Jan 01, 2019 The 5 Best City Building Games for the PC in 2019. Cities: Skylines. Cities: Skylines is what the new SimCity should have been. An open, freeform city builder with all the frustrations, elations. SimCity series.
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:
- Looking for the best new Mac games available today? You’re in the right place. This guide covers all the new Mac games 2018 and 2019 have in store for us. If an exciting game is released, announced or even rumored, you can count on it being in here.
- Jul 31, 2019 15 Best City Building Games for iPhone & iPad July 31, 2019 September 29, 2017 by Dan Norris Indeed, it is truly fascinating to build a metropolitan city from the flat ground.
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. Best mac and pc games. The game allows you to travel through thousands of years and be a part of the evolving era.
New City Building Games 2019
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.
City-builders are an interesting genre of games: You get god-like control over the growth and expansion of urban space and the ability to manage resources on a scale you’d probably never handle in real life (unless, of course, you were actually elected mayor of someplace). Have a look here at our curated list of the top 8 free city-building games on PC. You’ll be sure to have fun building up your virtual cities, looking after citizens, and even dealing with natural disasters.
Most of these are free to play and can be download either from Microsoft store or Steam. So, some of them should also work on Mac. With that out of the way, let’s begin.
City-Builder Games on PC
1. Cities Skylines
Okay, Cities skylines is not a free game but this list couldn’t be complete without this app. Plus, there is a free version of the game on the Microsoft store that you can try. Unlike other city building games, this one more modern and probably a bit easier to learn for beginners. Also, unlike most city building games that focus too much on money and budget, cities skylines are inclined towards increasing population and try to manage the traffic jams while managing infrastructure such as education, security, medicine, etc.
Overall, it’s a good game for beginners, but if you are a pro, skip this one.
Download Cities Skylines (Steam, Windows Store)
2. Megapolis
Want something that’s a bit more substantial than Cities Skylines? Megapolis has you covered. This is a free city-builder that’s available across platforms, from Windows to Android to iOS, and supports cross-platform play, so you can keep building that city whether you’re in the subway or at your desktop. Megapolis has you building civic amenities, industrial buildings, and residential quarters to increase your tax revenue and population limit—you take your newfound resources and invest them towards scaling things up. Megapolis mixes things up by introducing water and electricity resource needs for specific buildings—you’ll have to ensure that the resource supply is adequate to allow your power plants and other structures to function. You will have to deal with IAPs, though.
Download Megapolis (Steam, Windows Store)
3. City Mania
City Mania is the first full-3D title in our list here. It’s got a good pedigree—it’s developed by Gameloft, the makers of a wide range of great free-to-play titles on iOS an Android, from Asphalt 9 to Modern Combat to, well, City Mania. The game has you playing as mayor and managing civic amenities, resources, and businesses. You need to keep your wits about you and scale resource production and residential sites as population and resource pressure increases. This is where the free-to-play elements come into the picture—you can buy resources which otherwise take a long time to accumulate. While this can slow down the pace of play for free players, we still suggest giving the game a spin: It’s a great mobile-centric city builder with a unique, painterly aesthetic to its 3D visuals.
Download City Mania (Windows Store)
4. Virtual City Playground
The biggest criticism we can leverage against Virtual City Playground is that it simply doesn’t do enough to set itself apart in the free-to-play city-builder segment. As a mobile title on iOS and Android, the game plays out very similar to City mania, albeit with 2D sprite graphics instead of polygonal 3D. You’re tasked with managing your city and building amenities and ensure that growth is supported as your population increases. There is one way that Virtual City Playground sets itself apart, though: You’re able to engage in a certain amount of micromanagement, allowing you to plan out individual bus routes among other small-scale tasks. Free-to-play mechanics operate the same as in other titles in the genre. How fast your city develops is directly proportional to how much real-world money you invest in it.
Download Virtual City Playground (Windows Store)
5. Pixel Worlds
Minecraft spinoffs have been a thing the past couple years, with everything from a Minecraft narrative RPG from Telltale to Minecraft battle royale. Minecraft mania’s hit the city-builder genre too. Pixel Worlds is less a city-builder and more a world-builder, where you terraform a barren world and build up a settlement and other developed areas. The main hook is the massively multiplayer component: You can trade with other players and cooperate with them, too: When there’s a large number of real-world players onscreen, it feels more convincing as an urban space than conventional city-builders since you know that you’re seeing is the product of a lot of collective effort. Pixel Worlds also has dungeons, exploration, and minigames like fishing to help keep things fresh. The game is free-to-play and you can purchase additional currency through IAP but the in-game means of earning are quite fair by themselves.
Best City Building Games For Pc
Download Pixel Worlds (Steam, Windows Store)
6. Township
This is another title that treads a bit off the beaten path as far as city-builders are concerned. Township is less a city-builder proper and more of a, well, town builder. It’s about building cozy settlements at the intersection of the rural and the urban, so farm management plays just as much a role as building civic amenities. The town you end up building is much more down-to-earth than the skyscraper-crowded screens of other city builders, but the payoff’s arguably more worthwhile—you didn’t just lay down roads and wait for settlers to arrive—Township’s very much a farm-to-fork experience, letting you touch on all aspects of the town-building process. It also has a wide range of side activities like mining which mix things up in the gameplay department.
Download Township (Windows Store)
7. Worlds Builder
Are city-builders not ambitious enough for you? You might want to try Worlds Builder, which has you overlooking an entire world as its god. As farms and settlements come into the picture, you’re given a much wider toolset of options, including the ability to control forces of nature to shape destinies. You can also build up natural environments like forests as well as urban settlements. Because of its larger scale, it’s no surprise that Worlds Builder also has an exploratory element which has you sending out expeditions to discover treasure.
Price: Free, with IAPs
Download SimCity 4 (Windows Store)
8. SimCity 4
No list of best city building game is complete without SimCity, the most popular game in this genre. When you start the game, the tutorials do a pretty good job at covering the basics. My favourite thing about the game is its realism. For example, if you build a city with high-value residential neighborhoods, you get more tax money without taking up more space. But if you apply a high tax rate on low-income residents, you soon see strikes on the street. This game almost reflects the life of an actual city.
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Sim city 4 is a bit harder than other city building games, so if you are just getting started, it’s not the best game to pick up (I recommend Sim City 2000 instead), but if you are looking for some challenge it’s a must-have. It’s a paid game, but I’ve seen it on heavy discount on steam most part of the year.
Download SimCity 4 (Steam, Website)
Best City Building Games Mac
That’s all for this list! Which free city-builder did you find the most fun? Let us know in the comments below! If you want to try out more games and get a little smarter in the process, check out this handy list!