Strategy and Simulation is an odd category, with as much, if not more variation between games than the catch-all genre of adventure game. It’s also one which relies heavily on the flexibility and broader control inputs of the PC’s keyboard and mouse, with games like Total War: Attila and Prison Architect featuring plenty of menus to navigate.
These can all be boiled down and simplified, however, and two of our runners up do just that. Fallout Shelter has you in command of a vault, making good use of the smartphone and tablet touch controls to let you easily manage your underground colony’s survival and growth, while The Escapists puts you in control of a single prisoner on a quest to break out of incarceration.
Our winner falls into the former group, as it managed to successfully revive a classic sub-genre.
It’s been a long, long time since budding city builders have had a game that’s worthy of their time and effort, but Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive have plotted to set that right for quite some time. Coming from the Cities in Motion game, CO clearly had a handle on how to build complex and interwoven systems, but now they were setting their sights on letting you play with the whole city.
At launch, they got all of the fundamentals right, from the simple joys of laying out your city’s road network and growing to sprawl across multiple 2km2 tiles, to letting you create districts with separate tax breaks and incentives for different types of business and setting up complex public transport systems.
However, it’s only got better since then, as patches and the first game expansion have built upon those solid foundations. You can now have road and rail tunnels, instead of always relying on bridges, there’s now a day-night cycle for all players, regardless of whether you bought the After Dark expansion, and that expansion also brought fresh situations to try and deal with in the hours of night.
Rest assured that there’s plenty more on the way for Skylines.
Runners up in alphabetical order:
- Fallout Shelter
- Prison Architect
- The Escapists
- Total War Attila
Kennykazey
Well deserved, it’s the city builder we’ve wanted for years. And that Sim City failed to be.