Will City Masterplan live up to Cities: Skylines as a next-gen city building sim?

There are plenty of city-building simulation games these days, ranging from hyper-realistic titles to fun indie twists. Still, when it comes to hand-crafting a sprawling city with skyscrapers and detailed traffic, plus in-depth management layers, nothing comes close to Cities: Skylines or its sequel. However, that might not be the case for long, as City Masterplan aims to overtake Cities: Skylines at its current best-selling point.

City Masterplan was recently announced by an indie team called 1:1 Studio. The game is directly competing with Cities: Skylines and is positioning itself as a worthy challenger.

So far, City Masterplan promises players a “highly realistic” take on city-building sims while keeping “the perfect balance between ‘ultimate realism’ and ‘smooth control,’” as detailed on the game’s Steam page. Players will be able to build cities on a massive 24 x 24 km map, creating either a classic American metropolis or a Chinese-style megacity.

From what we’ve seen so far, the game promises both freedom and scale. City Masterplan will allow players to build freeform roads rather than adhere to rigid grids. The game also promises “true-to-scale” skyscrapers and buildings sourced from a deep architectural library. Furthermore, it will feature advanced procedural generation to allow cities to grow naturally.

Leveraging Unreal Engine 5 to deliver on its promises

City Masterplan’s trailer dropped a few days ago and showcased photorealistic scenery in Unreal Engine 5, thanks to dynamic lighting, terrain shaping, and transitioning weather. Visually, it seems very much in the same league as Cities: Skylines II so far.

However, the game makes some big promises and will have to deliver on them. For context, Cities: Skylines was released in 2015, making it more than ten years old, and it is still the go-to city-building sim for many fans.

Cities: Skylines II, on the other hand, had a bumpy launch marred by performance issues. Recent updates by Colossal Order and Iceflake Studios, however, have fixed many of its problems and delivered quality-of-life improvements requested by players.

With that said, could City Masterplan become a true successor to Cities: Skylines, much like Skylines became to SimCity? While the game’s early footage looks gorgeous, there’s still a lot we haven’t seen in terms of gameplay. Furthermore, the game has no firm release date yet, but current estimates suggest it will arrive sometime in 2027.