Cities: Skylines
Great game with loads of content and mods to keep the game fun. New DLC’s are a big reason why I’m still playing this game after so many years. I wouldn’t recommend buying them for the full price though, they are quite expensive. Just wait for a sale where most of them are 50% off.
– Real player with 707.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Simulation Management Games.
If you’re into building stuff from scratch, loved Sim City, and cannot help yourself trying to do something better and more beautiful, buy the game. There’s nothing better. Be prepared to give a healthy chunk of your life, you budding City Planner!
Intuitive design, layered sophistication in game play, and plenty of mods and tools keeps you engaged for hundreds of hours.
I’m a relative amateur with a mere 339 hours of playtime. Just saying.
Enjoy!
– Real player with 421.2 hrs in game
Tropico 4
Power corrupts, absolute power… is pretty neat.
Tropico 4 is the magnum opus of the Tropico franchise. It has the best gameplay, graphics, story and characters of the whole franchise. This game took the torch from Tropico 3 and made everything absolutely better. The soundtrack is amazing and gives you the Caribbean immersion you need to rule the proud nation of Tropico. The interface is clean and to the point, and the game communicates very well to the player what he is supposed to do, and the colour palettes in this game are gorgeous even by today standards. Also the jokes are hilarious and never get old.
– Real player with 817.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Simulation Strategy Games.
At first, I wanted to be a kind, benevolent dictator, in charge of my island which of course would be perfectly green, a land of equality, equal pay, a high living standard, jobs for every Tropican, a high level of schooling and a good member of the United Nations.
However, people kept complaining. At first, this was fine. Free Speech and all. But they were not working. Worse, they began to become rebels and attack the work of innocent, hard working Tropicans. “Right,” I thought, “no more of that.” I built guard posts around the nation to protect my other civilians and the economy which kept everyone fed and housed. After a while, the strikes became too much. “This right to protest is too inefficient”, I thought, “and we just missed that freighter. We needed that boost to the economy.” In a moment of Thatcher, I had the newly raised guards gun down some of the strikers. The rest returned to work. The right to protest had been removed, but people were happier as everyone got richer.
– Real player with 258.9 hrs in game
Tropico Reloaded
One of the greatest political simulators of all time. The only thing the remakes do better is adding vehicles, tropicans have a real hard time walking the length of larger islands. Still runs excellent on modern machines.
Why is Tropico one of the greatest simulators of all time?
1. Clear factions that know what they want - people follow factions to varying degrees, factions have measurements of how you are doing based on their own criteria. Communists like housing and income equality, capitalists like industry, religious people like cathedrals and a robust clergy etc. In theory you can make all the factions happy, but if you actually manage do that, turn up your difficulty.
– Real player with 149.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Simulation Strategy Games.
The original Tropico is still good, but not quite as good as the later ones. Tropico 2, on the other hand, is still the only game that lets you run a pirate island and is very much worth playing.
Tropico 1 is still quite enjoyable, but if you’ve played 3 and onwards you’ll miss the cars as it takes Tropicans forever to get anywhere on foot. This tends to cause food supply problems on large islands even with plenty of farms and wharves and markets. There’s also the same problem that’s been present in every game until Tropico 4’s Modern Times expansion of any housing with decent quality taking enormous amounts of real estate for the tiny number of people it houses. On the bright side, the excessively goofy style of the later games is absent here.
– Real player with 78.8 hrs in game
Children of the Nile: Enhanced Edition
Children of the Nile is the more modern version of the old citybuilders like Pharaoh And Zeus, allowing you to build a city in ancient Egypt. Some of the more modern things are, aside from the obvious graphics being different, that you no longer need to worry about intersections sending your supply and maintenance people entirely the wrong direction. You can now actually focus on building a city, rather than having to puzzle out the most efficient way to place buildings without them collapsing, catching fire, and starving because the food vendor doesn’t show up there.
– Real player with 115.4 hrs in game
So it crashes at regular intervals. It lags occasionally when a city gets really big, aside from lagging at every autosave. The AI can be infuriating at times: If you like micromanaging, be prepared to sit back and pull your hair at your laborers who will go across the Nile and over 2 mountains to haul limestone, while an overseer stands by himself overseeing no one in a site right next to their houses. Transporting heavy loads, like statues and obelisks across the Nile is also a well known problem, annoyingly time consuming at best, unsolvable at worse (unless you’re willing to delve into the editor). It shows its age in a lot of ways, the graphics included, though they still hold their own fine enough.
– Real player with 70.9 hrs in game
SimCasino
I honestly am upset giving this game a thumbs down because as the game progressed through the early access releases, it honestly looked like the structure of this game was going to build up into something great. Sadly, the dev team have taken this project into full release much too early and I worry that everything that at first glance might seem like placeholders are, in fact, here to stay.
There is no variety in guest appearances; just the same pallet swaps of hair, skin, shirt and pants. This also includes any entertainers you hire or VIPs you invite to your casino; they all just blend together without any kind of visual differences to make looking at your casino population grow from a few dozen people to thousands all that interesting. And it just feel like a massive shame that the magician you hired to preform on stage is dressed the same as everyone in the audience.
– Real player with 74.3 hrs in game
For an early release this is pretty good. It has it’s issues and needs a lot more content but it’s definitely worth giving a try if you enjoy sim tycoon style games.
That said currently (12/31/2020) there are some things that could be improved and I’m going to give a list of suggestions below in case the developers actually read these reviews:
- My clock display is set to a 12 hour clock but peak hours are still listed in military time.
*The minimum pay out for a slot machine grand prize is 10 dollars but we default to penny slots. If they are paying a penny one dollar is a huge return, minimum payout should be based on the cost per pull. Also, why is the AI spending ten dollars a pull for a game with a 25 dollar grand prize? That’s insane.
– Real player with 52.2 hrs in game
SimCity™ 4 Deluxe Edition
Ever thought you could make a better city? Pah, I could be a better Mayor; well now you can! SimCity 4 is just that and offers this opportunity and lets you sit in the chair titled “mayor”. I’ve definitely clocked up more hours in the days I installed this on ME and XP.
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition is another one of those games that has been created by EA… EA? Not again you say - except this time.. EA has really created a game and has polished it up to its standards. SC4 is one of the older prequels to ‘Societies’ and the 2013 SimCity relaunch; released after Sim City 3000, it showed off superb graphic capabilities at the time and invented new ways to enjoy building a simulated city, where you play as the city’s major, managing the: finances, housing stock, roads, ports, resident satisfaction, transit, and employment.
– Real player with 567.8 hrs in game
Ah, SimCity 4, the best, in my opinion, of all of the SimCity games. The graphics are dated, being that this was released around fifteen years ago, but don’t let that deter you. Play times depend on how much you enjoy city building games. I myself have spent 2-4 hours today playing it.
The U-Drive-It mode is pretty cool, as it lets you drive through your transportation system with a variety of vehicles, but can get annoying over time with the other cars.
The regions are a nice addition, as you can have cities depend on each other, plus some of the regions come in the shape of several real-life cities, albeit with no structures. In the same vein, importing and exporting cities & regions are useful. If you have a sprawling metropolis and want to share it with the world, you can! Have a police state with stations on every corner? You now can show it to your friends and family!
– Real player with 325.6 hrs in game
Patron
Coming from Banished, and particularly modded Banished with RK, or North 7… there is a lot I like about Patron, a ton that I (hopefully just currently) dislike about it, and hope to see what it may become. So everything in this review should be seen through the lense of a long time fanatical Banished player. As what I like and dislike about Patron as it currently stands are so closely intertwined, rather than a list of like/dislike, I will discuss various aspects of the game and what I like/dislike about each of them.
– Real player with 150.5 hrs in game
Despite promise, Patron needs baked a little longer.
You know those game dev sims, where you have to wait a little while after a game is “done” to work out some bugs before you release? I don’t know that that happened with this one.
Nevertheless, I have worked around the bugs that have caused it to crash (and crash… and crash…) enough to get it to work at least in windowed mode and given it a try. And so far, it’s kind of just making me want to play some Banished with the Colonial Charter mods in place.
– Real player with 49.7 hrs in game
Citystate
First off, I must say I love this game. It seems I have already put 30 hours into it.
Graphics.
While many complain of the “Old school” graphics, I happen to like them. While yes, they are not the ultra-high definition 3D graphics like in other new city builders, It is still very good. The architecture is detailed and modern. It is different and original, which I like very much. Plus, the graphics don’t make my computer crash like other city builders.
Gameplay.
The gameplay is relativaly easy and simple. It may be a bit confusing at first without a tutorial, however, I recommend viewing one of the many gameplay videos on youtube. Many reviewers complained it had “No point” and was boring, but I disagree. In their logic, what is the point of playing simcity 4? or cities XL? They too don’t have a “story mode” or missions. Since there is no in-game goals or tasks, you do have to set your own goals. I find that great, as I aim to build a rich city, or aim to have a socialist city without going broke, or try to make a farming city. And remember, this game is a political sandbox to try out several political and economic models, not an adventure game. Set your own goals, and you are good to go.
– Real player with 222.8 hrs in game
Citystate may be the only city builder sim I can think of where you can politically influence your city and eventually go into space, but it’s difficult to recommend the game given all the bugs, performance issues and barebones design choices present.
First of all, the game was plagued with some rather serious bugs that came with the 1.2.3 update. Though many of these have been patched out, some such as the “NaN” resources bug which occurred on space colonies require you to completely reset your region and start from scratch to fix them. Another one that screwed one of my playthroughs was where I managed to click a policy multiple times in the middle of a lag spike and ended up applying its effects seven times over. I know it applied multiple times because I lost around 70% stability as a result of this and since then my city’s environmental score has plummeted to 0 regardless of what political changes I made in future.
– Real player with 118.7 hrs in game
Block’hood
For a 3 dimensional city builder; the game is remarkably devoid of depth. It’s very pretty, but as a simulation or a strategy game, Block’hood falls flat where it matters.
I love city builders. Creating a carefully balanced, tightly operating system of checks and balances that eventually bloom into a series of new gameplay mechanics and challenges, is a joy, whether it be Anno, Simtower, or Simcity/Skylines. What Block’hood brings to the genre, is an ingenious sense of 3D verticality. Both Simcity and Simtower were fine games, but in both you were stuck between either the directions of a compass, or to the left side / right side dichotomy of of a vertical slice of your ascending tower. Let’s face it; both games pinned you down upon a flat sheet.
– Real player with 60.4 hrs in game
An acquired taste.
Summary
Don’t buy this game based on the assumption that it’s a tower-building sim, because this game’s heart is clearly in the strategy-puzzle genre once you get to playing it. If you already enjoy resource-management see-saw puzzle games, you’ll immediately love the depth and complexity of this game behind it’s simple, pleasant looking facade. Those who don’t enjoy the hectic, non-stop balancing act of games like this, steer clear, this game is a 1-trick pony. Those who aren’t sure, pick this up on sale and tool around with it, you’ll either love it or hate it.
– Real player with 29.8 hrs in game
Cities XL Platinum
TLDR: A great city building game that could’ve been the best for years to come. There are too many issues though.
I still rate it 3rd for me after Simcity 3000 and 2000.
Beware of the compatability issues, performance issues, bugs and illogical things (the save menu WTF).
The city building is solid and all the info you need is available. Sometimes the city’s management information is a bit hard to find, but it’s there. You don’t have to lay down power lines or water pipes, which I didn’t like at first, but got used to. The roads can be curved in any way you want which is really cool.
– Real player with 106.6 hrs in game
This is one of the best city simulations out there, especially when looking strictly at games with good graphics. That said, it is not without its flaws.
The Good:
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Lots and lots of replayability. You could get lost in this game on just a single city for weeks.
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Your cities interact with each other to an extent. You can trade things like water, fuel, industry, and office services amongst the cities you create. This allows you to specialize your cities, such as creating an industry giant that feeds industry goods to your cities where you want to avoid polution, such as a resort town.
– Real player with 52.4 hrs in game