I needed no further incentive to check out this video that explores why a SimCity game set in the United Kingdom wouldn't work, but even if the idea of comparing metropolitan systems of government isn't thrilling to you, you're going to want to watch it just to see who crops up at the end. It's so unexpected that I think it probably counts as a jump scare, and while I can't say whether it makes the video better or worse, it's sure as hell makes it fascinating.

The subject of the video—which is by YouTuber Chris Spargo—delves into how a SimCity set in Britain would differ from the standard, Americentric version of the game, using SimCity 4 as its case study. As Spargo points out, you can manage some "British" cities in SimCity 4, like London. But it doesn't really look or act like London, because it's built according to the US system of city governance.

As Spargo lays out, the differences between British and American cities are many and run deep. Even some of the most fundamental things diverge radically, like who runs a city in each nation. As with most modern urban city-builders, SimCity 4 puts players in the role of mayor, which works fine for American cities because mayors wield most of the power within a city. But in the UK, or at least, in England, power can be much more widely distributed among councils and boroughs.

Other differences include SimCity's fundamental mechanic of zoning. Spargo points out that zoning in the US is very rigid, hence why they end up with sprawling residential districts with no nearby amenities. The UK has a much more nuanced system that allows for multipurpose zones, but it's also much harder to build anything due to extensive planning permission requirements.

The video also delves into things like what public services a British "mayor" would actually control, and also tacitly explains why UK councils never seem to have any money (short answer, centralisation and massive social care costs).

It's all very interesting, but as the video seems to be wrapping up, Spargo says he "got the chance to speak to someone who seemed like he might know some things about this". Cut to Spargo chatting with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who he credits as a "Part-time YouTuber (51k subs)."

For context, Spargo appears to be at some sort of event also attended by the PM, who explains that he's a big advocate of devolution as he thinks "people who live and work in their community make better decisions about what's best for their community than people sitting in Whitehall or Westminster, frankly."

Starmer then points out that this is why the Labour government has "given more power to, particularly our mayors", which, given Starmer is seemingly about to be replaced by the former Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, is a tad unfortunate.

Putting aside surprise Starmer, Spargo makes some valid points, and it has given me a hankering to play a game that more accurately replicates the challenges of municipal management in the UK.

Space: the final frontier. I often dream what it would be like to leave this rock behind and go out into that infinite expanse. I'd probably die a horrific death because just about anything can and will go wrong in outer space, and I have basically no technical skills that would help me survive in a spaceship.

Fortunately, I can live out my fantasy from the safety of my living room thanks to videogames.

Star Trek: Outposts Unknown was just revealed in a PC Gaming Show world premiere, and it ticks a lot of boxes. Fans of the stories told during the escapades of the USS Enterprise will be delighted to learn this is a narrative-driven affair, not just a sandbox.

We get a hint at the drama on offer in the trailer, which shows a peaceful and prospering outpost suddenly beset by a strange anomaly called "the Rift." Like I said, anything can and will go wrong. We don't know exactly what the anomaly is, but it's described as "a mysterious cosmic force that threatens a new ally." So, expect alien buddies as well as unknowable forces of despair. Neat!

In Star Trek: Outposts Unknown, developed by Magic Fuel Games and published by Playstack, you face off against this terrifying threat as nought but a small captain. You're probably a regular-size captain, but compared to that glowing thing in the sky, anything appears miniscule.

The trailer shows some of the colonists fighting against what honestly looks like a localised thunderstorm shrouded in a mist the same shade of purple as the anomaly itself, so it seems to be causing smaller instances of danger and nuisance that you'll have to deal with.

We also get some shots of the colony building mechanic, where all the buildings are assembled by robotic arms. This is the future, no manual labour required.

If you want to boldly go where no man has gone before, then you can download the Star Trek: Outposts Unknown demo on Steam now. You can also wishlist it so you'll be alerted when it comes out.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

If you're a fan of city-builders, Life Below should already be on your radar. It's a very different take on the art of metropolis construction that swaps out the tenements and skyscrapers of your standard SimCity-likes for constructing glittering coral reefs as you attempt to revive collapsing marine ecosystems. It looks utterly beautiful, is developed with input from actual marine biologists, and has a story written by Rhianna Pratchett, whose other credits include Mirror's Edge and the excellent 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider.

It's a game with a worthy message, but developer Megapop has now made it so that Life Below can have a more direct impact on the precarious existence of the environments it portrays. Megapop has teamed up with the nonprofit organisation Whale and Dolphin Conservation to release a special supporter pack for the game that will help support the life of marine mammals.

The charity pack adds three new species to Life Below who will visit your restored reefs, namely the common bottlenose dolphin, the Atlantic spotted dolphin, and the harbour porpoise. You can watch them frolic around your corals and learn more about each species through an in-game guidebook which Megapop says is "inspired by real marine biology."

The optional pack will cost $5 (£4.50), when it launches, with 100% of net revenue from the pack going straight to supporting Whale and Dolphin Conservation's work. The base game itself will cost $30 (£25) on launch.

Of course, a game having a positive message doesn't guarantee it will be great to play. But Justin Wagner took a dip into Life Below's crystalline waters last year, and came away pretty taken with its unusual approach to city-building. "It's hard to tell without a full gamut of zones how deep the city simulation goes, but the foundations are there for a robust, quirky take on the genre." And if you need further convincing, you can try out the game yourself through its Steam demo.

Airborne Kingdom was one of the early pioneers of what I've dubbed the "weird city builder" trend, one that takes the genre out of its realistic, SimCity-esque roots and plonks it on the back of a dinosaur or in a world populated by beavers. In Airborne Kingdom's case, the gimmick was building a flying city, and it executed that well enough to receive a score of 80% in our Airborne Kingdom review.

I'd lost track of what developer The Wandering Band had been up to since, because Steam's torrent of new games never ceases. But it turns out what it's been doing is making Airborne Empire, which takes the foundations of Airborne Kingdom and builds it out with a larger world and some light RPG elements. After four years of development and just over a year in Steam early access, Airborne Empire has formally released with a substantial 1.0 update.

The launch patch adds several major new features to Airborne Empire, chief among which is a new area to explore. Kingsfell is a snowbound region where landmasses are surrounded by icebergs and riven with frigid waterways. Here, players will discover new stories and locations, and encounter "new environmental conditions" as their city soars through the sky.

Alongside the addition of Kingsfell, the game's narrative has been expanded with new quests to pursue and characters to meet. These will see players make new allies and "uncover lost civilisations", which is always a neat way to spend an afternoon. Your journey now has a proper ending too, in the form of a confrontation with a pirate queen that The Wandering Band says will form the "ultimate challenge" of your city's defences.

Of course, no city-builder update would be complete without more city to build. The Wandering Band says the update includes "new structures, upgrades and customisation options" you can use to expand and improve your base. The devs avoid going into much details about most of these additions, but there is one major new feature they take time to explain: the jet engine.

This is basically a massive thruster you can bolt on to the rear end of your city, enabling you to unleash sudden, powerful bursts off speed. This is mainly designed for use in combat, allowing you to quickly advance on an opponent or escape a situation that's spiralled out of your control. It can also be combined with other weapons in the game such as the barrage cannon. I initially misread that as "Barge Cannon", which I'd argue is a more interesting concept for a weapon.

As part of Airborne Empire's launch, The Wandering Band is selling the game at 50% for the rest of the month, bringing the price down to $15 (£12.50). If you missed the original Airborne Kingdom, that's also on sale at a significant 80% discount, letting you pick that up for $5 (£4). Both discounts end on May 1.

I'm aware all you pirates are busily scouring the Caribbean for Blackbeard and booty in survival game Windrose this week, but if I could just get your attention for a brief moment, perhaps by shouting something like "Avast!" and then pointing to a nearby island that has just appeared above the glimmering waves.

On that island is maybe the coolest pirate hideout I've ever seen, courtesy of the new pirate-themed city builder, Corsair Cove, announced today by Limbic Entertainment and publisher Hooded Horse. Lift your eyepatch and take a good look at the trailer:

In Corsair Cove, "players will manage complex production chains and govern a rowdy crew in a city-builder that’s all about building tall and overcoming the challenges of limited building space," says Hooded Horse. "Use the cliffs and hill tops to build factories that manufacture everything from spyglasses to cannons to meet the needs of your population."

As the trailer shows, going vertical is a must on your craggy little island, so you'll build rope bridges, ziplines, elevators, and perches from the remains of your once great galleon. Manage production chains of "over 50 types of goods," grow your settlement by attracting new pirate residents, and turn the remains of a shipwreck into a busting society.

If you're worried that spending all your time on an island doesn't feel all that piratey, bury those fears in Davey Jones' Locker. You'll still get a chance to set sail again as "players will also need to equip mighty ships of war that can take to the high seas and fight back against pirate hunters, resist agents of the Crown, and uncover mysterious dangers that lurk in uncharted waters."

Pigs will also play a part in your pirate colony, and I think they may be more than simply livestock. If you watch the trailer closely you can see pigs in a few of the buildings. One appears to be using a teeter-totter, though I don't know why: can you harness pig power in your hideout?

One of the screenshots PC Gamer was sent (you can see it in the gallery above) also shows a pirate riding on a pig's back as it jumps through the air. They both appear to be drunk. I don't understand it, but I'm interested.

Thank you for your attention, pirates. You can go back to Windrose now. Corsair Cove will set sail on Steam, Epic, the Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass on day one. It's due out in 2026.

After Generation Exile launched in early access on Steam last fall, game designer Nels Anderson—also known for Firewatch and Mark of the Ninja—was left scratching his head. The space ark city builder had been wishlisted thousands of times, but sold only a few hundred copies.

"I spent 7 years making Generation Exile, a solarpunk city-builder," Anderson wrote on Reddit just after the early access launch. "Trailers in PC Gaming Show June '24 & '25. Top 70 most played demo during our Next Fest. Did all the things you're supposed to. Launched in early access last week with over 35,000 wishlists. So far, we've sold fewer than 300 copies."

Anderson is careful to say that he never felt entitled to a hit game. "At no point, then or now or fucking ever … do I feel that we are owed a particular response," the designer told PC Gamer on a recent call. He just wanted to understand what happened, given the signs had been so positive.

One part of his hypothesis is early access fatigue, and Anderson now also wonders if Generation Exile is "a little bit too strange to be recognizable, but a little bit too recognizable to be strange." It's a weird game, he says (you may end up surrendering your water supply to capybaras), but perhaps not in a way that makes it obviously stand out in an environment where getting attention for anything is a struggle: "It just ended up feeling kind of fuzzy."

Whatever the reasons for Generation Exile's struggle to sell, Anderson and Sonderlust Studios didn't give up on it. Despite slim chances of earning the development costs back, the team has spent the past half-year completing Generation Exile's final two story chapters, adding a new biome, fixing bugs, and overhauling the production management UI.

"Smarter people than me would have, after like a week of response in early access, they probably would have pulled the plug, if I'm being honest," Anderson said on our call. But he's "not wired that way," and felt the studio had a responsibility to complete what it had promised for those who did take a chance on Generation Exile. The game currently has 31 user reviews on Steam, with a positive average.

"I think that, given the intensity, competitiveness, whatever of the current moment, that some people are letting their analysis swing way closer to, 'Just barf something out, and if it doesn't immediately catch fire, just cut bait and go on to the next thing,'" Anderson said.

There's a poetic irony to the situation: The focus on short-term return that Anderson is criticizing—"mortgaging the present at the expense of the future"—is one of the inspirations for Generation Exile, whose primary theme is sustainability. Players are tasked with returning a generation ship that's "teetering on the rim of collapse" to equilibrium.

In the world of game development rather than spaceship ecology, Anderson worries about what's being lost due to that 'catch fire or cut bait' attitude, as well as the kind of game design it encourages.

"So much of the experience ends up being about … encouraging you to keep coming back and spending more time with [the game]," he said. "Is that really for the player's benefit, or is it just to not let this thing out of your attention, out of your psyche, even if it's not really providing you with something novel or interesting anymore? That, to me at least, feels like another [case of], 'How do we maximize the short term at the expense of the long term?' I don't love it."

Generation Exile hits 1.0 on April 17, and is available on Steam for $30. Jon checked it out after its early access release and had positive feelings. He also learned that "the human body is equivalent in mass to 50,000 crickets."

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.

Developed by 1:1 Studio, City Masterplan is a "highly realistic" city-builder aims to strike "the perfect balance between 'ultimate realism' and 'smooth control'" according to its Steam page. It offers environmental canvases of 24x24km upon which to construct your cityscape, which can range from a traditional American metropolis to a "Chinese-style" city.

More specifically, City Masterplan promises freeform road building tools that are decoupled from typical grid-based construction and "true-to-scale" iconic buildings. Cities also develop from an extensive architectural library and "advanced" procedural content generation.

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.

If there's one thing that can ruin a beautiful and efficient city, it's the people who insist on living in it. Build them shelter (well, command them to build themselves shelter), and they'll want a convenient marketplace to buy food. Make food available to them and they'll start complaining that they want more than one type of food. Let their neighborhood flood and next thing you know they'll be asking for ways to respectfully dispose of the bloated corpses of the dead. There's just no way to please them!

Strap in, governors, because demanding citizens are just a small challenge compared with the crowd of needy gods you need to keep happy. In city builder Nova Roma, the Roman Empire has fallen and you and a handful of villagers slink away to start a new civilization in a pristine land. The gods are coming with you.

I began my new civilization on a lovely island split in two by a massive waterfall and river, a perfectly picturesque spot for a hopeful little city. I gave my earnest little villagers their first in a long series of chores like chopping trees and gathering stone to construct our first buildings: hovels, farms, wells, and quarries.

But there's another important starter building: the temple. Placing your first temple leaves with a choice: which god will this temple be devoted to? There's plenty of competition, because the moment it's built the various Roman gods will be crowded around it, shoulder to shoulder, each offering a bonus if you pick them.

If it's a temple devoted to Vulcan, nearby industrial buildings will get a production boost. If it's near the water, you might want to pick Neptune to improve your fishing yield. I went with Ceres, god of agriculture, because I was starting to farm and her temple being nearby would help my harvests.

But the gods aren't just about buffing your ass, no strings attached. They want stuff. A lot of stuff. Ceres immediately demanded I have five farms, and in exchange she offered me a reward of three favor points, which can be used to unlock new buildings on the technology tree.

Progress a bit more and the gods will also want bribes, or as they call them "offerings," which can net you more favor. Ceres suggested I might want to build some grapevines. OK, farming grapes sounds like a good idea because I'll probably want to make wine at some point, this being Rome 2. But she would like a whole bunch of my grapes, too, and in exchange she'll give me more favor I can use to progress further along the tech tree.

Not a big deal, right? Pick a god and complete quests and you get stuff. Yeah, except the gods you didn't pick for your first temple will start regularly griping about that, appearing in your city as 200-foot-tall apparitions, suggesting that you've got a real nice town here and it'd be a real shame if it got flooded or set on fire or bombarded with lightning bolts. So, you build another temple for another god, gaining their buff, completing their quests, and earning their favor. Then some other enraged god appears, making more threats. And so on.

It's not a bad way to progress, really, because they do offer great buffs and they shower you with tons of favor points, so making your way through the tech tree to the advancements you want to unlock doesn't take all that long. But the sudden demands of an angry god can appear at less than opportune times.

I'd had a few setbacks. Most significantly, my stone quarry was sorta kinda way too close to the massive waterfall that dwarfs my city. Every spring it floods a bit, I assume from melting snow, and my quarry workers have the annoying weakness of not being able to breathe underwater. Eventually, I had to relocate my quarry much further away, so for an entire season I essentially had no stone.

That's when Vulcan showed up, petulant that I hadn't built him a temple yet, and since I had no stone to build him one immediately, he basically started trashing the place with angry god magic. Lesson learned: keep some extra supplies stockpiled to appease jealous gods.

Another time, one of the gods getting its toga in a bunch happened at the best possible time. Mars, god of war, appeared and started whining that I hadn't given him a temple either, coincidentally (or not) right at the moment when some invaders appeared on the horizon in a warship. I quickly built Mars' temple, and as the ship drew closer and closer I spent his new favor points to unlock guard towers on the tech tree.

The enemy ship circled my island, looking for a place to land, while I sat there watching nervously as my citizens slowly built the towers I needed to defend them. The timing was perfect: as the enemy piled off their ship and crossed the bridge into town, my workers completed the guard tower, which immediately began raining down arrows on the invaders. They turned and fled, and I sent my militia across the bridge to finish them off. I survived my first invasion, thanks to Mars being a huge crybaby at just the right moment.

Despite all these angry gods competing for my attention, my little city by the big deadly waterfall is steadily growing, and I think I've now got a temple for each god so I'm hopeful they won't appear and wreck all my hard work.

The pace of progress is faster than in most city builders, which I'm enjoying: I'm used to leaning on the 3x speed button heavily in most city building games, but in Nova Roma I don't think I've even done it once—there's always something going on and no time to spare. Nova Roma is entering early access this week on Steam, but what's there so far already feels pretty good to me.

I thought Timberborn's early access journey was more or less done and (saw)dusted when I last checked in on it in February. The city-builder that has you oversee a colony of industrious beavers had confirmed its release date for March, and seemingly shared everything that was coming to the launch version. But it turns out Mechanistry had one final feature arriving alongside its new environment objects, maps and so forth, and it's arguably the most significant addition of them all—automation.

Yes, Timberborn's recent 1.0 release adds a dusting of Factorio to the city-builder. The launch update adds twenty new buildings to the game, designed to act as logic nodes so you can program structures and objects to operate independently. These range from simple levers to logic relays, flow sensors, power meters, and even weather stations. Alongside these general logic components are some more specific logic nodes, such as detonators for setting off explosions and fireworks, which can be used for signalling purposes or just for funsies.

Mechanistry published a blog post and a YouTube video explaining what automation can be used for. You could, for example, set up a system that automatically closes your city's floodgates when a tide of noxious badwater rolls in, protecting your existing supply from contamination. Or you could instruct production buildings to pause functioning when the supply of a particular resource runs low. You can also use it to reroute beaver pathways depending on certain conditions, such as blocking off the recreational part of your city until a certain time of day, like the owner of some horrible beaver workhouse.

It's a pretty huge addition considering everything that Mechanistry has added both in the 1.0 launch and early access more broadly. Since it was released in alpha, Timberborn has received water pumps, ziplines and tubeways, and even robotic beavers. The automation update has further cemented Timberborn's place as the one of the highest-rated city-builders on Steam, with a 95% overwhelmingly positive rating out of nearly 39,000 reviews.

If you haven't picked up Timberborn yet, whether because it's new to you or you were waiting until it was finished, Mechanistry's city-builder is on a 20% launch discount until March 26. That brings the price down to $28 (£24)—not bad considering everything the game has to offer.

While Cities: Skylines 2 has been sucking up all the oxygen with its bungled launch, severely delayed updates, and developer switcheroo, Colossal Order's original city-builder has been enjoying the quiet life. An update here, a community pack there, the odd free weekend away. It's like a retired middle-manager thriving in its dotage while its replacement burns the office down.

But it seems Skylines 2's shenanigans might have inadvertently brought the Cities: Skylines back in for one last job, as Paradox Interactive has abruptly announced a swathe of new additions to the OG. Across the next week, Skylines is getting an expansion pack, a meaty free update, a free weekend and a massive discount.

Let's start with the expansion, since it has an intriguing concept. Developed by Skylines's console port specialists Tantalus Media, Cities: Skylines—Race Day lets players outfit their city to host glitzy motor races and bring fame, fortune, and glamour to their metropolis.

By constructing a Race HQ, players can create a racetrack using special motor racetrack roads and pit lanes, build spectator stands, and schedule race events. You can also use the space within the circuit as a recreational centre by building parks, shopping malls, and so forth.

Although racetracks are designed to be separate entities for your city, you can also host races along your city streets by building event roads. These are multipurpose byways that can be used to host motor races, as well as cycling races, running races, and parades complete with floats and marching bands.

As you'd expect, hosting such major events in your city will require significant planning. It takes time for your citizens to set up for a scheduled event, blocking off roads, preparing for crowds etc, as well as packing everything away once the event is done. I'm intrigued by the potential challenge of ensuring your city can still function as such events are ongoing, requiring you to consider traffic contingencies much more when laying out your roadways.

Race Day bursts forth from the start line on March 10. The launch will coincide with a free update that adds illuminated billboards, fences you can build alongside roads, and a new employment visualiser that shows you which areas of your city are struggling for hires. Not as exciting as the DLC, obviously, but the employment visualiser should come in handy.

If, somehow, you don't already own Cities: Skylines, Paradox is hosting a free weekend on Steam between now and Monday, March 9. The game is also on a 90% discount until March 12, letting you grab the base game for just ($3) £2.49. That's a fantastic price for what is still the best nuts 'n' bolts city-builder you can play today, whatever the antics of its troubled sequel.

Cities: Skylines 2 just received its first update from new developer Iceflake Studios, which replaced Colossal Order at the end of 2025. You might think this would be a prime opportunity to breathe new life into the struggling city-builder. To come out swinging with some big new features. To make the flowers bloom, the birds sing, the babies gurgle in a way that makes you think "Are they happy or about to barf?"

Nope! Instead, Iceflake's debut patch is utterly obsessed with death. Turns out your idiot citizens have been croaking in completely the wrong ways in Cities: Skylines 2, so Iceflake has donned its black robe and sharpened its scythe to sort things out.

Dubbed First Frost (though really it should be Last Rites) the update makes numerous tweaks to systems that govern the lights going out, the buckets being kicked, the farms being bought, etc. Chiefly, it fixes a bug that prevented time of day being taken into account when determining citizens' demises, which meant everyone was popping their clogs between midnight and six o'clock. It also quadruples the number of times the game calculates deaths from four to sixteen, in order to "further reduce the number of citizens dying at the same time".

In addition, the patch fixes an especially peculiar bug that made most of your citizens immortal when playing in easy mode. "Previously, about 80% of them never died of old age," Iceflake writes in a Steam post. An ageing population is difficult enough for modern governments to deal with, so I can imagine how challenging an immortal one would be. Shuffle off, grandad! How else am I to get a house in this economy?

Not everything in First Frost is about departures from the mortal realm. The patch also reduces trips made on the bicycles introduced by Colossal Order before it moved on to pastures new, by 80%. In short, your citizens are spending less time cycling and more time dying, which I suppose is how exercise works in real life too.

Elsewhere, the patch introduces a bunch of new UI icons for roundabouts, cul-de-sacs, road maintenance depots, pollution types, and more. It updates the onboarding tutorial for new players, makes terraforming tools less aggressive (otherwise known as a terrorforming tool), and makes a bunch of graphical improvements like improved shadow rendering, snow support for decal-based lots, and fog that adjusts according to weather conditions.

Oh, and the update finally switches autosave on by default, which is good, but also kinda wild that it's only happening now. It took two years, four months, and a change in developer, but Cities: Skylines 2 will now save automatically without player intervention.

While not bristling with new features, Iceflake's first patch still seems to have improved the sequel's immediate fortunes. Recent Steam reviews stand at 67% positive at the time of writing, compared to 54% positive overall. Let's hope this proves a new foundation for a brighter future for the sequel.

We've known that Timberborn has been approaching the end of its early access journey for some time, but developer Mechanistry had yet to pin down a specific 1.0 launch date for its popular beaver-themed city builder. Now though, as the developer gnaws through the last few items on its to-do list, it has formally revealed when the game will depart early access, and it's happening in March.

Announcing the date in a Steam post, Mechanistry also showed off the game's intro cinematic, which it has temporarily redubbed as a "lore trailer". I query this title, not only because lore isn't generally foregrounded in this manner, but also because the arc of the trailer is "some beavers cross a desert and then start building a city," which is not exactly deep worldbuilding. It is a nicely animated video, though, with some supremely gravelly narration from British actor Shaun Dooley.

As Mechanistry notes in the post, Timberborn has come a long way since its debut into early access in 2021. Previous updates have introduced water pumps, robotic beavers and hazardous polluted water, alongside whole new transportation methods such as ziplines and water tubes. The current version has 16 playable maps, faction-specific wonders, and full support for mods and Steam Workshop.

As for what's coming in the 1.0 launch, Mechanistry laid out those plans back in November. The focus is more on lots of little features rather than any major expansions to one specific area of the game, with the update primed to introduce new natural phenomena such as aquifers and geothermal fields, alongside new environmental hazards, maps, spiral staircases and city banners. You can actually try these features already by downloading the game's experimental branch.

Timberborn releases into Steam early access on March 5, less than one month away. Timberborn's completion further reinforces what is set to be another strong year for city-builders, with upcoming metropolitan management games letting players build inside giant trains, on the back of cosmic whales, and in a Pokémon-style world filled with collectible creatures.

A decade after it famously beat SimCity at its own game, Finnish developer Colossal Order waved goodbye to the Cities: Skylines series last year. In Colossal Order's place, stewardship of Cities: Skylines 2 was taken over by Surviving the Aftermath developer Iceflake Studios. Now at the helm, Iceflake has unveiled the first part of its plans to take the sequel forward.

In the first issue of a new developer diary called City Corner, Iceflake outlines some of the features arriving in its debut Skylines 2 update. "There are quite a few changes coming in this first patch, some of which you have been requesting for a long time," the developer explains. The post focusses primarily on visual changes Iceflake is working on, though these do not represent the full extent of the update.

Even so, the announced adjustments to Skylines 2's are substantial. The headline change is a new feature that allows players to customise the colours of individual objects, inspired by yenyang's 'Recolor' mod. "So far, we are limiting this asset colouring to buildings, props and vehicles for now," Iceflake writes. "But we are working on making this possible for trees, plants and other props as well."

Arguably more significant, however, is an extensive rework to Skylines 2's UI, intended to make interacting with the sequel less confusing. "We have streamlined the onboarding process and changed some icons to be more expressive and easier to understand the context from them." The focus of these changes is to the toolbar, which Iceflake says has "gone through a big makeover" to improve clarity and readability.

Other planned changes include a major lighting and skybox pass designed to improve night-time visibility and increase the number of clouds you're likely to see, plus an overhaul of Skylines 2's weather effects that ensures snow actually sticks to the ground. "Since most of the surfaces didn't show any signs of snow even in the thickest snowstorm, we decided to fix it in true Finnish fashion," Iceflake says.

As mentioned, this isn't everything coming in Iceflake's first Skylines 2 patch. The studio plans a second dev diary that will dive into the mechanical changes coming with the update. "We have also prepared fixes to some of the issues you have mentioned in our forums, which we will touch upon in the next post," Iceflake adds.

It still isn't wholly clear why Colossal Order parted ways with both Skylines and publisher Paradox Interactive. In a statement announcing the split, Paradox said the pair had "mutually decided to pursue independent paths", while Colossal Order's CEO explained the developer planned to pursue "new projects".

But it isn't the first time a developer has shuffled off the stage of its own game under the publisher's banner, with the original developers of Bloodlines 2 and Prison Architect 2 both receiving the shepherd's crook treatment. Perhaps Paradox likewise felt that Colossal Order was no longer the best studio for the job, although it may also be that CO felt disillusioned by the response to the sequel.

Iceflake is in a slightly different position from the replacement developers of those games, however, taking care of a game that's already out. While it's too early to say how well the studio will handle caretaking duties, this initial post does show some promise.

Most city-builders are creative toolsets with an optional management sim attached, canvasses for the imagination with a budget you might glance at occasionally. But Microlandia is built different. The city-builder developed by Information Superhighway Games is designed to be "brutally honest". Roads are expensive, traffic jams can cost your citizens their jobs, and uncontrolled rent prices can trigger a homelessness crisis.

One area where Microlandia wasn't quite so forthright, however, was crime. Illegal activity was only simulated in the broadest terms within textureless cityscapes. But that's all changed. Microlandia's recently released update 1.5 makes crime vastly more complicated and, as a consequence, vastly more challenging.

In a Steam post, ISG introduces the update in characteristically bold fashion: "Cities are not clockwork, they are chaos machines with a mayor attached. Most of what breaks your plans is not the ordinary day, it is the ugly little surprise that arrives precisely because you acted as if it could not," the studio writes. "Version 1.5 leans into that reality: crime is no longer a single checkbox; it's a spectrum of consequences that can become a death spiral every single day."

The update breaks down crime into seven different categories, namely armed robbery, break-in, larceny, destruction, grand theft auto, violence, and major crime. These crimes can affect your profitability at different levels, from individual residents, through specific businesses, right up to kicking your entire city in the swag sack.

More complex crime brings with it more complex law enforcement. Players can now build a police HQ that houses 50 cops, who will patrol and respond to crimes within a specific radius of the building. The update also reworks police brains to produce "smarter" behaviour, with officers making "realistic decisions about where to patrol and how to respond to incidents."

All of this is apparently propped up by a rigid "statistical backbone". ISG says that Microlandia's crime frequency, police clearance rates, and zonal moving out behaviour are all modelled according to real-world publications on the subject, like the FBI's Crime in the Nation statistics from 2023, and Laura Dugan's 1999 paper 'The Effect of Criminal Victimization on a Household's Moving Decision'. I love it when a developer shows their working.

Alongside its major crime revision, update 1.5 makes some more general changes to Microlandia. Players can now build movie theatres, vineyards, premium condos, and two-storey houses. Both the UI and visuals have been given a clarity pass, and performance has been improved so that "large cities should feel less like punishment."

Microlandia continues to be a fascinating project. If you fancy giving it a go yourself, you can grab it on Steam for a very reasonable $7 (£5.89).

Medieval city-builder Manor Lords had a quiet 2025, as its developer adjusted to the game's enormous success following its release into Steam early access in 2024. Things picked up speed toward the end of the year, however, with a major patch arriving in December that introduced a rework to core systems and an overhaul to castle construction.

It seems Slavic Magic and publisher Hooded Horse are keen to maintain that momentum in 2026. In a Steam update, Hooded Horse's CEO Tim Bender provided a detailed rundown of what's coming to the management sim this year.

The most immediate planned change is a new upgrade level for the Burgage Plot—Manor Lords' basic homestead that can be expanded and tailored to a variety of uses. Burgage plots currently have three upgrade levels, but Slavic Magic is adding a new level, which exists between 2 and 3. "Its goal is to more smoothly bridge the gap between early and late-game housing", Bender explains.

Alongside this, Slavic Magic is also considering shifting certain workshop progressions to later in the game, tying baker extensions to level 3 Burgage Plots to encourage use of the early-game communal oven, and also doing the same with cobbler extensions. According to Bender, "shoes as an item aren't strictly required until this stage of progression anyway", though Manor Lords' barefoot peasants might disagree with this point.

More interesting, though, are the ideas Bender discusses for the patch due after the Burgage Plot update. To summarise, Slavic Magic is working on an extensive rework to trading, one designed to allow players to compete with rival lords economically as well as militarily.

According to Bender, this new system ties trade routes to specific locations, with said location using them to import and export specific items. "While a good like iron may appear on multiple routes, some cities will offer better prices than others, making certain routes more desirable…and more contested", Bender explains.

Each of these trade routes can support up to three merchants using it, while engaging in trade along any route requires you to hire at least one of them. If all merchants for a route are hired, lords can attempt a buyout of that merchant, increasing the hire fee and triggering a cooldown before they can be bought out again. "This turns profitable routes into contested economic territory rather than guaranteed income", Bender says.

This, Bender reckons, enables players to apply specific economic strategies. "You could, for example, attempt to monopolise Iron Slabs by hiring all Merchants on routes that export them. This would be expensive, but could leave a rival Lord without access to Iron, forcing them to adapt by paying inflated prices, expanding into an Iron-rich region, or negotiating with you directly." It might even result in "diplomatic deals where a rival trades excess weapons or other goods in exchange for Iron Slabs, effectively paying you as a middleman."

Bender is clearly jazzed by the concept. But both Hooded Horse and Slavic Magic are keen to know what existing Manor Lords players think about this potential direction for the game's economics, requesting that they leave comments on the post. "We're interested in how this kind of competitive trade feels to you, what concerns it raises, and whether it adds meaningful strategic choice to the game."

Hooded Horse has had a lot going on in this first week of the year. On Monday, it launched the 1.0 version of Terra Invicta, the massively ambitious sci-fi grand strategy from the creators of X-COM The Long War, which is sitting pretty with a 'Very Positive' Steam rating. Then on Thursday, Bender revealed just how much he hates generative AI, explaining that "It's written into our contracts if we're publishing the game: 'no fucking AI assets.'

We're still happily awash in the golden age of city builders, and there's no sign of things slowing down: 2026 is already looking like it's packed with new takes on plopping down houses and roads.

You can expect loads more city builders than these next year, but the ones listed below all take place in interesting places. If you want to build a city in a world filled with vengeful gods, in deep space on the back of a cosmic whale, or on a massive steampunk train thundering through a post-apocalyptic landscape, you'll be able to. There's even a builder set in a world of collectible creatures you can tame and send into battle. That's a first!

Here's a quick look at 7 city builders coming in 2026 that will let us build in some truly wild places, such as…

In a Rome where gods are real (and real angry)

Nova Roma
Release: Jan 2026

You won't need to wait long for this beautiful builder: it's due in January. Rebuild a fallen Rome, but be careful not to anger the gods: they're watching and won't be shy about voicing their displeasure in the form of lightning bolts and other disasters. There's a demo out now if you want to try it early.

Up a massive tree in a dark fantasy realm

DarkSwitch
Release: March 2026

Look, I don't get the name either, but it sure looks like an interesting city builder. Construct an elvish metropolis encircling a giant sacred tree in this vertical builder set in a dangerous fantasy realm where the encroaching fog can make your citizens lose their little minds.

On a gigantic steampunk train filled with orcs and elves

Steel Artery: Train City Builder
Release: 2026

I'm not a train guy, but anytime a game is set on a train it immediately captures my interest. (Maybe I am a train guy?) Build a city on a moving train as it travels through a steampunk world on rails. Manage thousands of autonomous citizens (many are orcs and elves, naturally), meet their needs, and create a thriving economy. This looks great.

On the back of a cosmic whale

Beyond These Stars
Release: 2026

As your giant space whale restlessly explores the cosmos, build and manage a city for your "Peeps" on its back. Develop technology so you can communicate with the sentient being you're riding around on, and manage the fragile ecosystem to carefully expand while avoiding disaster.

Across an entire medieval county filled with settlements

County of Fortune
Release: 2026

There's something deeply appealing about not just building one city but many interconnected ones, and County of Fortune lets you do just that. Build multiple towns and manage their connections, including their growing and evolving social, cultural, and political identities.

In a Pokémon-style world filled with collectible creatures

Tamer Town
Release: 2026

They're not Pokémon, OK? They're Mokiton. Very different! And you'll need to build a city around the collectible creature economy, complete with arenas where critters and their trainers can do friendly battle. There are over 130 creatures to collect while you grow and decorate your city.

In a funky throwback '90s where you can decorate every building yourself

Metropolis 1998
Release: 2026

I've written about this a few times already because there's a frequently updated demo you can play right now. Enjoy the retro vibes of early isometric city builders but with plenty of modern goodies under the hood, including a complex simulation and the ability to design and decorate every single building yourself.

As someone who's spent an excessive amount of time micromanaging entire civilizations, the industrious little rodents of Whiskerwood have to be the cutest critters I've ever lorded over. The adorable cat-and-mouse city builder puts you in charge of a fledgling mouse colony filled with hardworking, skilled laborers who don't seem to know they're the only thing of real value in the equation. Their only ask is that you meet their most basic needs—you know, food, shelter, clothing, the bare minimum kind of thing. But even that grows difficult as supplies run thin and your feline overlords keep demanding a bigger slice of the pie.

When times got tough, I figured my mousy subordinates would surely understand going to bed hungry a night or two. I didn't expect them to question it, nor did I think they would spread ugly rumors of my misgivings, further stoking rebellious fervor. Well, I say rumors, but yeah—I did overpay the monarchy several times in hopes of courting shiny infrastructure upgrades while leaving the mice to starve. I tried explaining that I thought this society was too cute to be of serious consequence, and that they really needed my useless governance negotiating days of food for a wind chime. I don't think they liked that.

Anyway, long story short, the mice revolted. And that's how my first city, New Gouda, fell in an impressive speedrun of societal collapse. I repeated my sins a few times before really getting the hang of it and accepting that Whiskerwood only looks like a warm and fuzzy city sim. In reality, it's a brutal balancing act of complex systems that demands you take your duty leading the Whiskers—its mousy proletariat—seriously.

Life on the procgen archipelago gets rough, but I finally established a successful colony with the founding of Brieton. I've had some close calls with the game's ruthless kitty monarchy, the Claws, though it's usually just firing a cannonball or two after I fail to pay taxes. It's a screw up that's (mostly) easy to fix, or at least it is when compared to the threat of colonial uprising that comes with betraying your workers. I'll occasionally get a little too excited and strain resources while making decorations, but it's not like aesthetic philosophy is an entirely useless concept here. The mice need a little joy in their surroundings.

The general flow, environmental fixtures, and setup of your colony are all factors just as important to keeping your island citizens happy as they are in city builder cousins like Cities Skylines, but Whiskerwood takes a zoomed-in look at a smaller populace. It's more akin to colony sims like Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld with a heavy focus on production chains, political conflict, and conquering harsh landscapes. The system gives me a chance to hone in on individual mice too, and when I find one that's particularly gifted and wired for productivity, I invest in advancing their talents.

It's all just a big cat-and-mouse balancing act, but I find the old adage "slow and steady wins the race" particularly helpful for surviving those first few weeks. I stick to the basics early on, keeping my population small while preparing for the first difficulty spike in winter. The cold snap is where things really took a turn for the worst in New Gouda and several of the attempts that followed. I wiped out half the island by making some mice sleep outside while I hoarded wealth for later investments. Despite Whiskerwood's flurry of tutorial warnings, I learned the hard way my colony couldn't get by on campfire heat alone. The surviving workers expressed grievances after seeing their dead, frozen neighbors, and well, you know the rest of the story.

The more I stew on my failures, the more I realize Whiskerwood is quite grim, but I will say some items and Whisker traits make me think a colony run by more competently negligent monarchists works fine. I haven't experimented with them yet, but I've researched some gross displays of wealth, like a golden feline statue meant to intimidate passing workers. I've also noticed some mice like to do a little class betrayal, but I've tried to keep those folks sequestered from my island. It's only acceptable when I'm the one exploiting the labor here.

Anyway, I've found enough success with the path that lets me rest my bourgeois head at night, and ethical motivations aside, profits from sloppy shortcuts in a society where mice don't have their most basic needs met won't last. The Claws always come back, beating down my door while asking the Whiskers to give up more for less.

It's all surprisingly robust for a game in early access, and I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible in its current state. I've yet to really push back on the monarchy, and mostly stick to paying its unfair tax rate in full and on time with zero bribery involved. I'm eager to see how far I can push the despots when I try to cut my island's over-reliance on their paltry supply shipments, but Brieton just got showers and warehouses bigger than a shoebox, so I don't think I'm anywhere close to that… yet.

It's been a rough ride for Cities: Skylines 2 over the last two years, with the sequel's premature launch in 2023 leading to severe technical issues and lengthy delays to planned future updates. But the troubled city-builder has received some significant TLC lately. November's bike patch brought bicycles, scooters and associated infrastructure to player-created metropolises, and now, developer Colossal Order has finally added its hotly anticipated asset editor too.

As Colossal Order concedes in a recent Steam post, development of the asset editor has been "long underway", with the community clamouring for it more or less since the sequel launched. The developer admitted in March that the editor had "proven more technically challenging than initially anticipated". Citing issues such as lingering Unity dependencies and the large amount of in-built assets affected by the editor's addition.

In any case, those issues have seemingly been resolved. Colossal Order's aim with the asset editor is to let players "create complex assets on par with official content", and the tool has a few interesting features to make this easier for players.

For starters, rather than having its own bespoke menu, the editor opens into a custom Skylines 2 map where users can build numerous assets simultaneously. "That's right! If you're making multiple asses, you can prop them all at once." Users can also choose different scenes in which to build, including a plain green landscape and one dotted with roads and trees to aid "size comparison and [provide] a visual reference for how your asset will look in game."

Elsewhere, the editor supports "flexible" prop placement, letting users select and adjust props as much as they like once placed, and streamlines the process of managing bigger lots: "Gone are the days when you had to manage multiple assets to create truly large building complexes," Colossal Order says. "Now, all you have to do is simply type in the numbers for the depth and width of the lot for the whole building."

The editor bundles in several tutorials to help aspiring asset modders get started, while the official wiki features detailed guides for how all the editor's functions, er, function.

Short of any surprise updates, the asset editor represents Colossal Order's final major addition to Cities: Skylines 2, as the studio parts ways with publisher Paradox Interactive and moves on to pastures new. Neither Paradox nor Colossal Order has explained the reasons behind the split in detail, simply claiming the choice represents "the strongest possible future" for the series. But Paradox has developed a habit of transplanting troubled projects into new development hosts, having done the same with the recently released Bloodlines 2 and the currently MIA Prison Architect 2.

Come January, development of Skylines 2 (and the series as a whole) will be taken over by Surviving the Aftermath developer Iceflake Studios. While Skylines 2's future direction remains unclear at this point, Iceflake has stated it will reveal its plans soon.

Colossal Order will soon part ways with its difficult second child, Cities: Skylines 2, but at least the developer got to teach the sequel to ride a bike before sending it to live with adoptive parent Iceflake Studios. The newly released bike patch actually adds bicycles and electric scooters into Skylines 2, along with all the infrastructural gubbins that go along with a bicycle-friendly city.

By default, your bike-loving citizens will cycle along the standard road network with cars and trucks. But you can create specific bicycle paths and bicycle road lanes to separate cars from cyclists—which is safer and healthier for everyone. Since cyclists also need a place to park their bikes when they reach their destination, the update also adds numerous types of bike parks. Just as adding more car parks encourages drivers not to park on the street, bike parks will encourage more citizens to cycle around the city rather than drive.

But the bike patch adds considerably more, such as several new types of park. This includes a bike park that is also, wait for it, a bike park. What I mean by that is it's a place to park your bike that is also a bike park. Sorry, that still isn't clear enough. I mean a recreational civic area themed around bicycles where you can also safely stow your two-wheeled, pedal-powered transportation device for a temporary period. Jeez. English, eh? Who needs it?

Elsewhere, the bike patch adds a new campfire area, several types of business plaza to ensure workers don't enjoy themselves too much while on a break, and a whole bunch of transportation buildings that aren't related to bikes. This includes a new train depot, a railway terminus station that can be extended with a multiplatform bus station and a tram stop, a cargo transfer station, and three new tram stations. Finally, the update adds two new types of wind turbines and a small cemetery—perfect for when you're running out of places to hide the corpses.

While the bike patch will likely be the last major mechanical update introduced by Colossal Order, the studio will be implementing Asset Mods before it bows out completely at the start of next year. From that point onward, it's Iceflake Studios' baby, with Colossal Order's fellow Finnish developer aiming to outline its plans for the game soon.

It still isn't clear exactly why Colossal Order is handing off development of Skylines 2 to another studio. The sequel has certainly not been an easy ride for CO, but it's very rare that a developer willingly hands over the creative reins to another studio. Paradox, meanwhile, has developed a track record of switching projects between developers, having done so with both Prison Architect 2 and Bloodlines 2.

The latest game in the long-running Anno strategy city builder series has had a great launch week—depending on where you're standing, at least. Anno 117: Pax Romana, which released on November 12, has been met with "Mixed" reviews on Steam and has been the target of complaints about the use of AI to create in-game assets.

But, according to Ubisoft, that hasn't stopped the city builder from breaking a few records.

Anno 117: Pax Romana is "the fastest-selling title in the franchise’s 25-year history," Ubisoft said in an email to PC Gamer. Ubisoft also said that with an average of 85 on Metacritic (PC Gamer's Anno 117: Pax Romana review scores it an 80) and a 94% "Recommended" on OpenCritic (with an average score of 84), Anno 117 has become "the highest-rated Anno in the franchise's history."

Steam reviewers haven't been as generous. Amid scattered complaints of bugginess, a shortened campaign, and connection issues with its co-op mode, one user summed it up with the most damning sort of praise a game can get: "Anno is fine."

Most of the negative reviews are focused on how unhappy players are that AI assets have been used in the game. This is the first Ubisoft game to post an "AI generated content disclosure" on Steam, which states: "AI tools were used to help create some in game assets. In all such cases, the final product reflects our team’s craft and creative vision." That vision apparently includes background images where people's heads are missing and hands are deformed—that old AI oopsie classic. Some of the AI-assisted artwork is being replaced, per Kotaku, though I'm not sure that's going to smooth the troubled waters.

Or maybe the waters aren't really that troubled after all? Ubisoft also says Anno 117 has "reached unprecedented player numbers, making it the fastest growing title in the series," though it doesn't specify exactly how many total players that is. SteamDB shows a peak concurrent player count of over 50,000, though—roughly twice the peak of Anno 1800, which launched in 2019.

Cities: Skylines developer Colossal Order has parted ways with publisher Paradox Interactive, with ongoing development of the series moving to a different studio.

In a statement posted to the Paradox Forums, Paradox announced that the pair had "mutually decided to pursue independent paths", claiming the choice had been made to ensure "the strongest possible future for the Cities: Skylines franchise."

Colossal Order will continue to oversee development of Cities: Skylines 2 until 2026, handling the incoming Bike Patch and a "beta implementation" of the long awaited asset support for the game's Editor. Come 2026, however "all existing and future development" of Skylines 2 will be handled by Iceflake Studios.

What is Iceflake Studios? Well, Paradox describes it as one of its "internal management game studios" based in Tampere, Finland. Iceflake was founded in 2007 and acquired by Paradox in 2020.

Looking at Iceflake's website, the developer seems to have been mainly focussed on developing mobile games until relatively recently, having developed 2021's survivalist city-builder Surviving the Aftermath—though as part of the statement, Iceflake's Studio Manager Lasse Lijedahl says it has a "decade worth of experience from making city building and management games."

Lijedahl also said that taking over on Cities Skylines is an "immense honor and a great responsibility." Colossal Order, meanwhile, is moving onto pastures new, with CEO Mariina Hallikainen saying the company is "excited to channel our experience, creativity and passion into new projects that align with our long-term vision."

It's hard to know exactly what to make of all this. Cities: Skylines 2 had clearly been a difficult project for Colossal Order. The sequel launched in a rough state, poorly optimised and lacking many features players had grown fond of in the original and its many, many expansions. Supporting the game has also proved troublesome for Colossal Order, with its Bridges and Ports expansion being delayed for more than a year.

Paradox eventually conceded that Skylines 2 had been released too early, though deputy CEO Mattias Lilja claimed that everyone involved had been "in agreement that iterating [Skylines 2] live was the right way to go." Clearly though, this was the wrong choice, and the game's reputation has yet to recover.

Skylines 2 is also far from the only game published from Paradox to hit troubled waters lately. Indeed, replacing developers has become something of a habit for the publisher, with Prison Architect 2 being handed off from Double Eleven to Brazilian outfit Kokku, while Bloodlines 2 was taken off Hardsuit Labs and given to The Chinese Room. Bloodlines 2 did eventually come out, albeit to responses that ranged from mildly positive to largely negative. Prison Architect 2, on the other hand, has been delayed indefinitely.

That's not to mention the cancellation of Life by You, the botched DLC releases, and the underwhelming responses to games like Millennia and Lamplighters League, the latter of which also led to Paradox parting ways with its developer, Harebrained Schemes.

As for what this all means for Cities: Skylines 2 and the series as a whole, all three parties are apparently working to ensure a "smooth transition" at present, while Iceflake Studios will "share its plans" for Cities: Skylines "in the near future."

Ubisoft has been caught with its hand in the generative AI jar again, continuing a multi-year streak of formal insistence by the publishing giant that AI and game development are destined to be together. Anno 117: Pax Romana is the first Ubisoft game to appear on Steam with an AI content disclosure, though the statement notes "the final product reflects our team’s craft and creative vision." It seems that vision includes some pretty janky background characters with nubs for hands, as players are spotting on Reddit.

In the above thread posted by user MedicaeVal, there's an imgur gallery where you can see some dubious, muddy-looking figures in one of the game's illustrations. Kotaku shared another imgur gallery featuring artwork where some Roman senators can be seen with similarly uncanny looks—one of them lacks a head, for example.

That same Kotaku story shares a quote from Ubisoft explaining that first image and proposing a fix: "This image was a placeholder asset that unintentionally slipped through our review process. The final image is attached here and will replace the current version of this artwork with the upcoming 1.3 patch." The statement also notes that because Anno 117 is the studio's "most ambitious Anno yet," AI tools were merely a complement to "the largest team of artists ever for the franchise."

Here's the new image Kotaku shared:

While the new image looks a bit better, I'd say the use of the term "placeholder" is questionable when the final product is very nearly the same. It calls into question how much of the artwork is AI in the first place; after all, the fix here seems to have just been to paint over the AI asset where it was ugliest.

It's proving troublesome for fans. On the aforementioned Reddit thread, user AlcoreRain commented, "Your post is the reason I won't buy the game for now. It shows that they have used AI as base for the art, and this picture is just not on the same level as 1800. If they are going to go with cheap tools in their game, I will wait 'til the game is cheap." Another reply from taytay_1989 reads, "Of all of the video games, not Anno!! What drew me to Anno 1800 was its gorgeous artworks."

This issue has permeated other areas of the game too, with players on social media expressing concerns that certain language localizations are allegedly AI-generated. It's a particular shame with Pax Romana because, in some respects, it's one of the better city builders in recent memory. AI is also an increasingly ubiquitous gamedev tool these days: It's getting harder and harder to spot when the handcrafted stuff ends and the AI insertions begin.

The latest in the series of era-obsessed city builders, Anno 117: Pax Romana, launches today on PC and consoles. There's plenty of toga cosplay to go around as you slip into the sandals of a Roman governor at the peak of the empire, managing the needs of your people against the demands of the emperor. There's more of a narrative going on in Anno 117 than your average city builder as well, which is a nice touch.

Our Anno 117: Pax Romana review says, "At times it borders on so friendly and non-threatening to your endeavours that you feel like you could leave it unattended for an hour and return to find everything absolutely fine. At others, the sequence of events required to tick off the next chapter objective feels so long and incremental that you wonder if you’ll achieve anything at all of note this evening with it."

When is the Anno 117 unlock time?

On PC, the Anno 117 launch time is 3 pm Pacific on Wednesday, November 12, 2025. On consoles, Anno 117 unlocks at midnight in your local time zone on Thursday, November 13. You can find Anno 117 on Steam and the Epic Games Store for $60/£50, or the Ubisoft Store, where it's also available through Ubisoft+.

Here's the global launch time for Anno 117 on PC in other parts of the world:

• 3 pm PST November 12 (Los Angeles)
• 6 pm EDT November 12 (New York)
• 8 pm BRT November 12 (São Paulo)
• 11 pm GMT November 12 (London)
• 12 am CEST November 13 (Berlin)
• 10 am AEDT November 13 (Sydney)
• 12 pm NZDT November 13 (Auckland)

Is there preloading for Anno 117?

Preloading for Anno 117 has been available on PC starting on Monday, November 10. You'll need to have preordered the game already to begin preloading it and play right at the global unlock time on PC. Preloading is also available for Anno 117 on Xbox X|S and PlayStation 5.

It wasn’t built in a day, famously. But this latest Anno in a long-running series of accessible and endearingly twee city builders doesn’t take that old adage overly to heart. There’s complexity to its supply chains and economy, but it takes a ruthless writers’ pen (quill?) to the systems-bloat and perplexing menu rabbit holes found elsewhere in the genre. As a result, overseeing a burgeoning Roman territory feels far less like filling in a tax return than other city builders, and more like the power fantasy that we probably all showed up for in the first place.

The Pax Romana era was a golden age for the be-sandaled denizens of the Roman empire, full of peace, prosperity and neatly laundered togas. Developer Ubisoft Mainz uses this happy clappy context well for a bit of early game tutorialising, trotting you through some basic supply chain creation via a menu layout that will feel like stepping into worn-in old shoes to Anno 1800 players, but which Tropico or Cities Skylines veterans would find almost confrontationally straightforward: you begin by clicking on the resource you’d like your citizens to start making, then—from a pop-up menu which shows you the buildings required to make it—you drop the necessary structures into the world. Simplicity itself, and enough to make you wonder why almost every other game does this process in reverse.

There’s plenty of subtlety to even this most basic action, though. Placing those structures in positions that are both geographically close to the resources they need, close to each other, and in areas that might trigger productivity or happiness bonuses, is not easy to achieve, and introduces a nice puzzle-like wrinkle to the way you lay out your cities. It does mean that you eventually see your initial settlement for the trashpile of inefficiency that it is when you become better attuned to those variables, and will probably want to bulldoze the lot and start again, but hey, it’s a golden era. No one’s out to get you. You’ve got time and space to make mistakes.

Or have you? This is where Anno 117’s interactive narrative element shows up to enrich the scintillating garum hut-placing action, and with some surprising twists, too. As an inexperienced governor and something of an outsider to the Emperor’s inner circle, you’re just trying to keep your head down and follow Emperor Lucius’ orders without asking too many questions or trying to let your sense of intimidation at the sheer majesty of the guy’s eyebrows become evident.

Cloak and dagger

Via a series of infrequent cutscenes with a few dialogue trees, you’re made to feel as though perhaps Lucius and his family aren’t taking you as seriously as they might. There’s his sniffy tone, for one. And the missions he gives you, which amount to nothing more than delivering supplies to his wife’s island so that she can throw a lavish party. And the massive cash payment he demands of you, with no repayment terms. Something about this relationship might not be as peaceful and happy-clappy as the vigorously cheerful colour palette has been suggesting.

Speaking of that, what a handsome game this is. It’s unlikely that CD Projekt will be tearing up their Witcher IV screenshots in despair as a result of Anno 117’s fairly low-poly fishing huts and amphitheaters, but there’s a lot of character to every building. Enough that I found myself regularly zooming right in on each one just to watch a day in the life of its workers. Meanwhile at mid-zoom, the combination of dramatic clouds, rolling hills, burning braziers and gently lilting wheat fields is enough to relax all the muscles in your neck that stiffen during a day of living life in 2025. When the score kicks in too, it’s basically Roman novocaine.

As your territory expands north, Anno 117’s next trick is to introduce Celtic settlements, using that characterful art direction to muster some wonderfully misty, boggy landscapes where thatched mud huts meet with Roman architecture. In other games the process of expanding your domain is about colouring in the world map your colour, or imposing your culture on every other settlement, but Anno 117’s approach is to let the Celts be Celts, augmenting their way of life with your newfangled viaducts rather than steamrolling everything and building over it until it looks like Caesar’s backyard.

Peaceful stupor

Is the sense of jeopardy high enough, though? There’s an hour or two after you’ve ticked off the basics in which it feels like it might not be. There are no invading troops from rival empires or clans lurking on the horizon, not for quite a while, and the story’s still in exposition mode, yet to surface the skullduggery that’s to come. But the drama happens anyway—at least, it did in my save. Because I completely ran out of money.

Part of it was accepting Lucius’ massive monetary tribute, certainly. Another element was allowing my resources to pile up in my storage warehouses without any trade agreements set up. There’d been my reckless spending on upgrading far too many buildings from Liberalis to Plebian dwellings, without a watertight understanding of how doing that would affect my workforce, and thus, income. And so it wasn’t long before I was reading a handy pop-up message about the implications of going totally bankrupt, and game over states.

In the nick of time, I adjusted my warehouse to sell off all the goods I was producing whenever I had a certain number of them in reserve. Terracotta tiles: got more than 20 of them? Flog them. Garum? Drowning in the stuff, get it sold. Stinking the place out anyway.

Doing this made me really understand, for the first time, why it’s important to build supply chains efficiently and in a way that triggers as many bonuses to nearby buildings and citizens as possible. Without giving me a specific objective or a single cutscene with a bathhouse burning, the game had created a moment of brinksmanship, tension, and learning.

It was swiftly followed by many more structured moments of drama, mind you. The military element doesn’t kick in for quite a while in the narrative campaign and isn’t a primary focus, but it’s there. So are your advisors, popping up with dilemmas for you to resolve. For example, I’d just constructed a lovely new governor’s mansion. You know the kind: tastefully placed trees lining the ostentatious access road. One or two magnificent statues within its grounds. My faithful advisor Ben-Baalion told me we could hire a specialist to work there, one of two brothers specifically. The eldest was thick as mince but could get workers going like the clappers, boosting productivity. The younger is a wizard with an accounting book but cares for little else, boosting income. It could have just shown me two avatars with some stats and had me drop one into a slot, but as is so often the case across its systems, Anno 117 went the extra mile.

A small step

It wants you to be just as directly, personally involved in its multitheist religious system, which can be used to spread influence between settlements, Civ-style, and in its vast research tree. It keeps you grounded in the shoes of an actual governor, rather than an omnipotent force in the sky who can bring down buildings at will, by having you travel around between islands by ship, sailing the world map to converse with other governors, renegade royal daughters, slavers and the like. It takes time to cover that ground on the ocean, and in that ground you feel the sense of accomplishment of being one tiny spec on the map who’s built a vast society. A small but significant touch.

There isn’t a confident stride forwards here from Anno 1800’s very accomplished refinement of the age-old Anno experience. And there didn’t need to be, especially. Instead, Anno 117 finds a reason for being with its setting and characterisation, giving you new resources and supply chains using a ready-made and polished interface. At times it borders on so friendly and non-threatening to your endeavours that you feel like you could leave it unattended for an hour and return to find everything absolutely fine. At others, the sequence of events required to tick off the next chapter objective feels so long and incremental that you wonder if you’ll achieve anything at all of note this evening with it. Both of those are challenges to my content-fried brain at times.

But most of the time, the experience of letting Anno 117 wash over me at its own pace is actually therapeutic. Order is relatively easy to achieve in this realm, and although there are forces who periodically threaten it, they’re neither numerous nor vicious enough to disturb an overall atmosphere of Sunday night TV. This is more about placing a viaduct for maximum economic and aesthetic impact than it is about conquering anything or proving your skills as a civil administrator, and I’ve been surprised to find that’s exactly the pace to keep me compelled towards this chocolate-box depiction of Rome.

Generation Exile, a city builder which just released on Steam in early access, has a killer plot: Earth is dead or dying, ruined first by ecological collapse and finished off by the gruesome genetically engineered things we thought would fix it. A colony ship is set to undertake the multi-hundred-years journey to a new world orbiting a new star, and the ship's huge compartments hold microcosms of Earth's biomes to feed the crew and repopulate the new world.

The only problem is that the engineered life forms, the Scale, have somehow made it on to the ship and now everything has gone very, very wrong. You and your people have hidden in the maintenance tunnels, but now the monstrosity is colonizing them too, so you've got to go into the biomes and build yourselves sustainable communities from the wreckage there—a landscape now populated by weird mutants that the Scale left in its wake.

How will you do that? By eating a lot of crickets, apparently. Like. So many crickets.

Yes, that's right, folks. Cricket mush is nutritious. It's packed with protein, fat, fiber, and probably lots of other things I didn't learn from a tooltip. So that's your first food source when you hit the surface for the first time: Cricket farms. Meals of cricket mush and unfiltered groundwater straight from a well pump.

Generation Exile cribs its gameplay from the smart kind of board games, combining simple mechanics into a more complex whole. The basic gameplay is pretty much from the tile placement genre: You have a set of buildings that cost various resources and require some kind of upkeep afterward—a water treatment plant might take prefab panels to build but needs technicians and filters to keep running. The trick is that structures, once you put them up, don't just vanish: Their deconstructed remains have to get hauled away. You need storage for all that mess—and mess your humans make—lest it further contaminate the already-unbalanced environment.

So every placement is something you've got to consider, plan, and think ahead on. Do you want that habitat there in 20 turns? Will it still be in distribution range once you upgrade to proper farm-raised foods from your cricket plant? Maybe not, if you're me, because you didn't quite plan ahead. Maybe those guys just eat crickets now. Those are the cricket-eating guys and they work at the soil decontaminator and the salvage yard.

"The human body is equivalent in mass to 50,000 crickets!" a loading screen tip cheerfully tells me.

It's a bit of gameplay almost hilariously at odds with the otherwise-hopeful themes of Generation Exile, whose randomly generated characters run the gamut of weird people who had the political clout and/or skills to get on the ship.

You've got experienced environmental engineers on one hand, and former pop stars on the other. Either way you've got to make them work together. Each turn of the game you assign your team to tasks: Build this structure, haul that wreckage, upgrade that housing. The further from the central hub of each sector it is, the more dangerous the area is, so you want to assign people with relevant skills to keep the overall risk of something going wrong low. Anyone can assemble a new water tank in the safe grassland near the center. You should probably send the trained engineers to do it out where there are poisonous vines with sap that burns you.

Figuring out how to optimally use your team and the resources available to you is such a key part of Generation Exile that it smacks of another board game genre—resource management. Any choice you make takes some of your limited pool, and figuring out what to build and in what order both fits the game rules and the sustainability theme. Overbuild and you'll probably regret it as you scramble to support the new stuff you've put down from your limited resources.

Keeping up the flow of stuff to support your operations draws from yet another genre: the engine builder. You need to clear out excess nitrates from the water to then purify the water to then water your crops to feed your people. Each of those steps needs a building, which itself may need a support structure or two. But now you've got an interlocking system that creates purified water output and crops you can feed into other production chains.

The sustainability angle serves as pushback on you there, though. Your little systems produce waste products you might not know how to properly dispose of—so you just have to store them. Those piles of human waste and bio-organic goop. There's only so much space to store it in, and resources to build safe storage from, so your efforts in any given biome are on a time limit.

All of this is to say that I figured out just feeding people crickets was way, way more effective than feeding them real food, at least in the scenarios that I got through during the early access release of Generation Exile. Turns out, crickets are the low-water, low impact way to keep the human machine rolling onward. Sure, that means your sustainability score is a bit lower than it could be, which means that bad events are more likely to happen between turns… but I got by just fine.

After all, if we're board gaming, why shouldn't you Push Your Luck?

Back in September, more than a few indie developers pushed back their release dates by a few weeks or months to get out of the way of the arrival of Hollow Knight: Silksong, which they feared would suck up all of gamingdom's attention. And maybe that was the right call, but one side effect has been an almost comically packed release schedule on Steam through October and straight into this first week of November.

Case in point: on Tuesday colony builder Generation Exile dropped on Steam to a total of three user reviews, despite a seasoned indie team behind it. Studio founder Nels Anderson was previously the lead designer of masterful stealth game Mark of the Ninja before co-founding Campo Santo to make Firewatch. Generation Exile's team also includes Karla Zimonja, designer on Gone Home and Tacoma, and Niamh Fitzgerald, lead designer of hit traffic sim Mini Motorways. Oh, and a soundtrack from FTL and Into the Breach composer Ben Prunty!?

Maybe the problem is the Steam page doesn't mention that the game's got capybaras in it. Or maybe between heavyweights like Arc Raiders and surprise hits like Dispatch and RV There Yet, a quieter game like Generation Exile dropping in early access doesn't have much chance of catching the algorithm's attention.

It caught our attention, though: last year we interviewed the Sonderlust Studios team for the PC Gaming Show, and the topic of sustainability—both for the games industry and the planet—were front-of-mind. That's kinda what Generation Exile is all about, as you find yourself overseeing a colony ship with limited natural resources on a long interstellar voyage.

"You're still having to provide the basics for your society: Food, shelter, clean water," Nels Anderson said. "But there's this kind of unquestioned assumption that lives in a lot of strategy games, but also in the world around us, where it's like: 'Oh, we need more resources? We can just keep extracting. We can just keep taking more forever. We can just keep growing and growing and growing.' It's simply not possible to keep expanding forever.

"That is both a thematic element of the game, but I think part of that has come from looking at the industry around us. We see the harm that's caused by focusing exclusively on short-term gains, where all the goals are 'what are the returns for the next quarter?' or whatever. That single-minded focus on what's immediately ahead of us—how can we extract as much value in the short term—is just not sustainable. ... We want to anchor a lot of the city building, strategy game stuff in not just getting bigger and consuming more stuff, but finding more ways to be more efficient. More effective. To use only what you have around you, because that's all you've got. And finding ways to grow and thrive, but in a way that is not just endlessly extractive."

We'll be digging into Generation Exile ourselves soon to write about how its ideas for a sustainable city builder come together. Its introductory 10% discount on Steam lasts until November 11, and there's also already a roadmap charting the course for future updates in early access.

Priorities. That's what managing a medieval city is all about. Farms are important for long-term survival, but fishing and gathering makes more sense if people need food quickly. Chopping logs into planks means construction on new buildings can commence, but if people are freezing in their homes, that timber should be turned into firewood instead.

And assigning laborers to salvage nearby ruins for resources should be put on hold if—and here's just one quick example—a giant angry bear is rampaging through the town brutally mauling everybody to death. Yeah, a murder-bear can shuffle a city's priorities real fast. Forget fishing and firewood: every single citizen's job right now is to find something sharp and become an expert bear-stabber.

Ravenous wildlife is just one of the many, many dangers you face in survival city builder Farthest Frontier, where famines, heatwaves, diseases, fires, bandit attacks, and even bee stings can send your settlers to an early grave. (New priority: build a graveyard. A big one.)

But Crate Entertainment's city builder isn't all catastrophes and crises, it's also a deep and intricate management sim about ushering your settlers from the early days of poverty and dirt roads into economic stability and (bear-free) cobblestone streets.

Town halls

The first year of Farthest Frontier feels like walking on a knife's edge. It's all about preparing for the harsh winter: building enough homes but not so many that you're wasting wood and labor, stockpiling enough food but not so much that it'll spoil, directing scouts to explore the map for resources but not straying so far you find a bandit camp or a wolf den, because you absolutely cannot risk combat at the start of the game. You have very few citizens, almost no food, and losing a single settler to animal attack or accident is a major setback.

Over the next few years that tension gives way to, well, a bit of boredom. The early game of Farthest Frontier is one of slow expansion, maybe a bit too slow: with only a handful of settlers, waiting for trees to be chopped down or for hunters to kill deer, there's just not much to do but lean on the fast-forward button and sit there watching. Advancement to anything beyond basic production is locked behind milestones like population growth, and that can take a while.

But things pick up quickly once you reach the second tier and more of the game's nearly 200 different buildings become available. A lot of the mid-game fun comes from choosing a specialty for your city, a direction to throw your efforts into. In one city I majored in bees, mass-producing honey from apiaries scattered throughout my town, which was like liquid gold because I could turn it into beer and medicine and sell it to traveling vendors.

Radiant raids

In my most recent city my scouts discovered something better than liquid gold: actual gold. The procedural map generation gods smiled upon me by placing several gold deposits just outside my city. Who needs to tax citizens or sell products to merchants when I can literally mine and mint my own money? I couldn't see the expressions on my citizens' faces, but I bet they were excited that their lives, and their children's lives, would be spent working in the mines.

My goldlust was swiftly punished, though, because I hastily built my gold mines long before I had built just about anything else, like adequate defenses for my now-wealthy city. It wasn't long until bandits poured from the trees and raided my town, making off with more gold than I would have thought could fit in their pockets.

I know the raid system is probably just the game checking my city for valuables and flipping the "bandit" toggle to "on" when it sees I have something worth stealing, but the raids in Farthest Frontier feel surgically timed. One raid came while most of my town was busy fighting a fire (I'd like to think it was set by a bandit as a diversion), and another came just after I'd transferred all of my gold from my vault, a stone building surrounded with stone walls, to my trading depot, a wooden building surrounded with nothing.

After I'd built walls around my trading post, the next raid hit my foundry: the place I melt gold ore into bars. Now I've gotta build walls around that, too, and maybe actually invest in a few guard towers and a cavalry. Good news, miners, some of you can now put down your pickaxes and spend your lives fighting brigands to the death. My citizens must love me.

Crop circles

One of the most engrossing parts of Farthest Frontier are the production chains. I decided to focus heavily on orchards to produce fruit: making people happy means giving them more than just deer jerky and berries to eat. It seemed simple enough: build an arborist building, wait for trees to grow, harvest the fruit, profit. A problem eventually became apparent: fruit rots way faster than other crops, so it wasn't really paying off.

No problem: I'll just turn some of the fruit into preserves. How hard could that be? Well, I needed to build a glassmaker to create the glass jars, which required a sandpit to collect sand to make the glass, but also needed heavy tools to construct the actual production building. To produce heavy tools meant building a blacksmith's forge, which required iron bars, which meant building a foundry, which needed ore, which needed a mine, which needed… hey soldiers, put down those swords and grab those pickaxes! You're miners again!

It took years—years—to accomplish all that, all so I can turn peaches into peach jam. But there's a ton of satisfaction in finally completing that sort of project, setting up the production chains, making space in my city for the buildings, and attracting enough new residents to perform all that labor without gutting all my other little industries.

You can watch those production chains in real time because all those resources and products exist in the world, not just as numbers in a ledger. Got a merchant at your trading post interested in buying smoked fish?

It doesn't happen by magic: someone's gotta get a wheelbarrow or cart, load it up with fish, and take it from the storehouse to the trading post. It may be tempting to fire all your soldiers until there's a military emergency, but you can't instantly put them back on duty: they'll have to physically walk from wherever they are to collect weapons and put on armor before they can stand post again. It's fun just to sit back for a bit and watch everything moving around the city, to see the place you've built really function.

Farming is another complex delight. Whenever I begin a new city, I'm really just killing time until I've got a big enough population that I can turn about 20 people into farmers. If you've ever wanted to ignore your entire city while you obsess over optimal crop rotation and spoilage rates, tinker with the clay and sand mixture of your soil, monitor weed levels and frost tolerance, and make dramatic pronouncements out loud like "Screw turnips, this year we're going all-in on leeks!" then this is your game.

Similarly to how the early game feels a bit sluggish, once my city hits about 500 residents and the economy stabilizes, the pace slows back down and I get restless for a new challenge. Farthest Frontier supports cities of thousands of people (if your hardware is powerful enough) but I've never felt the urge to sprawl quite that much. I wouldn't say I get bored, exactly, but presiding over a smoothly-running city isn't quite as engrossing as building that city up from nothing.

Farthest Frontier has a lot of what I look for in a survival city builder: intricate production and farming systems, tough challenges balanced with chill moments, and plenty of customization (you can turn off bandit raids, hostile wildlife, and even diseases if you want a more peaceful experience). There's also enough variety that each of my cities (I'm on my third now) feels like it has its own distinct storyline and history. I built Bee City and Gold Gulch, and I can't wait to see my new town's identity develop… provided my settlers survive the next bear attack.

SimCity 4 is one of the most pleasant games I own—I can experience all the splendor of a modern metropolis with a fraction of the nuance, and for the first time in my life, feel what it's like to drive on American roads that don't piss me off. Up-and-coming "hyperrealistic" transit sim Subway Builder offers a terrifying proposition: that same satisfaction in real US cities, assuming I'm up to the challenge.

On its face, the fidelity on offer in Subway Simulator is shocking; you can find the pitch on the game's website. Real census data is used to populate cities like Chicago and Dallas with realistic commuters, and you're saddled with getting them to their jobs, homes, and so on with as little hassle as possible. Whether people even take the subway depends on a variety of factors, so it's up to you to ensure it's accessible and not prone to delays.

There's a page on Subway Builder's site that gets into specifics, saying "The US census records home and workplace locations. The game generates millions of commuters with homes from that and then uses a distance-based gravity model to assign them all workplaces … This decision is then made based on how long each commute method takes, how much it costs, and the value of their time (different commuters can have different incomes).

Even if you can make sense of the city's geography layout itself, you've got money to worry about. Subway systems are expensive, and the most ideal setup may not be within your budget. These are the sorts of nitty-gritty details city simulators tend to streamline and gloss over to keep the impression of transit management intact while keeping the game broad and varied. If you're a very particular kind of transit obsessive, though, Subway Builder seems tailor-made for you.

It's started to turn heads on social media, with a subreddit nearly 10,000 strong and players taking to X to share stories of their budding obsessions—all before the game even got a Steam page. There are currently 26 US cities to play around with, but the game's FAQ section promises there's more to come both in and outside of North America.

If you're keen to jump in early, you can buy Subway Builder on its website.

Oh, a new city builder? I know exactly how to get started. I'll drag a bunch of long roads across the map, slam in a ton of residential and commercial zones, slap down a fire house, a cop shop, and a few schools, then sit back and watch the virtual bucks roll in.

That approach usually works in city builders, but it's not gonna fly in Microlandia. This city builder, as described by its developer, explodi, is aiming to be "brutally honest" with its simulation, so it looks like my usual slapdash approach isn't gonna work.

In Microlandia, roads, usually the cheapest things to build in games, cost "thousands of dollars" per kilometer and represent "a huge investment for the city." Traffic jams aren't just a nuisance: citizens will literally get fired if they can't make it to work on time. And if someone can't pay their rent, they won't just conveniently skip town: they'll become unhoused, giving you a new problem to deal with.

Why so serious? It's because Microlandia's simulation is "carefully modeled after publications like World Bank Open Data, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Equity Atlas, Center for Urban Future and more." Don't worry, it's still meant to be fun to play. But it's also meant to provide insight into the genuine challenges and complexities of modern cities.

That means you'll need to put thought into everything you do, whether it's drawing a new road or adding a high school to the neighborhood. And as mayor, there are plenty of factors you're not in direct control of, like corporations and housing costs. "When companies don’t make ends meet, they go bankrupt, and everyone is fired," explodi says. "When the supply of housing is scarce, landlords get greedy and increase rents."

Don't expect to see what happens in other urban builders when people get unhappy. Your virtual people won't just jump in their cars and speed away over the horizon. You'll still have to deal with them.

"Citizens without homes no longer fade quietly into statistics. They exist. They sleep under bridges," explodi says. "And now, you, benevolent tyrant, can rehouse them. The housing rate dynamically shifts, feeding into rent, employment, and despair. Poverty is now a loop, not a number."

Your townsfolk also get older. "Time comes for everyone; even simulated citizens. They now retire at a certain age, and the city pays pensions from its monthly budget. Ignore this at your peril: the elderly vote, and deficits don’t forgive," explodi says. "Your citizens now know about hospitals, taxes, and the delicate balance between survival and bankruptcy. Hospital capacity is calculated; tax rates feed the treasury and starve the people. The simulation now whispers the uncomfortable truth: every service has a cost."

As if that wasn't grim enough, there's a local newspaper that will remind you of just how bad you're doing as mayor. "Stories range from bad fiscal policy, criminals getting loose because of lack of police funding, and alarming unemployment rate, so now you have a constant reminder that your citizens' bad luck is perhaps your fault."

Is this the Dark Souls of city builders? You can find out for yourself: Microlandia is still in the early stages of development, but you can try out its "brutally detailed simulation" in beta on Itch.

September sure was chock full o' city builders, but wait, there's more! October has a treat in store for all you aspiring mayors, too: survival city builder Farthest Frontier is busting out of early access and going full version 1.0 later this month.

This is excellent news for two reasons. First, even from its earliest days of early access, Farthest Frontier felt pretty darn complete. I played a ton of it in 2022, turning my struggling medieval town into a profitable city thanks to investing heavily in bees—only to have my waxy fortune stolen by bandits in a suspiciously well-timed heist.

Farthest Frontier also has a surprisingly deep farming system involving crop rotation and soil fertility, seasonal weather that will have you dreading those bitter and dangerous winters, and a whole host of horrible diseases and afflictions your settlers will have to contend with, like dysentery, scurvy, typhoid, cholera, frostbite, rabies, and even the plague.

My townsfolk had an outbreak of worms at one point, which is utterly gross. I even had issues with villagers needing treatment for bee stings because I'd built so many apiaries around the neighborhood. That's a deep simulation.

The other bit of good news: while the price of Farthest Frontier is going up with the 1.0 launch (from $30 to $35), that's not happening immediately, so there's still time to buy it at the early access price. And that lower price is even lower right now, because the city builder is on sale for 25% off until October 6.

So, if you're interested in a great medieval-inspired survival city builder, you can get it now for about $22.50 instead of for $35, as it will be priced when it leaves early access on October 23.

The 1.0 launch is bringing some big changes with it, according to developer Crate Entertainment:

• Revamped progression with new 142-point Tech Tree, giving players more freedom
• Dozens of new buildings
• Bridges
• New Policy System
• Updated animations

I asked for some details about the new policy system, and here's how production director Kamil Marczewski explained it:

"The new policy system allows players to have more granular control over their villagers' lives by introducing togglable policies that provide various benefits, but with trade-offs, such as increasing the yields from farms by overseeding, but at the cost of greater drain on the soil's fertility, or reducing the cost of soldier recruitment at the cost of villager happiness."

By the way, Crate Entertainment is also the maker of outstanding ARPG Grim Dawn—which itself is on sale for 85% off at the moment, meaning you can nab it for under four bucks.

Cities: Skylines 2 just got a free content update in the form of the Netherlands Region Pack. This will provide Netherland-loving players the opportunity to build up a Dutch-inspired city with a bunch of new service buildings and an eerily realistic cemetery.

"The interest and size of the Dutch Cities community is not a secret; it represents a large and very active side of the playerbase, which is passionate about urbanism, transit, and city building," a Paradox staff member, REV0, says in an official blog post. "Even during the production of original Region Packs, we as creators had an interest in working on a Netherlands Region Pack and saw the interest the community had in including this region.

"However, back then, the budget, manpower, and time constraints didn’t allow for the creation of a 9th Region Pack, but following the completion of the original packs and the positive reception of the content, our collective interest in a Netherlands Region Pack was re-ignited, and PDX gave us the green light."

The dev diary is pretty lengthy, but in it REV0 explains what kind of features players can expect in this Region Pack. There's medium row density zones aimed at replicating historic city centres, something that can mimic cities like Amsterdam, service buildings like two fire station variants, small clinics, a hospital with early 1920s design motifs, and an incredibly realistic cemetery.

"I wanted to include a cemetery in the pack in order to have an asset that players can customize to the max, deal with the deathcare properly as their cities grow larger with an aging population," REV0 explains. "As a result, the cemetery became the most complex asset of the pack, offering more than a dozen functional and beautification upgrades, having its own small gameplay loop. A proper shoutout is deserved here—Peanut—as he provided his technical knowledge when it was needed in order to get this complex asset working the way I intended it to."

The cemetery will be a standalone building that can begin functioning straight away. It also allows players to "customise your deathcare towards crematorium or burial sites," via upgrade choices.

"Around 60% of the Netherlands prefers cremation, due to the challenges and costs of finding a burial site," REV0 says. "Even then, these sites are 'rented', offering burial services for 10 to 30 years with yearly costs, making cremation a more affordable and respectable alternative." It may sound pedantic, but these are the kind of specifications that I, and I'm sure plenty of other Cities: Skylines players, appreciate seeing in things like Region Packs.

"Despite its long Developer Diary, the Netherlands Region Pack was made in a short time, and based on our experience with other Region Packs we worked on, the process was rather smooth," REV0 says. "As a personal note, this pack was special for all of us, since the Netherlands has always been the top suggestion for a Region Pack. I am glad that we were given the opportunity to work on it, and hopefully, you will enjoy the results of our work."

Attention all mayors! There's a heck of a lot of city builders headed our way, and as luck would have it, a whopping eight of them are coming in September alone. In fact, there are two you can play right now (one is just a demo, but it's a demo you're gonna want to check out) and the month is only a couple of days old.

Plus, all these September city builders represent a nice mix of themes: there are a couple sci-fi builders, a couple more that take place in the past, and a few more set in fantasy realms. There's a cozy game, a couple puzzlers, and one with lots of combat, if that's what you're looking for. And if September doesn't have enough for you, I've tacked on a few more promising city builders planned for late 2025 and 2026.

Since these city builders sprawl across multiple genres, I've got a code I'll use below to identify what categories each these builders fit into: Sim ⚙️, Strategy ♟️, Survival 🍖, Puzzle 🧩, Cozy 🧸, Old Timey 👑, and Futuristic 🚀. If there's a demo available, I've also added a 📀.

Autarkis | September 1 | 🧩🚀

In pretty puzzler Autarkis you're building and managing a handful of futuristic settlements while hunting for the missing pieces of your spaceship so you can return to the mothership. Move supplies between your floating colonies using portals and survive hazards like meteor storms and floods. It's out now!

Anno 117: Pax Romana Demo | September 2 | ⚙️👑📀

Anno 117: Pax Romana isn't due out until November, but you can dive into the free demo now and play its sandbox mode until September 16. The demo gives you an hour of play per savegame, and will take you through the first two population tiers in two different regions.

Fata Deum | September 14 | 👑♟️⚙️

In city builders you're often not just a mayor but essentially a god, and Fata Deum leans into that. Command your mere mortal worshippers to harvest resources, grow crops, construct temples and monuments dedicated to you, and build a prosperous city. Guide them helpfully or punish them cruelly.

Town to City | September 16 | 🧸♟️📀

Start small and grow big. In Town to City you're free to place homes, shops, roads, and decorations anywhere in the gridless, voxel world. As you attract new citizens not only will your town grow but you can begin adding new towns, and develop the entire region into a big and bustling (but still cozy) city.

Pompeii: The Legacy | September 16 | ⚙️👑

Spoiler alert: things didn't end too well for Pompeii, but that's why it needs a new mayor so badly. In Pompeii: The Legacy, you'll take charge of the ruined city and create a new civilization from its ashes. Engage in politics with Rome, from alliances through marriage, and bring Pompeii into a new age of prosperity.

Mars Attracts | September 16 | ⚙️🚀📀

I wouldn't have guessed the 1996 comedy film Mars Attacks would abruptly get a videogame tie-in 29 years after it released, but why not? In Mars Attracts you're building a theme park-like city for abducted humans on the Red Planet, so your big-brained visitors can enjoy seeing humans in their natural habitat.

Super Fantasy Kingdom | Q3 2025 | 👑♟️📀

In roguelite city builder Super Fantasy Kingdom you're getting a mashup of exploration, kingdom management, and Vampire Survivors-like bullet heaven combat. Grow and cultivate your kingdom while using your handful of heroes to fend off huge mobs of enemies.

Meadowside Mayor | September 2025 |🧩

If you're up for a builder with a classic isometric look, Meadowside Mayor might fit the bill. In this puzzle builder you're dealt five tiles at a time and have to place them while respecting their rules and restrictions. With hundreds of buildings in your deck, the goal is to build the biggest city you can.

Beyond September & 2026

Beyond These Stars ♟️⚙️🚀 (2025): Build a city on the back of a cosmic whale swimming through the galaxy.

Tropico 7 ♟️⚙️ (2026): Bring prosperity you your nation as El Presidente in the newest entry of the long-running series.

Sintopia ♟️⚙️📀 (2026): Of course there's a city in Hell. Punish the damned and earn a profit in this management sim.

Surviving Mars Relaunched ♟️⚙️🚀(TBA): A remaster of 2018's strategy builder Surviving Mars that includes all its DLC.

DarkSwitch ⚙️👑🍖 (TBA): This vertical builder takes place in a giant tree living in a spooky fantasy realm.

Crowded ⚙️(TBA): In this avian city builder you're a crow designing a town of nests for your fellow birds.

Life Below ♟️⚙️📀 (TBA): Build an ecologically sustainable underwater city by reviving ecosystems and fighting pollution.

I was going to start this article by writing about how I feel like there's a new Tropico entry every time I return my attention to the series. I was going to write about how it wasn't that long ago I was pouring many hours into Tropico 3, and now there's apparently a seventh game on the way. I was going to write that they should clearly pump the brakes on this thing.

And then I recalled that Tropico 3 came out in 2009 and the previous game in the series released six years ago. Help. Tell me I'm still young and beautiful.

But enough about my swiftly encroaching demise. Kalypso has announced Tropico 7, the latest in its long line of autocracy sims, due for release some time in 2026. This one seems just a smidge less autocratic than previous entries, though—the headline feature is a new political council system, which will see you browbeat and cajole various faction reps in order to bring your island to heel.

And then when that doesn't work, send the army in. In the Tropico games I've played, the military has always been a bit of an abstract concept. You had the guards posted outside your presidential palace, sure, but you weren't exactly doing anything resembling strategy or tactics. That's set to change, because Tropico 7 promises a "reworked military system enabling more direct control of your military units."

I'll need to see that in action before I know how I feel about it. I come to Tropico for daft, Cold-War-era citybuilding. If Tropico 7 starts demanding I start thinking about troop deployments, it could be more than I really want. But if it's just a neato way to crush dissent beneath the iron bootheel of your state? Sounds good to me.

That is, if you ever have to crush dissent. I've always enjoyed Tropico's vibes, but the series has never felt like I ever had to become a tyrannical despot. It was always very easy to keep everyone happy in a socialist paradise. Even the CIA didn't seem to mind, which isn't enormously true to history. If the double whammy of the new factions system and a reworked military mean it'll actually be more of a challenge to keep the gears turning on my Caribbean commune/free-market utopia? I could go another 70-or-so hours of Tropico, sure.

I don't know exactly why, but the idea of setting up trade routes is like catnip to me. Little horse-drawn wagons? Shipments of lumber or wool or vegetables? Resources trundling between cities? Yeah, I'll play a game where that happens.

Let Them Trade, as you can probably guess from the title, is all about that trading life. You build little medieval cities on a beautiful map, assign them specialties like farming, fishing, or woodcutting, link them together through roads and bridges, and set up trade networks so that resources can get from the places they're produced to where they're needed most.

And speaking of catnip, you can even see a cozy kitty dozing in the background while you play because Let Them Trade takes place on top of a virtual dining room table—just like a game of Catan might.

Spaceflower, the developer of Let Them Trade, wants to make a few things clear before you dive in: this isn't a large-scale, time-consuming strategy game that sprawls across different eras, and it's not a punishment simulator about perfectly minmaxxing your trade routes. It's all pretty chill and casual, not a game where your entire town of peasants starves because a shipment of taters didn't reach them in time.

I started my own little trading empire by building one farming city on the grasslands, another in the woods, and one more near the ocean. Soon I had shipments of potatoes, wood, and fish crisscrossing the map, and as the King overseeing it all, I received a sweet 25% of every trade. Once the basics of supply and demand are covered, you can start researching and creating luxury goods to make your citizens happier (and tax the heck out of them to make yourself richer). And there's more to be discovered on the far edges of the map, so sending out scouts to explore reveals new resource nodes to exploit with additional cities.

But with the accumulation of wealth comes a threat: itty bitty bandits will start raiding your most successful cities and making off with your hard-earned potatoes, so keep a close eye out and send knights out from your castle to deal with them.

So far I'm digging the chill vibes and tabletop feel of Let Them Trade, and there's a couple ways to play: a campaign mode will challenge you with quests, or you can build exactly how you want in sandbox mode. You'll find Let Them Trade on Steam.

To celebrate Frostpunk 2's budding modding scene, 11 Bit Studios is hosting a contest to find the best mod around, alongside mod.io. There are a bunch of prizes and a ton of time for contestants to make something really special, as the submission deadline is August 22, and the winners will be announced on September 1.

"We’re thrilled to see how much Frostpunk’s modding community has grown since the game’s release," 11 Bit says in a blog post. "Seeing how your creativity expands and reshapes the world of Frostpunk makes us extremely happy, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed! Now, we’d like to invite you to unleash it in the world of Frostpunk 2 like never before."

Mod competitions are pretty common, but this is the first one that has really caught my eye, mostly because of the prizes. The four minor categories, such as best city mechanics mod or best politics mod, all have a custom AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT Frostpunk edition GPU up for grabs, while the honourable mentions will all get an 11-Bit goodie pack.

However, the pièce de résistance is the main challenge prize of $10,000 for the best overall mod, which will "represent the best in creativity and overall technical polish." Oh, and you'll also get the honour and "opportunity to leave your mark on the Frostpunk 2 universe" if your mod is picked. But let's be honest, a $10,000 cash prize is the main attraction here.

But before you get too carried away with dreaming about what you'd spend the prize money on, there are some important rules that you need to take note of. First off, you need to upload your mod to mod.io and include the #fp2modcontest tag so the jury can find it. If you want to put forward an already-existing mod, you just have to upload it again and follow the steps above.

The jury is judging mods based on "creativity, playability, and most importantly fun" and will be comprised of the dev team, mod.io representatives, and some experienced modders from the Frostpunk community.

"We would like to see what you will come up with to make the Frostpunk 2 experience even more interesting," 11 Bit says. "New stories and mechanics? Insane mode? Replace snow with sand? Add dinosaurs? Introduce a swamp with ogres? The Steward would rejoice!"

There are already some fun mods for Frostpunk 2, like the No More Cyan Housing mod that just gets rid of the "ugly cyan colour" or the Political Overhaul, which adds more laws for your citizens to complain about. But I think that this city builder could do with some even stranger additions. I'm tired of just sending kids to the coal mines in vanilla—I want to see some dinosaurs.

I want to introduce y'all to an excellent low-pressure city builder that I've become smitten with, Dystopika, but first I need to get some stuff off my chest. Sorry (I am not sorry).

Among my many questionable opinions, one in particular tends to elicit the most ire from my colleagues: that cosy games are bollocks. I'm not coming for any specific game, but rather the weird meta-genre that's sprouted up over the last bunch of years.

There are plenty of games that have been slapped with the cosy moniker that I absolutely love—Stardew Valley, A Short Hike, Wilmot's Warehouse—but the label has also given us an endless cavalcade of pastel-coloured repetition smeared in toxic positivity.

Even among the good 'uns, I'm not convinced cosy is the right descriptor. Stardew Valley, for instance, pulls you in all sorts of directions—you've gotta make new friends, buy gifts, solve mysteries, participate in festivals and competitions, delve into dungeons and murder slimes, and this is all while you're trying to run a farm, which is famously one of the most stressful and thankless jobs around.

The vibe and aesthetic might elicit cosiness, but schedule management and endless tasks sure don't. So: great game, wrong label.

Dystopika, though, seems to get it. Like Townscaper and Tiny Glade, it's an extremely chill, goal-free builder where you just make cool things with incredibly simple tools. There are no challenges, no demands placed on your time, no expectations at all. You're just free to be creative.

Now, Townscaper and Tiny Glade are cute and bright—undeniably happy games. But cosy is not just a singular aesthetic, and Dystopika proves that. It's dark and gloomy, letting you craft megacities full of imposing monoliths, gaudy holograms and bad weather. But what's more cosy than being safely tucked away in your home when it's miserable outside?

I used to live in Dubai, and while the image that immediately conjures up is one of blue skies and gleaming towers, it's still a city surrounded by desert, and that means sandstorms. Now, sandstorms absolutely suck. But when you see huge buildings sprouting defiantly out of the orange gloom, promising sanctuary from the hostile environment, there's something strangely reassuring about it. It's cosy. And that's the kind of cosiness that Dystopika offers.

Dystopika recognises that cosy is broad and means different things to different people. A sweet, queer dating sim; a gentle, low-pressure puzzler; or a dystopian city builder. These all tick different boxes, but they're equally valid.

There's not much to Dystopika, as it strips away all of the complexity inherent in city builders. You click through placeable buildings, filtering them by selecting a distinct district aesthetic, and then flesh out the city with props, like gargantuan walls, or motorways that weave between impossibly tall skyscrapers.

You can place some props on the buildings themselves, and you can raise or lower your towers, but there's a bit less flexibility than what's on offer in Tiny Glade, which lets you get more granular with your creativity.

But sometimes that's all you need. When I'm burned out, I don't want more tasks or fiddly activities. I just wanna make something very cool, very quickly, only engaging the tiniest part of my brain.

And I should add that this doesn't mean you can't put your stamp on a city. There's some prop customisation, for instance, letting you tweak the colours, text and size of a prop, and you can upload your own images, which is how my cockapoo became the mascot for the Tyrell Corporation.

Even with its limitations, Dystopika still has the power to get its hooks in you. I spent a wee while the other day creating a megacity that was really two cities: one filled with massive spires and twinkling lights, the other grotty and disheveled. And between them I built a sprawling wall, physically dividing the classes. With only the ability to place premade buildings and some custom props, I was still able to craft a simple story in my noggin.

There's also some light proc-gen at work, too, as smaller buildings sprout up around your monoliths, almost feeding on them. Just some little baby buildings. You'll start to see traffic appear, as well, flying between megastructures or using your serpentine motorways to get to the next heist or corpo meeting. This way, it feels like you're growing and nurturing a city, rather than just building it brick by brick.

While it launched a year ago, developer Voids Within has continued to take good care of its community of relaxed architects and city planners. Last month saw the release of the Meditations update, introducing new districts, like the high-tech Labber's Row, lots of extra props, and an appropriately synthy new soundtrack from composer Sascha Dikiciyan.

There's a lot of joy to be had in quickly rustling up a city and just sitting back and watching it thrive to the sound of old-school Berlin electronic music. It's soothing and comforting—like you're flying back home and watching the twinkling city beneath you come into view.

It's also extremely cheap! You can grab it for less than £6/$7. You're absolutely gonna get your money's worth, even if you don't pour hours and hours into it. It's the kinda game you dip into for 20 minutes when you just need a breather. Pure, uncomplicated escapism.

I love it.

Cities: Skylines 2's latest patch includes a bunch of new fixes, and introduces actual quays and piers, which means players no longer need to play Frankenstein with their shoreline.

"We’ve seen how you have used the cut-and-fill roads to create makeshift quays in your cities, but we also know how challenging they can be to build," a blog post says. "Where roads and pedestrian paths are designed to follow the terrain, creating retaining walls and bridges only when there is a significant elevation change, quays detect the slightest change in elevation and create a retaining wall on the lower side."

You'll be able to choose between three different quay sizes. There's a narrow option which only supports pedestrians, while the medium and wide options support both pedestrians and vehicles to different degrees.

Like most features in Cities: Skylines 2, there'll be an option for you to be lazy or exceptionally detailed with how you construct these quays. If you're not feeling like going through a ton of work then there's the 'Snap to Shoreline' feature, which does as the name suggests. It'll quickly stick your quay to the closest shoreline and will keep "a consistent height above the water surface, which can, of course, be raised based on the selected elevation steps."

On the other hand, if Snap to Shoreline is disabled, quays won't just connect to the nearest shoreline, but will instead follow the terrain height at water level instead of keeping a consistent elevation.

"If you have a specific vision in mind and want more control over where and at what height the quays are placed, disabling 'Snap to Shoreline' is the way to go," the blog post says. "While quays do have a lower limit for how close to water they can be, so they’re not flooded, we hope that the snapping option, along with all the regular options for networks, allows enough freedom to create the waterfronts you dream of."

You also don't need water to construct quays, which lets players create neat little verandas. Maybe you just want a house to have a cool terrace, create a cliffside walkway, or just have a nice viewpoint: As long as there's a slope or cliff edge then you'll be able to plonk a quay down.

Then there are piers. Similar to quays in function, these are "all about leisure." Being pedestrian-only, they can be found in the landscaping menu under paths. There are also narrow, medium, and wide options which can all be combined to "create intricate pier networks," the blog post explains. "Similar to bridges, they have a minimum height, and they can be built stretching into the water or as a viewing deck overlooking the city."

Speaking of bridges, two new bridge types are also being added as part of this patch. A Truss Arch bridge which supports two train tracks can be found in the train transportation menu. "This classic style bridge provides a stunning visual regardless of whether your train tracks cross a gorge or waterway," the blog post says. "And if it’s built at a high enough elevation, it can easily cross a narrow seaway."

A double-decked bridge is also now available. Combining a four-lane two-way highway on the upper deck with a double train track on the lower, it's a "cheaper option when you need both a highway and a rail bridge."

Then there are all the bugfixes, many of which are specifically aimed at the Bridges and Ports expansion, which was delayed again. "Since cargo transportation is part of the Bridges and Ports gameplay, it was important to us that we also looked at the base game and fixed as many issues related to the flow of goods as we could," the blog post continues.

Other fixes include:

• Trucks stop visiting the Cargo Harbour when deactivated after completing their already begun trip.
• Fixed high number of taxis and visitors arriving at small parks.
• Fixed cargo ships overlapping when arriving at a deactivated Cargo Harbour.
• Fixed the amount of cargo not being displayed in the Cargo Train Route Selected Info Panel for stations that use building upgrades.
• Fixed an issue where trucks with trailers sometimes did not subtract the correct amount of resources from the target storage when loading cargo.

We may not be getting the Bridges and Ports expansion until later on in the year, but it pays to be prepared I guess. There are even more updates, which you can read in the full patch notes.

How do you like building your cities? There's real appeal in a godlike, top-down view as you become a sort of all-seeing invisible mayor in a city builder. But there's definitely something engaging about having your boots on the muddy ground as you carve a town out of the wilderness and fill it with citizens you can look right in the eye.

Noble Legacy is of the second variety: a medieval city builder where you play as a person (in third-person) and not a ghost mayor. You arrive in a tiny, neglected little town of just a few grubby citizens, and start cleaning the place up: collecting resources, building structures, and putting the villagers to work while attracting new ones to your growing city.

If that sounds like your jam, great news: there's a demo out now on Steam. It's fairly short but gives you a good look at the start of the full game: setting up a few production buildings like a woodcutter and fishing hut, placing a storage building and setting up a market, and most critically, organizing your workforce and assigning people jobs.

Your citizens have attributes, so don't just cram them into various occupations without putting a little thought into it. One newcomer named Fernando requested to work alongside women, which honestly made me worry that he was a bit of a creep—but when I put him to work with Ethel, my fisherwoman, the productivity of my fishing hut got a boost. I don't know what those two are doing in there, but it's resulting in more fish being caught so I'm gonna allow it!

There are also little quests that pop up from time to time. Someone got drunk and passed out in my town's temple, so I had to run around picking up trash in a timed challenge—odd for a city builder, but it was refreshing to suddenly be rushing around instead of just chilling out. There's also a bit of combat: a thief showed up one night and my companion and I dispensed with him with our swords. The building system can be done piece by piece or by using building templates, so if you're not a gifted builder (like me) your town can still look like a town instead of a series of large wooden boxes.

Noble Legacy is a bit reminiscent of a game like Medieval Dynasty: not only do you build a town but you live in it and deal with the villagers face-to-face. The demo is a bit too short to fully get into it, and it's plenty rough around the edges—but hey, it's a demo. Noble Legacy enters early access on Steam in July.

As revealed in the PC Gaming Show 2025, Stario: Haven Tower is launching a new demo on June 9 as part of Steam Next Fest, before it's set to arrive in early access later this year.

And, as I'm frequently reminded by our resident Chris Livingston's yearly roundup posts, there are so many different types of city builder out there nowadays. Whether it's constructing a settlement snaking around a mountain peak in Laysara: Summit Kingdom, or your own little quaint medieval fiefdom in Manor Lords; this is a genre that lives and dies on its ability to endlessly reinvent itself. Turns out people can live just about anywhere…

Stario: Haven Tower adds yet another twist to the formula, as you construct a city in the form of a tower rising into the sky. Inspired by the Tower of Babel myth, Stario's world was engulfed in a cataclysmic sandstorm, forcing its inhabitants to seek shelter in underground cities until they thought up a better solution: why not live above the storm?

Through this, you'll build layer after layer, juggling both resources and the morale of your people as you raise your tower into the clouds and see how high you can go. Along the way you'll research new technologies and expand each level into a sprawling district, bolting on homes and resource-producing buildings wherever you can—this freeform construction means that no two towers look exactly alike.

Maintaining the faith of your "towertizens"—as the game lovingly calls them—is also a must; this key currency is used in both research and when adding new levels to the tower, so in typical city builder style, keeping your people happy and catering to their needs is essential if you want to thrive and grow ever higher. Be warned, though; you'll have to contend with changeable weather and other mysteries as you expand into the deep sky.

If this twist on the city builder formula sounds like fun, be sure to take a look at the Stario: Haven Tower Steam page for more details.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show 2025

The city-building genre has gone from strength to strength the last few years (admittedly with the unfortunate exception of Cities Skylines 2) Developers far and wide have spun out virtual urban planning from its modern metropolitan origins in dozens of weird and wonderful ways. We've built cities in frozen wastelands, in the skies, and in a world populated entirely by beavers. There's even a city-builder set on the back of a dinosaur.

Now, DarkSwitch invites you to embrace your inner wood elf, by constructing a fantasy metropolis around the trunk of an enormous tree. One might even be tempted to call it a Lothlorien simulator, if Tolkien's elvish woodland was threatened by a creeping fog that drives people mad.

Revealed at the PC Gaming Show 2025, DarkSwitch's key twist on the format is that the city you'll be building will be predominantly vertical. You need not only to construct buildings, but also wooden platforms to support them, creating your own foundations that sprawl from the tree's vast trunk, and connecting these tiers together with ladders and elevators.

Constructing this city requires a vast amount of resources, so you'll need to build a variety of resource gathering and production buildings. At a basic level, this means building logging outposts, fisheries, and metal collecting stations. But more advanced structures include lumberjack walkers—giant, caterpillar-like tree-felling machines.

As well as being your home, the tree is your main refuge from the fog. Not only is the fog capable of terrorising your citizens in and of itself, there are also things that lurk within it that will actively attack your city. You can push back the fog by constructing light sources on the ground, while magical watchtowers will help you keep the fog's spectral lurkers away.

But the tree cannot provide everything you need, so you'll have to dispatch expeditions into the fog, searching ancient ruins for technologies that will help you improve your city and better understand how to overcome the fog. In addition, this being a more survivalist city-builder, you'll also have to make tough choices that will define the game's narrative and shape your society.

I'm always up for a new twist on city-building, and the idea of constructing an elvish haven is certainly one that appeals. There's no release date for DarkSwitch yet, but you can find out more info about the game on its Steam page.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show 2025

I was already intrigued by Generation Exile, Sonderlust Studios' turn-based city builder about managing a colossal generation ship as it ferries the last of humanity through the stars. But the latest trailer for the game, which aired on the PC Gaming Show 2025, has sold me on it with one of the best narrative choices I've seen in ages.

Said decision appears just under twenty seconds in, relating to your ship's water supply. One of the choices is "Secure the water supply." Normal, standard, everyday survival city builder fare. The other choice, however, is "surrender it to the capybaras", which is just superb. If anything, it's too good, because of course I am going to surrender the water supply to the capybaras. I would surrender anything to those delightfully swole rodents. It needs another offbeat, animal-based choice to counterbalance it, like "secure the water supply for the pangolins" or something.

Beast-based decision-making aside, this is a very good showing for Generation Exile. The ecologically-minded city-building looks like splendid fun. The game is framed around building a sustainable society where nothing is wasted, where you'll construct buildings that restore the land as well as harvest from it.

Moreover, Generation Exile features procedurally generated NPCs who have unique personalities. These characters will then form families and pass down those traits to their descendants. And of course, the narrative choices will play into the stories of your citizens, having consequences both for the general management of your ship, and the fates of individual members of your crew.

Some of these dynamic sci-fi vignettes will be considerably darker than the capybara-flavoured decision mentioned earlier. The trailer takes a sinister twist in the middle, when one such character stumbles upon a corpse that looks exactly like them. You'll have to deal with ghost-like entities and stranger things still that have found away aboard your vessel.

Generation Exile doesn't have a firm release date yet, although it's still scheduled to launch sometime this year. There is a demo available right now, however, that'll let you get hands on with its interstellar city-construction. The demo is only available for the next week, scheduled to vanish into the cosmos on June 16. So get on it while you can.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show 2025

When the cat's away, the mice will play. But did you know that when the cats are heading up a colonial empire, the mice will build sprawling island colonies with complex production chains?

Well, that's assuming upcoming city builder Whiskerwood is based on true rodent facts. Why wouldn't it be? Who would use a videogame to lie?

Shown off with a new trailer at the PC Gaming Show 2025, Whiskerwood promises to be one of those sims you boot up, blink, and suddenly it's 3am. As the leader of a mouse colony, you get to burrow into every detail of managing it—from reshaping the landscape, to creating automated production lines, to keeping individual mice happy by tending to their needs and preferences, to exploring the seas looking for new islands to take over.

Because of the archipelago setting, space is always a key concern—there's only so far you can spread out on an island. That means efficient building is key, but you also have the ability to build up, creating a mighty tower city, or to dig down, carving out an underground home in the cliffs and mountains.

The mice themselves add a cute and quirky feel, though otherwise the vibe is surprisingly serious—it's definitely more Anno than it is Animal Crossing. Anno-mal Crossing? Expect a dense simulation, covering everything from the effects of the weather, to planning your water grid, to international trade.

Even your cat overlords aren't anything to smirk at. They will actually oppress you as you build, arriving to demand fealty and taxes and even attacking you if you step out of line. It's an intriguing twist on the genre—normally in these games, you're simply the master of your domain, with at worst only enemy factions to trouble you. Striving to succeed while your own masters undermine you should make it an even trickier challenge.

And when you get truly sick of them, you can even launch your own rebellion. The mice can build and arm a navy and take the fight to the cats, presumably in the name of founding an independent rodent nation. As an uptight Victorian governess facing an infestation might say: these mice are revolting.

The supply chains at developer Minakata Dynamics must be running smooth, because there's not too long to wait—Whiskerwood is due out later this year, wishlist it now on Steam.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show 2025

Ever since the sandbox city builder Gourdlets was released last August, the most requested feature players have been asking for is co-op. After almost a year, Gourdlets Together has now been announced with a new trailer as part of Wholesome Direct. It's a multiplayer spin-off that lets you and your friends come together for an all new experience set in the vegetative world of Gourdlets.

In Gourdlets Together, you'll be able to enjoy the city builder elements of Gourdlets with a whole island to design and customize. But you'll also be able to invite your friends to come and hang out while you do. Rather than making homes for Gourdlets, you can build places for your friends to chill in.

Most importantly though, you and your friends can fish while you hang out, which seems to be a significant selling point for Gourdlets Together. After the success of Webfishing, a game where you and many others come together with the sole intention of fishing, I can see Gourdlets Together becoming quite popular because of this. I for one can't resist a fishing minigame, that's for sure.

As you make your way through the game you'll earn rewards you can exchange for new improvements for your island too. These include everything from house plants to tables and chairs, and even little hats for your Gourdlet which you can customise.

Thankfully, we won't have to wait too long for the release of Gourlets Together either. The trailer shown at the Wholesome Direct shared that the game is "coming 2025" and is already available to wishlist on Steam. From what I've seen, it seems pretty fleshed out. Even though there's no concrete release date yet, it seems like we'll be able to fish with our friends sooner than we think.

I love metropolitan city builders, but once I'm done turning fertile riverside plains into a mess of eight-lane highways and coal plants, I can't help but wonder if I've maybe been a net negative for the world around me. When I saw Life Below on Steam—a city builder all about constructing reefs that opens its Steam description with "the ocean is dying"—I was flooded with the exact blend of guilt and intrigue I look for in my entertainment.

After trying a demo build, I walked away pretty taken with its marine premise. The basics are similar to something like SimCity; you walk that line of territory expansion and resource management, mitigating random disasters while making sure your populous has a stable income of food, energy, and housing. Instead of electricity and traffic stops, though, you're working with fish, the algae they eat, the anemones that shelter them, and various resource-rich corals.

The science isn't one-to-one with reality: resources are distributed by magic water spirits cultivated from stray souls, and you play as a tentacled ocean guardian called Thalassa. But it's just rooted in reality enough that when a heatwave hit my reef, I was scrambling to cool it down so my clownfish population weren't all rendered homeless. As you monitor pH levels, expand to new zones, and watch as new schools of fish dance around your base, it feels grounded enough to make sense of while retaining a sort of magical sensibility befitting the briny deep.

In a press release Q&A, game director Lise Hagen Lie said it's all meant to foster a nurturing sensibility rather than an exploitative, imperial one: "We want to show the spectacle of underwater life on nature's own basis, subverting the materialistic and human centred focus of traditional city builders … We had, for instance, workshops with marine biologists, who helped us make sure we had a certain amount of 'reality' in the game."

The full game promises a narrative focus that, despite all the magic and spirits, is ultimately about the fragility of underwater ecosystems. Hagen Lie gave an example in the Q&A: "The player might, for instance, experience lionfish infestations, where the here-invasive species infests a zone, causing devastating wildlife death. The fish living in that area will be eaten by the lionfish as it spreads, taking over neighboring areas until dealt with by the player. The loss of wildlife is devastating to the area, the coral structures and the reef itself—slowly killing the Reef Heart and the foothold the player has made."

That might sound sort of intense, but the demo I played had a mostly languid pace and a pause button. It's hard to tell without a full gamut of zones how deep the city simulation goes, but the foundations are there for a robust, quirky take on the genre.

If Life Below has piqued your interest, you won't have to wait long to give it a spin. It'll be at the upcoming Steam Next Fest running from June 9 to 16, which perhaps unfortunately leads right into the Steam Fishing Fest the following week. Better save those minnows while you can.

PC Gamer's Lauren Morton said All Will Fall is nearly all of her videogame things stuffed into a single package: It's a building game, it's a survival game, and it's a physics game. And in just under two weeks, it will also be a game that's in open beta, so you'll finally be able to see for yourself what it's got going on.

What it's got going on from a narrative angle is the end of the world: The oceans are rising, humanity is dying, and you, the leader of a small group of survivors on a rusty boat, are given the job of saving a small chunk of what's left by building a ramshackle city on one of the few small chunks of remaining land.

The problem—aside from the whole "humanity on the verge of extinction" thing, I mean—is that this isn't SimCity, where you can slam down buildings on a happily flat Earth and call it a day. The nature of the drowned world in which you're trapped means you'll be building vertically as well as horizontally, and it all looks, well, pretty delicate. The Steam page says "you're essentially playing Jenga with human lives at stake," which is nicely illustrative and also a reminder that people—tiny, digital people—will be living in whatever sort of city you build, or dying in it as the case may be.

The good news is that shoddy construction standards won't be solely responsible for the untimely deaths of your citizens—you'll also have the opportunity to get Frostpunk on their asses now and then.

And in the end, we're probably all doomed anyway: "Each colony you build will deal with unique challenges, foundation layouts, circumstances and random events—like storms, mysterious structures emerging from the ocean, political coups, unexpected newcomers, food shortages, and more. Learn from your mistakes, unlock new locations on the global map, and embark on the next dangerous adventure once the inevitable calamity comes to destroy the city."

Ah well, I'm sure we'll all do our best nonetheless. All Will Fall doesn't have a release date yet but it's set to come out sometime in 2025. The open beta will begin on June 9 as part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest, and will run until June 16.

Cities: Skylines 2's had a rough ride since it launched in 2023. There's no denying that Colossal Order has made some substantial improvements to the wonky launch build in the nearly two years since it arrived, but it feels like the team is constantly juggling a variety of issues.

In the original post-launch roadmap, which went up to the second quarter of 2024, one asset pack and one expansion were teased. The asset pack, Beach Properties, launched as expected in early 2024, but it was so threadbare and poorly received that Colossal Order and publisher Paradox issued an apology a month later, doled out refunds and gave it to everyone for free.

The first expansion, Bridges & Ports, was expected to appear within a few months of Beach Properties, but that never happened. In September 2024, the team announced that it was delaying the expansion so it could improve the base game. It eventually got a release window of the second quarter of 2025. So around now. Well, that won't be happening either.

"We've spent the last five months working hard on the Bridges & Ports DLC, and towards our upcoming expected release," Colossal Order explained over on the Cities: Skylines 2 forum today. "After reviewing the content ourselves and sharing it with our early access group, we've received consistent feedback: the bridges are super exciting, and the port works well, but there are aspects of the expansion that are not as polished as they could be."

With that in mind, the expansion has been pushed back. "In the meantime, we're assessing feedback from our early access group and mapping out what we want to improve when the expansion launches—which we are now expecting in Q4 of this year."

This does feel a bit inconsistent, though, and the lack of specifics has given me pause. "Polish" is increasingly used as a catch-all term, when it technically suggests that only very minor changes are needed. It's hard to imagine an experienced developer needing four to six months to polish an expansion.

Colossal Order also mentions that it wants to "add more depth", which, again, doesn't feel like a simple polish. And the part about "mapping out what we want to improve" suggests that the issues aren't clear cut at all.

All that said, a delay sounds like a good idea. Cities: Skylines 2's problems started because Colossal Order and Paradox released it far, far too early. It was badly optimised, full of bugs and fundamental features did not work as intended. Players felt like they'd bought into a beta, and while in this age of early access launches that's pretty common, Cities: Skylines 2 was sold as a finished game.

I'm still hopeful that Cities: Skylines 2 will turn into the game I was hoping for. The asset editor will certainly help with that, unlocking so many more possibilities for modders—which was critical to the first game's success. But that still seems like a long way off.

The good news is that the free update that was expected to launch alongside the expansion is still coming soon. It will arrive on June 11, "with a bit of content that gives a slight sneak peek of what is to come in the expansion".

There's a familiar start to City Tales: Medieval Era, a new city builder that launched on Steam today. You've got a few citizens that need housing and food and work, so you place a wood cutter's camp near the trees, a gathering station near a berry patch, and a hunter's cabin in the woods: stuff any city builder player has done plenty of times before.

But there are also some interesting twists on the city building formula. You don't build homes for your citizens, you draw districts. Click on the map to create borders around the district, and your citizens will handle the rest: dividing up the district into plots and deciding where their houses go themselves. You can add other buildings to a district: a well, a market, a weaver's shop, a lumber mill, but again, you don't choose their precise location. Your wee little villagers handle that.

I like that approach. There's something to be said for city builders where you're 100% in charge and decide where every last structure is placed, but I also enjoy giving my citizens a bit of agency. It also tends to make a city feel like it's growing organically.

Something else fun in City Tales: Medieval Era is the six named companions (you can choose their names if you wish) that you begin the game with. When you build a production quarry like a sawmill or a rock quarry, you assign one of these companions to run it. While they work and generate resources, they'll level up, getting better at their jobs.

If you're thinking, "Wait, I'm going to have way more than six production buildings, won't I run out of available companions?" Don't worry, because your companions are awesome. While they're working and leveling up, they're also training apprentices to take over for them. Once an apprentice is ready, you can assign your companion to another building, or keep them where they are to continue leveling up that skill until they're a specialist.

Companions will even request certain jobs, from time to time. Judith, who I had working away making planks in my lumber mill, approached me to ask if she could work on the cattle farm I was planning to build. She'd prefer if it were a sheep farm, which made sense—Judith's bio mentioned that she had a loyal sheep dog—but at the very least it sounded like she was more interested in farming than churning out planks all day.

This is a really nice touch: instead of parking randomized faceless NPCs into production buildings and forgetting about them for the rest of the game, it feels more like you have real people working to make your town successful, improving their skills, training other citizens, and even asking you for a choice of the jobs they do.

I'm not too far along in my own town yet, but I'm enjoying the organic approach to building and seeing my little companions grow their skills in City Tales: Medieval Era. It launched into early access on Steam today and is 10% off for the next two weeks.

Cozy sandbox castle builder Tiny Glade has announced that its next update is currently in the works, and a number of new features are being added. As detailed in a post shared to the Steam page, the update has "accumulated quite a few goodies". But, we don't know when exactly this update will be coming. So for now, we just have to stare lovingly at what we've got.

The first addition is cobblestone paths, which are certainly welcome in any medieval city. We're not being limited to one style either. Three paths are currently being worked on, so you'll be able to choose whether you want larger stones, neat curved rows of square stones, or mismatched clusters. The choice is already overwhelming. But if you don't want to pick between the three, you don't have to. You'll be able to blend every variant of cobblestone with existing paths, which also goes for each style of stone.

But the second thing featured in the announcement is what I'm most excited for. Stairs. Yes, Tiny Glade does technically already have the ability to make stairs in the game but they are incredibly tedious to craft. You have to use either platforms or paths to build them step by step rather than having the option to place them automatically. Now, however, it looks like we'll be able to draw staircases like we can with walls and adjust them to suit our buildings.

The post showcasing this element does explicitly state that "stairs are the biggest and most complicated change we've done since Tiny Glade's launch" before sharing that it has taken five prototypes to get to a point where they are happy enough to share it. It's also expressed that the gif shown on the Steam announcement is still a work in progress, and things are bound to change before the update rolls out.

Tiny Glade's update will also feature additional smaller elements but they are being "kept as a surprise." Let's face it, nothing is going to be more exciting than finally being able to build a winding staircase with the click of a few buttons. I might finally take on the daily challenges once I don't have to meticulously glue walls together in the shape of steps.

Timberborn is yet another example of just how brilliant the city-building genre is right now. Mechanistry's beaver-themed management sim lets you construct a water-powered metropolis for the world's most engineeringly-minded rodent, constructing dams and aqueducts, powering your city with waterwheels. All that, and it's still in early access, with subsequent updates adding mechanised beavers and disgusting polluted water.

Now, a whole new update has arrived, and it folds in some pretty dramatic features to the city builder. Update 7—Ziplines and Tubeways adds two whole new ways to move your beavers around your city, as well as making fundamental changes to how cities can be constructed, as well as a few other goodies.

Let's address those new modes of conveyance first. The ziplines and tubeways are divided between the two beaver factions Timberborn lets you play as—the nature-loving Folktails and the industrially-focused Iron Teeth. The Folktails get access to ziplines, which function similarly to regular pathways, but move beavers 2.5 times faster than walking and are obviously elevated, letting them pass over structures. Ziplines begin at a zipline station, and are connected to tall zipline pylons, or smaller zipline beams designed for navigation through more densely built-up areas.

Naturally, this means that the tubeways are reserved for the Iron Teeth. According to Mechanistry's Steam post about the update, tubeways require "a little more careful setup than ziplines", presumably because they can't pass over buildings in the same way (though it seems they can pass underground for short sections). Once built, however, tubeways will move beavers at four times normal speed. Tubeways likewise have their own stations, and are built from horizontal and vertical tubes.

Alongside these new modes of transport, update 7 brings an overhaul to terrain, to make it truly 3D. "While the in-game terrain has always been made of little 3D cubes, you could only place them one atop another," Mechanistry explains. "With update 7, terrain blocks go on all Solid surfaces—roofs, platforms, and overhangs." This means you can do things like grow crops on top of buildings like lodges and warehouses, and construct buildings beneath overhangs and even inside caves.

This new terrain system also brings several subsidiary features. Beavers can now build tunnels directly through terrain, so you no longer have to construct meandering pathways around or over mountains. In addition, Mechanistry has expanded the functionality of its layer tool, enabling you to scroll through terrain slices in sequence to peek inside caves, tunnels and so forth.

Other improvements include "adaptive" power shafts that make it easier to rejig power grids, revised game maps designed to facilitate the 3D terrain and new transport buildings, and a substantial list of balance and bug fixes. I'm only going to highlight one of these here, but it's a doozy: "Fixed units breakdancing when traversing and rotating multiple sets of stairs". Bug or not, I cannot fathom why you would remove breakdancing beavers from your game. I'm starting a petition. Mechanistry, let those beavers throw down!

All told, it's another impressive update for Mechanistry's beaver building sim. There's no word on what Update 7 represents in terms of pushing Timberborn toward completion. But if Mechanistry keep adding updates of this scope and quality, it can keep Timberborn in early access as long as it darn well pleases.

The last time I played Frostpunk 2, I was about a hair's breadth away from a political breakdown. I had somehow managed to anger every faction. I fell behind on promises I made to pass laws, and every time I get something done I end up pissing off more people than I impress. In the end, a vote of no confidence that would've certainly seen me stranded in the tundra was the last straw—I haven't been back in over five months.

But even with all the stress, I'm still morbidly intrigued to see first-hand what Frostpunk 2's first major content update has in store for us today. "This substantial update introduces transformative new systems, a sprawling new map, and several long-requested community features to the city builder," a press release says.

The new map is for the Utopia Builder mode, and it's set around the remnants of a failed Generator project. This may mean there's some leftover resources for you to mine, but it will be a challenge to build near thanks to the rugged terrain.

There are also new optional narrative challenges like quests, storylines, and rewards for you to explore, as well as modding tools, which are finally exiting beta, providing a little bit of replayability as players can shape the frostland to their liking. Alongside this, there's an overhauled heat system, meaning you can manage temperature at a district level, but with this comes new research laws and consequences, as citizens will be more responsive to how warm or cold they are.

But the best feature arriving in this update, as far as I'm concerned, is the Serenity Mode. I know, I'm a coward. But I'm a coward who just wants to experience building in the frostlands without having to deal with all the relentless bickering, politics, and everyone getting angry at me when I accidentally kill a bunch of orphans—I didn't know the mine was going to collapse and I was told the kids were fine with it.

The Serenity mode will provide a "gentler survival experience with mild weather, plentiful resources, and no faction conflict," which is perfect for beginners or players like me who just want to build cool cities in the snow without all the yelling.

This content update, which is releasing today, is just the beginning for the support lined up for Frostpunk 2. "This update marks a significant step forward in the evolution of Frostpunk 2, reinforcing 11 bit studios’ long-term commitment to significant post-launch support and player-driven creativity," the press release says.

More updates are scheduled for 2025, including DLC announcements and the console release. And players also have Frostpunk 1886, a remake of the original game, to look forward to as early as 2027.