Tag: City Builder

Whiskerwood looks like an adorable game of cat and mouse, but in reality it’s a brutal city builder where my grossly incompetent governance never goes unpunished for long

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 […]

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Cities: Skylines 2 finally gets its asset editor in a parting gift from the series’ original developers

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, […]

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Cities: Skylines 2’s bicycle update adds a lot more than just bikes, as Colossal Order prepares to hand over development to a new studio

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 […]

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Despite ‘Mixed’ Steam reviews and a touch of AI slop, strategy city builder Anno 117: Pax Romana has the best launch in series history

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 […]

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After the bungled launch of Cities: Skylines 2, Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order part ways as development moves to a new studio

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 […]

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Ubisoft touches up AI art ‘placeholder’ that slipped into Anno 117, but fans are not happy it was there to begin with: ‘Of all the video games, not Anno’

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 […]

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Anno 117: Pax Romana review

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 […]

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‘The human body is equivalent in mass to 50,000 crickets’: In city builder Generation Exile, humanity’s last hope for sustenance is cricket mush

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 […]

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Farthest Frontier review

Need to know What is it? A medieval survival city builder from the creators of Grim DawnRelease date: Oct 23, 2025Expect to pay: $35/£30Developer: Crate EntertainmentPublisher: Crate EntertainmentReviewed on: Intel i7 9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAMSteam Deck: PlayableLink: Official site Priorities. That’s what managing a medieval city is all about. Farms are important for […]

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This ‘brutally honest’ city builder features greedy landlords, cutthroat corporations, and a newspaper that gives you ‘a constant reminder that your citizens’ bad luck is perhaps your fault’

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 […]

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One of my favorite survival city builders is leaving early access this month, so here’s your chance to buy it before the price goes up

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 […]

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Cities: Skylines 2 latest region pack heads to the Netherlands, ‘the land of windmills, clogs, and stroopwafel,’ and includes new hospitals, fire stations, and hyperrealistic cemeteries

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; […]

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Setting up trade routes is gaming catnip to me, so I’m pouncing on this beautiful city builder on Steam that has some strong Catan vibes

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 […]

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Frostpunk 2 is hosting a modding contest for a ‘chance to leave your mark on the Frostpunk universe’—oh, and a $10,000 prize pool

Take on the Frostpunk 2 Modding Contest and Win $10 000! – YouTube Watch On 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, […]

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This brilliant dark and moody cyberpunk city builder is my kind of cosy game—and for less than $7 you might as well see if it’s yours too

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. […]

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Cities: Skylines 2’s latest patch has introduced quays and piers after seeing players using makeshift substitutes: ‘We know how challenging they can be to build’

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 […]

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Dark Switch is a fantasy city-builder where you construct a metropolis around a massive tree, but watch out for the fog that drives citizens mad

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 […]

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Stress-free city builder Gourdlets is getting a ‘fully-featured’ multiplayer spin-off sometime this year

Gourdlets Together Reveal Trailer | Wholesome Direct 2025 – YouTube Watch On 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 […]

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