Strategy City Builder Games

[Ena Marklund]

Upcomingpost-apocalyptic survival strategy game Homeseek, set to release in the late summer or early fall of this year, has a demo out on Steam that's surprisingly savage. You really just... don't get to save everyone.

In the world of Homeseek your region of Earth, at least, has become a dried-up dusty wasteland where water is precious and food is scarce. What little water you can find is often tainted, radioactive, or poisonous, and your little settlement is always on the brink of collapse.

Where in other games that's often just a thematic threat, Homeseek is broken up into missions, each of which has an objective, and resources are well and truly scarce. Just playing the demo gave me a sense of that: What little water we could pump from wells and food we could scavenge from bushes was often consumed that same day. The last few stragglers from the day's work often went hungry.

It was frankly quite cool to see a post-apocalyptic city builder that's built a world where you actually want to turn away people seeking to join your village, or avoid contact with larger groups in order to preserve your resources for the people you have now. On the other hand, sometimes however you need to bring in new people so that someone can operate the water purification system you just built.

I quite enjoyed the demo for Homeseek on Steam, and I hope that with some more polish and mechanics refinement, along with a clearer explanation of how its game systems work, it'll make a nice contribution to the survival strategy genre.

Maybe my expectations were wrong. I thought that Surviving Mars would be something akin to Cities: Skylines, the wonderful city builder experience that plops you down on a patch of dirt and asks you to build a city. In that game, you manage water, power and cash flow, and as long as your citizens have the first two and you have enough of the last one, everything works out great. Surviving Mars is different because there are explicit goals that make it feel more deterministic at every stage.

That, sadly, is the problem with the game. Surviving Mars has too much strategy in it for me to turn on some music and just start building a world like I might do with Skylines. On the other side, it is a little too slow and freedom-enabling for me to play it the way that I enjoy playing strategy games. It seems to be the kind of game that is perfect for a person who enjoys crunching numbers, managing their domes, and looking for emergent stories that happen among the denizens of Mars. There is probably something really great in Surviving Mars if that describes you.

Bulwark follows the events of flight combat game The Falconeer, after the end of the previous games' main storyline. In the aftermath of the wars of that era, Bulwark takes place some unknown number of decades after the fact. Society, or what remains of it, scratches out a meagre existence ensconced on rocks and ruins protruding from a treacherous and stormy oceanscape. It's your task to rebuild society, essentially, and bring together the remaining factions to find prosperity once again.

Build a ocean-faring cityscape in Bulwark, following the end of a massive oceanic colony war. Paint your city using clever tools, and develop into a bustling ocean metropolis in this unique title from Tom Sala.

Bulwark is well and truly unlike any other city builder I've played, and I've played a lot. I've got hundreds of hours in Endzone, Frostpunk, and Surviving Mars, and various others across the spectrum. Whether it's something more chill and relaxed like Cities Skylines or something a bit more stressful and strategic like Rimworld, there's usually something for everyone in this genre, but Tom Sala reckons he's identified a gap in the market.

Tom Sala mentioned he was inspired by 3D modelling programs like Maya, instead of other city builders while constructing Bulwark. That's why in this game, developing your city revolves around towers you place and define, and then grow out dynamically, almost like the line tool in MS Paint. It was a bit disorienting at first, my city-builder-brain immediately wanted to WASD the camera around, panning and scrolling with the mouse. But in Bulwark, your cursor travels between your towers, and then you can drag to define roads and other types of platforms. Houses, buildings, defensive structures, and other features then dynamically sprout like a hyperlapsed botany documentary, growing more complex and dynamic as you paint. It's entrancingly intuitive once you adjust your thinking, and immensely beautiful too. It feels as though giving the player freedom to basically paint wherever, overlapping pathways and buildings would create a total hideous mess of bridges and intersecting 3D models, but therein lies the genius here. The paths are generated via a clever algorithm to prevent your creations from ever looking ugly and nonsensical. Sala has effectively turned a professional 3D map editor into an entire game.

Bulwark has a minimalistic user interface, stripping back the reams of numbers and graphs and other trackable items that the genre is typically known for. Instead, Bulwark focuses on the building for the most part, but that doesn't mean you can expect a completely passive experience (unless you're playing on free build mode, that is).

Indeed, the world of The Falconeer is dangerous, full of roaming factions, giant sea monsters. While we didn't see any giant sea leviathans in our gameplay session (yet), there's a lot of depth lurking beneath Bulwark's whimsical surface.

Pressing a button will bring up a resource flow overlay that gives you an idea of how your settlement is being supplied. And that's the primary resource management gameplay here. It's not about waiting for gold numbers to accumulate. Instead, it's about linking resource nodes together, and adequately creating supply chains using a variety of options available to you. You can build roads between towers that serve to automatically supply things like iron and mushroom "wood" to the nearby settlements, which will then automatically generate buildings and populations for your city. The more workers, the more extraction, and then, the further those supplies can be stretched out. If you want to build more towers and create more paths around them, you'll need to adequately source those resources.

In order to do that, you have an airship that serves as a type of cursor when you're not in city building mode. You can guide the airship around the map, and place down remote settlements anywhere on the map, which can then be populated with harbors, and then captains, who can facilitate those supply lines for you automatically.

Supply lines aren't always safe, either. There are rogue factions, "pirate" enemies, and other hazards that your supply ships will potentially face while moving to and from your hubs. To that end, you can also construct battle ships to patrol the supply lines, who will partake in automated battles on your behalf. It's a bit like building your own living diorama, and playing witness to the chaos that will gradually unfurl as your settlement grows into a city, and then eventually a country.

As you grow, independent captains will appear and offer their services. The captains are often from other factions too, and their involvement in your city can increase trade and improve relationships with other nearby nations, depicted by the tree above. You can, of course, reject working with other nations, and seek their destruction and subjugation instead. Over time, you can generate fighters of your own, battlements, anti-air defences, and other combat capabilities that can help you gun for for that "war victory" if you're so inclined. I am very inclined, I must say.

Jez Corden is a Managing Editor at Windows Central, focusing primarily on all things Xbox and gaming. Jez is known for breaking exclusive news and analysis as relates to the Microsoft ecosystem while being powered by tea. Follow on Twitter @JezCorden and listen to his XB2 Podcast, all about, you guessed it, Xbox!"}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Jez CordenSocial Links NavigationCo-Managing EditorJez Corden is a Managing Editor at Windows Central, focusing primarily on all things Xbox and gaming. Jez is known for breaking exclusive news and analysis as relates to the Microsoft ecosystem while being powered by tea. Follow on Twitter @JezCorden and listen to his XB2 Podcast, all about, you guessed it, Xbox!

Our list of the best city building games offers something for every management game fan, which is why you can find some of them on our best PC games list, from hardcore town planners looking for a challenge to entries that welcome genre newcomers with the promise of tutorials, stripped-back interfaces, and a few apocalyptic threats.

As you start your basic village, a simple villager from outside your city walls turns up to tell you that their home is being taken over by barbarians. To begin with, you can only invite them into your city once their homes have been destroyed. As you play on, though, unlock more NPCs, such as Boudica, and she will help battle the barbarians in combat sequences. Different unlockable characters offer different abilities and help to grow your city in different ways.

Pioneers of Pagonia is a colony sim in which you can play peacefully, building your new civilization from the ground up; meeting, joining, and helping nearby colonies, creating new life, and ensuring your population are well-fed and happy. Alternatively, you can choose a PvE game mode, in which fantasy creatures, rogues, and thieves alike will try to kill your guards and steal your resources from under your nose.

Frostpunk is the kind of city builder that will make you question your morality over and over again. Your job is to survive a premature ice age in a sheltered steampunk-powered city that was left unfinished before the big freeze took hold. As the leader of a group of survivors, your role is to rebuild the city around a giant heater that constantly needs fuel to keep your denizens safe and healthy.

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