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Citybuilder games are a unique kind of game, being half-simulator, half-strategy game as you balance budgets, design sewage systems and care for your citizens needs. However, they might not be the most approachable, being a fairly niche corner of the gaming industry, so we’ve found 3 top pics that we’d advise for the new gamer in 2025 looking to break into the citybuilding world!
Firstly, Tropico is a fairly simplistic sim that places you as the dictator of a small caribbean island, forcing you to advance its status throughout the centuries and lead your people into prosperity! The biggest selling point of Tropico 6, in my mind, is not so much the mechanics but the general “vibe”- from allowing you to dress up your dictator in goofy outfits, the ridiculous options to steal world monument or the general humour of the dialogue, Tropico 6 doesn’t take itself too seriously, sticking to a light-hearted, approachable style.
Indeed, Tropico 6 matches this mood with a gameplay loop to match. Tropico 6 doesn’t try to be too complex in its economic systems, while still making the game get more complex as you move forward in time. For example, the trade mechanic (your primary means of raising currency) is very simple- goods not being used on your island (e.g to feed your people, to be converted into other things) go to the port to be sold. To get more money, you can turn goods into other things (e.g sending your sugar off to become rum) which then sells for more, and as the game goes on you get more complex orders turning one thing into another to then be combined with 3 other things to create a final result! The game is careful to never overload you with micromanagement- at the end of the day you can honestly get by to the nuclear age just selling corn if you tried hard enough- but makes setting up supply chains to feed your industry very straightforward! Furthermore, with more means of customisation like trade routes and piracy, you can make your trade even more effective by cutting down on raw material costs and boosting your profits!
However, the cherry on top of Tropico is the political mehcnaics. Each ages forces you to balnce the demands of various factions- from royalist overlords and rebellious locals in the colonial era to the axis and the allies in the world war- with every age ultimately culminating with some kind of conflict. This means decisions like trade, embassies or piracy actions can have real implicationson international relations, which in turn may hurt or help your economy! Furthermore, as you become forced to disguise yourself as a “democracy”, you equally have to manage internal factions, from building churches to appease the religious zealots to keeping people out of poverty to stay chums with your socialist comrades.
Overall, Tropico 6 is a really unique citybuilder experience and goes beyond the genres typical confines, creating a very engaging game that somehow manages to make international relations and political espionage simplistic and lighthearted!
Frostpunk is, in essence, a survival game turned city manager. Frostpunk is set in an alternative universe where a second ice age hits a steampunk Victorian worlds, forcing the residents of London to journey North, hoping to escape the storms making their way Southward, but unknowingly plunging themselves into the heart of the chaos. Frostpunk definitely cultivates a general tone of both bleakness and resilience, from the little popups that tell you how your people are doing, the stellar soundtrack by Piotr Musiał, or the gradual sounds as the temperature increases or decreases each night.
From a gameplay mechanic POV, Frostpunk keeps things relatively simple. Frostpunk offers you six base currencies- people, wood, steel, food, coal and steam cores- with further elements like the difference between raw and cooked food for your populace and the level of skill your workers have, from children who labour with low efficiency to skilled engineers who can only fill certain positions. The game balances very well, requiring you to constantly manage your economy, bearing each of these factors in mind- forget about your steel mines and you’ll soon find yourself unable to upgrade your hunting huts to maintain your population growth, forget about keeping a steady supply of wood and you’ll be overburdened by homelessness as you are unable to expand your community to take in new rescues and wanderers. That said, the key currency is, naturally, coal- without coal, your generator runs out of fuel, shuts down and leaves your people to succumb to the temperatures. With the game’s temperature fluctuating up and down across the various storylines, you’ll always need to not only have enough coal to fuel your generator, but also a small reserve in case you need to up the generator power in the worst case scenario. With fair balancing, the game deliberately keeps you on your toes, never making it too easy as the mounting temperature constantly fuels the need for your economy to change and grow throughout the game.
While Frostpunk’s sequel goes into a lot more detail with the political mechanics, Frsontpunk still has some fairly basic elements of politics- with a variety of laws available to pass, from ensuring the right to a dignified funeral to forcing certain workers into 24-hour shifts, each game and its difficulty forces yout o choose between clinging to individual freedoms and liberty or succumbing to the need for more resources, more child workers, more organ harvesting. Furthermore, with 2 branches for government directions- sliding into a totalitarian dictatorship to crack down on people’s unrest, or becoming an cultish theocracy to maximise hope output- and various story-specific decisions in the game’s various chapters (e.g deciding whether or not to take in refugees from the approaching storm, deciding whether to help another city or stick to your initial policy of isolation, etc) allowing politics to add a little more flavour to your gameplay, thus keeping the game to its city-manager/survival roots rather than being too distracted by the politics of things.
When you think of what a ‘city builder’ is, City Skylines is probably it. Placing you at the heart of a growing urban centre, you have to build your city to be successful by providing your people with basic utilities, working traffic and other amenities fundamental to the success of a fledgeling city. The general dynamic of City Skylines is enjoyable- the game feels approachable but at the same time does have a difficulty threshold that requires familiarization. You need to get to grips with each aspect of city life, as overlooking one element can have devastating consequences (e.g some players have been known to accidentally create Cholera by placing their sewage treatment systems a little too close to their water supply).
Unlikes a game like Tropico, there isn’t any real “money-making” methods to be concerned with- you get money through taxes, and the best way to get more taxes is to expand the city or optimise your existing city. While absolutely, you can send off excess goods like electricity for a cash bonus, the majority of your money will be coming from your citizens, and your gameplay will generally be focusing about controlling your spending rather than trying to raise new money. For example, if you create a city that has a clean environment, safe water and sanitary living conditions, perhaps you can afford to cut back on healthcare? Or, perhaps you should invest in tourism, or other specific industries, in order to create jobs AND money for your population? Overall there’s a variety of different ways to manage your money, but as stated before the real focus of the game tends not to be on money- although that absolutely is a big big factor in your gameplay- but on what you can do to sustain and expand your city’s growth.
The biggest problem with City Skyline, however, is the DLC model. Being a Paradox game, some of its most fun elements are gated behind an ever-rising paywall, with the cost of every DLC stacking up at about £300. This is obviously unsatisfactory, but made even moreso by the fact that these DLCs offer genuinely important functionality that should be included in the base game. For example, some of the game’s funnest elements come not from building up your city, but putting it through a crisis or two, like a hurricane or a meteor shower. These are fun little challenges to test your city’s limits, or simply to just allow you to destroy a save you no longer with to play on. With these being mostly kept behind the Natural Disasters DLC, this is an element of gameplay that your average player will just miss out on! This doesn’t at all invalidate the fun of the City Skylines base game, but it is something that should be disclaimed to temper expectations.
In short, these are 3 of the best citybuilder games for someone looking to play a game slightly different, with one foot in the realm of simulators as they force you to imagine yourself as an upcoming mayor, a frost-bitten leader or a tropical dictator, and another in the realm of strategy games as each requires planning, thought and… well, strategy, to master. Overall, each of these games are worth their price, and while City Skylines’ DLCs might be a little too much, there are still some good ones you can pick out if you want to enhance your gameplay, but I would 100% recommend all DLC from Frostpunk and Tropico 6 if you enjoy the base game.
