The city building games like SimCity here offer similar gameplay and features to the SimCity franchise for fans of the city building genre. This includes construction, management, open ended objectives and customisable game worlds. Create, design and shape your own creations in the varied gameplay that you will experience in the games below.
Management games are all about being the one in charge. Whether it’s yelling at the England manager, cursing those clowns in Congress for doing it again (seriously, what a bunch of clowns), or laughing at Bryce Dallas Howard for running away from dinosaurs in high heels, we all think we could do better.
This explains why management games have remained one of the most enduring and popular genres in PC gaming. It helps that managing balance sheets, planning cities, and bossing staff around is so easily translated to the keyboard and mouse.
From the early days of city building in SimCity to refining tactics in Championship Manager, through to the more recent classics we’ve got below, the humble management sim accounts for some of the best PC games of all time – not to mention the most addictive. These management games will eat your life away like no other, but every hour spent laying electricity cables, tweaking prices, or adding extra toilets is time well spent, so read on for a roundup of the very finest. Just remember to try and get some sleep, yeah?
The best management games on PC are:
Rimworld
While management games like The Sims let you manage every aspect of a person’s life right down to what they get up to in the bathroom, RimWorld shifts the perspective back a little and puts you in charge of managing a whole colony of people after crash landing onto an alien planet. What happens after this crash is partially up to your management skills, but also up to the tragedies that are dealt to you by the AI Storyteller, which hands disasters to you at a regular cadence, ranging from simple thunderstorms to vomiting livestock. So, while you might be up to handling the practicalities of this, the individuals in your colony will all react different ways, ensuring every game plays out differently.
It’s still getting plenty of love from its dev team, too. A recent RimWorld Royalty DLC heaps in a variety of royal titles your colonists can have and psychic powers that you can use to induce mass vomiting – what’s not to love?
Cities: Skylines
Despite developer Colossal Order comprising only nine people, Cities: Skylines manages to easily outshine most other city creation sims by taking the genre back to its roots – offering freedom, scale, and simple building mechanics.
The smartest idea the game has is disposing with individual building placement. Instead, you choose a ‘style’, and then basically spray-paint structures on to the ground. It’s really satisfying to behold your city just pop up in front of you.
Despite the straightforward attitude to building, don’t mistake Cities: Skylines for being easy, as there are plenty of interconnected components to manage and hundreds of ways for things to go wrong. There’s no Godzilla to go on a rampage – although there are disasters – but Cities: Skylines is the true heir to the SimCity legacy. Plus, you can expand your experience thanks to the huge number of Cities: Skylines mods available to download for free.
Planet Coaster
When Bullfrog created Theme Park in 1994 the studio probably didn’t realise it’d be giving birth to a whole sub-genre of management sims. With Theme Park unlikely to get another game any time soon (see SimCity or Dungeon Keeper instead, or EA’s back catalogue in general), it was up to others to dominate this small sub-genre. And Frontier Developments did – first with Rollercoaster Tycoon, and then with Planet Coaster.
Read more: Here are the best Planet Coaster creations
Planet Coaster is the ultimate theme park designer game. The level of freedom is unparalleled. You can do everything from raise the price of crisps by a penny to create entire, elaborate rides. That’s not just pick a ride, shove it down, and alter the height of the tracks – in Planet Coaster, you can design an entire experience from scratch, limited only by your imagination. We’ve seen fantastic, elaborate rides based on Aliens, Moonraker, and even a whole park that looks like Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings.
Planet Coaster lets you micromanage your park at every level, and we do mean every level. It’s had a steady stream of official content and thousands of mods since release, too, so there’s a terrifying mountain of gameplay to be had here – and none of it is boring.
Two Point Hospital
Not long ago, Bullfrog’s classic Theme Hospital would’ve been a cinch for this list, but then a young upstart came and knocked it off – although, in this case, it’s a game by several of the original’s developers. Two Point Hospital takes everything great about Theme Hospital and brings it right up to date.
What both games have in common – and what made Theme Hospital so particularly enduring – is gameplay that anyone could get their hands on and enjoy within minutes. Managing a hospital could easily be made too tricky, or too depressing, but Two Point Hospital makes it joyous. One floor, simple drag-and-place controls, uncomplicated items, and the simple goal of curing patients and keeping everyone happy. Then someone’s sick in a bin, the De-Humorifier blows up, or a failed patient comes back from the dead seeking revenge. All in a day’s work at Two Point Hospital so you better know how to deal with it all.
As we say in our Two Point Hospital review, everything escalates after the gentle intro and soon becomes proper challenging – but this management game never loses its humour. It’s cute in the same way Wallace & Gromit is, with plenty of ridiculous diseases – and cures – and the DJs on the tannoy only add to the entertainment. Just make sure to check under the snack machines as that’s where those pesky Monobrows lurk.
Frostpunk
Frostpunk mixes management with the harsh challenges of survival sims. You have to manage people, yes, but the goal isn’t to make money – it’s to make it through each bitter night without losing everyone to a sudden death.
From the creators of This War of Mine, which is similarly about a group of people trying desperately to survive under horrifying circumstances, Frostpunk deals with nothing less than the end of the world. The Earth is freezing in this post-apocalypse game, which means the group under your control has to build steam engines and collect resources to stave off the cold.
Sound simple? It would be, except half the time you’re not managing a society – you’re managing your own morality. You’ll soon find yourself sending frostbitten workers to their deaths in order to clear or a bit of snow, or executing your own citizens because they dared to disagree with you.
As we say in our Frostpunk review, this is one of the best management games on PC. Not just because it’s different, but also because it holds a mirror to your own actions like no other game – and you might not like what you see.
Factorio
Factorio is all about building and maintaining factories on the alien world you’ve crash landed upon. While initially about survival, harvesting resources by hand as you do in Minecraft, and fending off the dangerous wildlife, Factorio quickly expands beyond that. It allows you to create massive centres of industry, with production lines, automated machines, and solar-powered robots.
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While Factorio could be too complicated for some, once you get into designing and managing your factory, you’ll soon find the hours slipping away. It’s not the most attractive game on this list but Factorio is probably the most addictive. We live in hope that the developer will actually finish it some day.
Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley lets you mingle with the locals and take a break from the stress of making decisions. But don’t be fooled: while on the surface it looks like an RPG that would be published on the Super Nintendo, this is in actuality a pure and gripping management game – just one that’ll get your hands dirty for once.
Inspired by the likes of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley has you manage a farm that was left to you by your grandfather, which you can do with whatever you choose. You can grow crops and raise livestock, make a thriving jam business or enter the nearby caves to fight slimes that you can breed.
But there’s so much more to do outside of that, too. Head into town and you can make friends with the local villagers, or even start a romantic relationship. There are also quests to earn extra Stardew Valley money, a huge map to explore, and you can work on restoring the town hall if you want to be charitable. Stardew Valley is one of the loveliest farming sims available on PC. Just make sure to manage your time most of all as this game will eat it up. Plus, if you want to extend the experience then you can install a bunch of the best Stardew Valley mods.
Farming Simulator 19
Now, when it comes to farming, we know little when it comes to the agricultural variety. We’re much better suited to the farmer’s life when we’re doing it in space, as we would in Destiny 2. Which is precisely why Farming Simulator 19 is one of the best kinds of management games: with a deep tutorial that gets us started in one of the most complete farming games ever, we now everything we need to when it comes to owning a real farm, maybe.
With a welcome graphics upgrade to make living off the land an even prettier – if still smelly – experience, Farming Simulator 19 boasts more vehicles and tools than ever before. And, quite literally hold your horses as John Deere tractors finally make their way to this simulation game. In case you didn’t believe in the sheer detail on show here, check it out in practice with our Farming Simulator 19 diary to see how we fared. Spoilers: it didn’t go well.
The Sims 3
The Sims was a phenomenon when it first hit our PCs in 2000. SimCity creator Will Wright’s little people simulator gave us the chance to fully manage the lives of a family. You can build their house, get them jobs, help them fall in love, and remove the ladder from their pool and watch them drown, it’s all part of The Sims experience.
While there are four games in the series so far we suggest playing The Sims 3. The Sims 4 is still lacking a few crucial features, although you can enhance the experience with the best Sims 4 mods. The Sims 3 still reigns supreme for the ability to travel to other neighbourhoods and manage them too, and the high level of both developer and mod support.
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The Sims 3 is a well-rounded package that still looks good today. Just try not to name Sims after your close friends or family as that doesn’t usually go well – ‘what do you mean you locked me in the basement?’ Agh!
Tropico 4
The Tropico games are essentially city builders like SimCity except they have you managing a tropical island that’s been conquered by a dictator. SimCuba, if you will. But rather than being grim these are some of the funniest management games out there.
You look after every aspect of your island, including where you get your money, exports, relations with other countries, and making sure the workers don’t revolt – and if they do, will you placate them or mercilessly stomp out their revolution? What makes the Tropico games distinct in the genre is that you can succeed by keeping your population happy, or subjugated under your brutal regime.
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The reason to play Tropico 4 over any other game in the series is that it’s the most well-rounded of them. Each entry does a good job of improving the formula but Tropico 5 complicated matters by trying to go in a different direction. With Tropico 4 you have the freedom to rule your island with an iron fist – or not. The choice is yours, Mr Presidente.
Football Manager 2019
When it comes to the best management games, Sports Interactive are a shoe-in for that accolade with each annual entry to their famous football series. Football Manager 2018 was already excellent and the most complete a behind-the-scenes simulation of the beautiful game, so FM 19 is very much an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach. Still, for what’s effectively a collection of interactive charts, diagrams, and spreadsheets, this is the next best thing to being by the touchline. Shouting at your players from the other side of your screen is optional.
Not much has changed under the hood, but the surface is much more appealing and simpler to digest. Experienced gaffers will certainly appreciate the more streamlined – and particularly purple – user interface, but new players can benefit from tutorials for key systems in a way that’s informative without being overwhelming. Optional walkthroughs for training and building FM19 tactics are a handy head start, but control freaks can customise every fitness session and player role down to the tiniest granular detail. If you fancy yourself as the next special one, this is the only PC game you need.
Jurassic World Evolution
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis was far too long ago. Thank goodness, then, that Planet Coaster developer Frontier turned up to make a modern version of the classic dinosaur park management sim. Jurassic World Evolution lets you breed, care for, and unleash dinosaurs on unsuspecting visitors – if you’re feeling particularly nasty.
Frontier brings the incredible extinct creatures to life with fantastic animation and sounds that are so superb you’ll think your name is John Hammond. Keeping the dinosaurs happy, and meeting the demands of your department heads, is a full-time job. Especially when the Indominus Rex breaks out and you have to send a team out to capture it eats all the tourists.
Jurassic World Evolution is a thrilling dinosaur game that will please fans of the franchise. Bear in mind that you’ll have to complete challenges before unlocking an island that you can build your own park on. Not that it’s a chore when there are so many dinosaurs to watch.
Upcoming management games
Planet Zoo
Planet Zoo is the upcoming management game from Jurassic World Evolution developer, Frontier. Our impressions of Planet Zoo are mostly positive, however, it may not be for those new to the management game genre due to its scale and detail. we say, “It imbues everything with a real sense of life, and places its astonishing animals at the heart of it all. Genre newbies should be wary of being taken in by its charming aesthetics, but the rewards on offer are more than worth a bit of a mauling”. It’s definitely one for fans of the genre to watch out for when it releases later this year on November 5 2019.
So there you have it, ten of the best management games on PC, a genre particularly suited to our favourite platform. If you’ve played all of these games we’re astonished you have the time to eat, sleep, or even breathe, let alone read a feature like this.
Still, if you do love having no spare time – and don’t mind commanding armies instead of workers – you can also check out our list of the best strategy games on PC. Just don’t start with Civilization…
Indeed, it is truly fascinating to build a metropolitan city from the flat ground. It’s more interesting to manage the towns and look after the needs of the citizens residing there and focus on the constant development of the city. These things cannot happen in real life, but it can fulfill with some the city building game genre.
City building games are in wave these days, and new games are coming up on a daily basis with colorful and innovative graphics. You can find a broad range of good city building games, and it would be confusing to narrow down the best ones scanning through their various features. To reduce your burden, we have compiled a list of some of the best city building games for iOS here:
1. SimCity
SimCity is the most popular iOS city building game that comes with an improved version of the game SimCity started in 1989. SimCity lets you follow the footsteps of the mayor who wants to build a beautiful, bustling city where citizens will happily thrive.
The game features high-quality 3D graphics and gives you an opportunity to display your strategic skill into action. You can build the city, create a resource, provide it to the citizens, manage the resources and look after the citizen.
By using the most advanced gaming technology, you can have a real-time building experience on various elements of architectural techniques. With the 360-degree rotation feature, you can have a clear and crisp view of everything inside the city. The game also gives you chances to compete against other SimCity players by conducting the mayor’s contest and hence is the best city building game in the app market for iOS.
2. Forge of Empires
Forge of Empires is a strategy game from Innogames that is available on iOS devices including iPad. It is an award-winning game that takes you back to the time of Stone Age when civilization did not yet begin. The game allows you to travel through thousands of years and be a part of the evolving era.
It starts from Stone Age and allows you to pass through several levels where you have to find out a solution to every problem you encounter. You will get opportunities to make discoveries like our ancestors did and had a positive impact on the society regarding discovering technologies and new things.
It is a compulsive game as it involves finding out cutting-edge technologies and exploring new things on every single level. The gameplay goes through such a scenario that ensures longevity. Hence, once you start playing the game, you will surely come back every day.
Also read: 15 Best iOS Tower Defense Games
3. The Simpson: Tapped Out
You must be surprised to know that, the Simpsons: Tapped Out is one of the most popular downloaded city building games in the Apple Store. With more than 300,000 downloads, it is one of the popular games that have been around for five years.
It is a hot selling mobile game based on America’s favorite TV show The Simpsons, and you can find several video games with the same name as well. It is surprisingly simple and pretty straightforward to play. The theme of the game is to rebuild the Springfield city blew up earlier.
The homer starts with rebuilding the city, bring his fellow Springfield people along with his family to the city. You can crazily rearrange the city and control the life of fellow Springfieldians. The game moves with a unique storyline that includes some interesting situations and twists.
4. Township
Do you want to test your architectural skills? Building epic cities with great architecture and technological power are fun and it gives you an opportunity to display your architectural talents.
However, city building is not just about building a giant city; you can build a countryside that has a peaceful setting. If you want to build a small town where there are animals, paddy fields, and growing crops, then Township by Playrix Games is the game you should try.
Though the game has the characteristics of a city building game, it has the backdrop of a beautiful countryside which makes it as one of the best city building games available in the market. Once the game starts, you have to build the township from the barren ground. It involves growing and harvesting crops, developing facilities for living, collecting and buying animals, trading goods and more.
5. Fallout Shelter
Fallout Shelter is a popular iOS game from Bethesda, and now it is available on Android as well. It has a simple storyline for helping people who are struggling to survive in a place where there are harmful effects of radiation. Your goal is to form a vault or multiple ones so that you can provide shelter to your residents and keep them safe there.
The game involves building multiple resource rooms with each having a specific purpose. The vaults you create need to have a lot of facilities. As more people join you, the rooms will get unlocked. The game is interesting and goes on like that for a long time.
6. City Island 3
What about building a city from scratch? City Island 3 is the 3rd version of a fun and rewarding tycoon game where you can build your city from ground level. It is similar to other tycoon games, but this game allows you to win additional rewards and bonuses by sharing codes with your friends.
The game from Sparkling Society is available for both iPhone and iPad users. In this version, you have the choice to choose a volcano island, a tourist island, a desert or a swamp to build a city. There are a lot more options to unlock. You can build cities or villages or even a large metropolis.
7. Village City
Village City: Island Sim Builder Farm Resident by Sparkling Society is a tycoon stimulation based city building game. You need to build houses for the citizen and build a village from scratch. Once you do things and make your customers happy, you can earn rewards like gold or money from them.
It is an exciting Sim city building game where you can expand your island to build structures in town or beach or anywhere you wish to. You get access to various structures and can choose from the long list including cinemas, eat outs, hotels, offices, etc. It is also possible to engage your friends and share gift codes with them.
8. Paradise Island 2
Paradise Island 2 is the second version of the popular resort building game from Game Insight. In this game, you will be allowed to build an island resort in your own style. It has a catchy eye graphics of over 300 buildings and structures. Although you have to create the resort from scratch, the background of the game gives the vibe of a resort.
Like in any other city building game, you unlock new items once you move to an advanced level. In-app purchases are also available where you can spend money to unlock things faster. Overall, it is a fun game that you can play every day and continue for a long time.
9. Virtual City Playground: Building Tycoon
Virtual City Playground is a sequel to the original version of virtual City which has launched earlier in the Apple Store. The core idea of the game is similar to any other city building game where you get to build a city from scratch, maintain it and make the people living there happy.
In this game, you also have to manage the delivery truck and garages as well. You will have to execute several simple and exciting missions in the game making one of the popular city building game on Apple Store. Overall, the game has a fresh looking design, and it is fun to build a city with the given backdrop.
10. Rebuild
Rebuild is a strategy based building game from the developers Northway Games Corp. The app is selling at $2.99 and is available for both iPhone and iPad users. It is quite different from standard city building games as it is a perfect blend of exploration, danger, and rivalry.
The game is a zombie city build game where you are the leader of a group of survivors who lives in a city that has been ruling by zombies. As the available city blocks are not sufficient enough to accommodate all the people, you need to expand it further.
Throughout the game, you need to explore the city blocks, save the survivors, look for food and other daily supplies and try reclaiming the land. From time to time, you have to defend against the zombie group as well. Rebuild is a unique city building game that is a treat for adventure lovers.
Also read: Best Football Games for iPhone
11. The Battle of Polytopia
The Battle of Polytopia is a classic civilization based game application developed by Midjiwan AB. It has a very bright and distinctive style design with a fun storyline. However, it is strategically challenging and reminds you of other civilization games.
The theme revolves around an encircled situation, where you are stuck up in the small isometric world, and you are the only player surrounded by unknown people. Auto-generated maps are the peculiarity of this game, as it offers upcoming challenges. You have to start with a chosen tribe in a particular city as shown on the map.
With each game, you will get a fresh unit to play with. This game is a challenging one and it entirely based on survival.
12. Townsmen
Townsmen is an iOS game by HandyGames with a medieval time setting. As a player, your mission is to change the given village into a full-fledged empire that is both vast and royal. As with building any city, you have to deal with various challenges like natural calamities and many other issues that arise.
The village cut looking for people who are busy with their daily chores. While building the marketplaces, monuments and beautiful statues, you also have to protect the people from thieves and bandits who pose a constant threat to your development activities.
13. Megapolis
Megapolis is a number one metropolis building game that already has more than 10 million downloads. It gives every player, the opportunity to get the sophisticated city building experience.
You get the full charge of handling finances and building the major infrastructure of the city including railway station, airports, seaports, oil mining, various power plants, etc.
The game has included some very popular real buildings like leaning tower of Pisa and Big Ben’s clock tower. With crisp visuals and graphics depicting real cities, you get a lot to do there, and indeed it is one of the best city building games without any doubt.
14. Build Away
Build Away is a simple iOS game by Futureplay where you have to build a city with the gold you receive. Once you advance with city construction, you will start getting more gold in return.
First, you can start with rusty shacks, and from there you can construct buildings, supermarkets, factories, etc. Depending upon the perfection of the buildings you build, the amount of gold you receive will vary. You have to keep on working hard to advance with your construction project.
15. Dungeon Village
Dungeon Village is a stimulation kin of city building game from Kairosoft Co.Ltd. The game lets you build a fantasy RPG township and send the heroes there to battle the tiny monsters trying to invade the town. There will be multiple heroes, and once a hero moves in, the player can recruit the protagonist, for quests like clearing the dungeons and cleaning up the outbreaks caused by monsters.
All the heroes’ works for making the town better. As more heroes join you, you need to offer the best equipment and make them, remove the quests. It is a very simple game that is a little too easy to play.
Conclusion
We have tried to highlight the best city building games for iOS that are capable of giving you a memorable gaming experience. The list of city building game can go on and on as there are bundles of games available in different categories. Hopefully, this round-up article helped you get familiarized with some of the best games in the genre.
Dan is a web developer, a digital nomad, and a lifelong Apple fan. At iPhonebyte, his job is to help you get the most out of your iOS and Mac devices. Read the story about him and the website here.