Cities: Skylines stormed the City Builder genre over the last few years, consistently being hailed as a fantastic and lovingly made experience. It has something for everyone: complex transport simulation, flexible design tools, the ability to experiment with city-wide policies, and a frankly astonishing amount of talented modders.
Players have sunk hundreds of hours into this game, whether they were previous fans of the genre or simply dipping their toes in the simulated waters of City Builders for the first time. While Cities: Skylines will forever remain an old-faithful, there are plenty of other games that may scratch that familiar itch while broadening your horizons.
Updated February 17, 2023 by Ryan Bamsey: Cities: Skylines is one of those truly special games that can drain away days and weeks of your life. Even so, it can get a little samey, and you might want to step out into a new game every now and then. We've added a few more recommendations for you simulator lovers.
19 Against The Storm
Cities: Skylines has you managing lots of different things at once - at times, it can be an exhilarating experience, juggling traffic jams with death waves and economic crashes. If this sort of high-intensity gameplay is exciting to you, Against the Storm might be the perfect game to play in your city-building downtime.
This is a city builder with roguelike elements, so your settlements are less permanent than those in Skylines. This might be an attractive prospect, though, especially when you factor in the pretty art style and fantasy elements, too.
18 Farthest Frontier
While it doesn't have the same tech level as Cities: Skylines, Farthest Frontier is up there in how complex the simulation is. There are lots of different resources to manage, crops to grow to feed your villagers, and buildings to fit their needs.
This title is still in Early Access at the time of writing, but there's plenty of content so far to get enraptured by. Not least of all the really detailed buildings and environments allowing you to create some truly stunning towns of your own.
17 Airport CEO
One of the highlights of managing a big city in Skylines is tweaking your transport systems down to the finest details, moving bus routes and railways until they're perfectly suited to your metropolis. What if you could take that management even more granular? Airport CEO allows you to do that, getting you to manage an international airport.
The purely top-down viewpoint makes this a striking game that allows you to focus on the meat of the gameplay, making for an immersive simulation, mechanically speaking. It can provide some complex challenges, at times, but it's worth learning.
16 Sweet Transit
Sweet Transit is like Cities: Skyline with more emphasis on railways - cars don't even exist. Building up a town that totally relies on rail transport and solving the problems that arise from that is a very engaging experience, and it's a very challenging one thanks to how antithetical to real life it is.
If you're looking for a transport simulator with a very steep but rewarding difficulty curve, this might be the one for you. It has replayability, a realistic yet beautiful art style, and more trains than you can shake a stick at.
15 Going Medieval
One of this year's breakout indie hits, Going Medieval takes the city-building and colony simulator genre in a new direction with flexible building tools and a harsh survival system.
A game still deep into Early Access, there is a lot to be added to Going Medieval. As it stands, though, meticulously putting together your medieval village and the main castle is seriously addictive. You don't even have to deal with horse-and-cart traffic. Not yet, anyway.
14 Frostpunk
Brutal to its chilly core, Frostpunk is a city-builder for those who're looking for a challenge beyond traffic management and highway construction. Frostpunk is all about keeping your citizens happy...and alive.
With the announcement of Frostpunk 2 arriving sometime in the future, there's no better time to jump into this game and get ready for an upgraded version of this severe city-builder.
13 Tropico 6
The Tropico series is an all-time classic. Tropico 6 is one of the best so far, with a robust scenario mode and a sandbox mode for those who prefer to let loose with their creativity on a glorious tropical island.
Plus, Tropico 6 is currently available on Game Pass, so there's really no reason to check it out if you like Cities: Skylines.
12 Dorfromantik
A city-builder with a twist, this tile puzzle game was another indie hit this year. A gorgeous art style is paired with fairly brutal gameplay mechanics that put stress on putting the right tiles in the right spots.
Create huge forests, sprawling villages, and the most twisty-turny rivers and lakes you've ever seen. There's an upcoming creative mode on the horizon for those who just want to place tiles all over the place. Definitely worth checking out, and at a bargain price, too.
11 Patron
Banished really set the bar high a few years ago, but there have been several city-building games that have walked in its footsteps over the years. Patron is another to add to that list.
It has everything you might expect from a city-builder, but fuses in survival mechanics, a large tech tree, and plenty of mechanics revolving around the society inside your small, fledgling village.
10 Endzone - A World Apart
For fans of Cities: Skylines who may prefer to be challenged every now and then, Endzone - A World Apart provides a perfect opportunity to throw themselves into a new game. This game merges City Building with Survival to create quite a unique experience.
After a successful Early Access campaign with many gameplay updates along the way, Endzone - A World Apart has accrued a loyal base of fans who love the gritty, post-apocalyptic stylings.
9 Railway Empire
Fans who love Cities: Skylines for its flexible and robust transport systems may find the gameplay of Railway Empire particularly engaging. Set during the 1800s in America (and in plenty more regions with the appropriate DLC) and featuring a ton of trains and technological advancements to discover, players will no doubt find this game a fun and educational experience.
Train enthusiasts and strategy game fans alike will no doubt enjoy the need to micromanage and plan their railways. It has a rather more competitive aspect to its gameplay than Cities: Skylines has with its transport systems, and that may be what some players really want.
8 Ostriv
Another more historical game, Ostriv is a City Builder (Village Builder, really) set in 1700s Ukraine and has the lofty goal of encouraging truly organic creations. It does this with features like doing away with the usual grid-style placement of other games in the genre.
While still in Early Access on Steam, Ostriv has built up a devoted fanbase who are more than happy to sink hundreds of hours into the game. Players praise the game for its calming nature and smooth difficulty curve. Challenge is not the point of Ostriv, creativity is.
7 Planet Coaster
While building serene and beautiful parks is just one small part of Cities: Skylines, Planet Coaster takes that idea and runs with it. Players can create just about any manner of theme park, from small funfairs to gigantic mega parks that may even rival the likes of Disney.
This game will really appeal to gamers who enjoy having powerful tools with which to explore their creativity. While management and simulation are still the name of the game, there is a lot to enjoy in Planet Coaster.
6 Dyson Sphere Program
While still in Early Access, Dyson Sphere Program shows so much promise already that it has accrued a huge following. In this game, rather than building a city the player must build a Dyson Sphere, a gigantic megastructure that would produce enough energy to fuel humanity.
This is one for the Cities: Skylines players who thrive on getting everything just so. Maximizing layout efficiency and keeping everything rolling with little intervention is a challenging but extremely rewarding experience in both games.
5 OpenTTD
OpenTTD describes itself on its Steam Page as an "open source remake and expansion of the 1995 Chris Sawyer video game Transport Tycoon Deluxe". Transport Tycoon Deluxe is one of the precursors to the grid-based construction-based gameplay that is still so ubiquitous in Simulation, City Building, and Management games today.
Featuring procedurally generated cities, a host of different modes of transportation, and modding support, this game has the potential to suck fans in for hours. All for the price of nothing!
4 Surviving Mars
Surviving Mars is another City Builder just like Cities: Skylines and fans will no doubt already be well aware of it as it is also published by Paradox Interactive. This time though, the cities are on Mars and are under domes.
Colonizing another planet is a whole different experience as players have to handle energy and resource consumption, a large technology tree, and the construction of futuristic space domes. While the game can hold a lot of challenges there are ways to make them take it easier on the player, helping the game strike a wonderful balance between the relaxing construction aspects and the challenging management aspects.
3 Banished
Banished is a game about starting from scratch, taking a group of exiled villagers and helping them create a whole new settlement. As such, it has a more strategic take on City Building than many other games in the genre. Food must be gathered, winter must be survived, resources must be exploited.
The game offers particularly challenging gameplay that some players may find frustrating, while others will adore it. It is very much a game of intuition and some trial and error, as there are no technology trees to guide players through development - having to find out exactly how to use what they have to their advantage is the challenge that keeps players coming back to Banished.
2 Tropico 6
The sixth entry in the humor-laced tropical punch that is Tropico is a gem for players who appreciate a little light-heartedness in their City Building games. Players must create a dictator to be their avatar and turn gorgeous islands into their own personal paradise.
Attracting new residents, building up efficient infrastructure, and having to constantly tread the thin line between all corners of the political compass are the features that players have come to expect from Tropico. It's a game full of decisions that can affect a story, and that makes it quite a unique entry in the genre.
1 SimCity 2000
As the successor to SimCity Classic, SimCity 2000 had big boots to fill and it sure managed to fill them. It is one of the quintessential entries in the City Builder genre and is a must-play for fans of Cities: Skylines and not just for the historical significance of the title.
It is a game that holds up extremely well even today, with bright, pleasing graphics and gameplay that is satisfying to get a grip on. The smatterings of humor spread throughout are also very enjoyable but don't distract from the satisfying core experience of being a city planner.