newly announced metropolis sim that files its zoning permit request squarely in Skylines' home turf.

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City Masterplan Official Reveal Trailer | 1:1 Scale UE5 City Builder - YouTube

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The trailer shows a game similar in visual style to Cities: Skylines 2, with a strong emphasis on realistic skies, lighting, weather conditions and so forth. Hopefully it can avoid the performance problems that dogged Skylines 2 on launch, though I don't know whether the fact it's built in Unreal rather than Unity makes this more or less likely, given how many Unreal Engine 5 games have struggled to perform on PC.

That said, there's undoubtedly room for a game like City Masterplan. The original Skylines is now twelve years old, and Skylines 2 has, so far at least, not been the successor that fans hoped for. The game's recent reviews seem to have taken a more positive turn since Iceflake Studios took over development duties from Colossal Order, but the general consensus of the game remains decidedly mixed.

Could City Masterplan do to Skylines what Skylines did to SimCity? The early footage certainly looks promising, but as we discovered with Skylines 2, the proof is in the playing. There's no release date for City Masterplan yet, but I would be surprised if we saw it much before 2027.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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