I maintain that city builders, as a genre, are some of the best-looking games on PC. Manor Lords leaps off the screen. Cities Skylines 2 (for its various shortcomings) provides some fantastic vistas. When you look at a completed map in SimCity 3000, it's like a circuitboard, intricate and elegant at the same time. It's the symmetry and the density. Rollercoaster Tycoon has it, too, with all those colorful sprites pushed together – all that microscopic life. Created by a single developer, under the label Yesbox Studios, Metropolis 1998 is one of the most beautiful city-building games on Steam. We're still waiting on a full release, but you can try its newly expanded playtest version for free right now.
On the surface, city-building game is much more than just a nostalgia trip. It's a tiny and it boots instantly, but the amount of complexity and detail here is remarkable. Everything is granular.
As well as building your city in broad strokes, you can design each house room by room, and one piece of furniture at a time. Citizens go to work, sleep, and have names, personalities, and individual needs. The finished version will be able to simulate more than 100,000 people and vehicles, and you can look into the interior of every single building.
Combined with its gorgeous visuals (I really am a sucker for old-school city builders and RTS games), Metropolis 1998 feels like the ideal alternative to Cities Skylines 2 and the genre's other big hitters. Yesbox has just released a new version of the demo that provides a bigger map for you to build on, edge scrolling for easier navigation, improved tooltips for newcomers, and also interaction sounds to make inputs a little bit more gratifying.
Provisionally, Metropolis 1998 is scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year, but you can try this expanded demo right now, right here.
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