This 'highly realistic' city-builder could be the first real competition Cities: Skylines has seen in over a decade

Steam is flooded with all manner of weird and wonderful city-builders these days. Yet few of these newer games have laid their foundations in the true heartland of the genre. If you want to build a vast, modern cityscape with intensely simulated traffic and three types of zoning, you're pretty much stuck with Cities: Skylines or its troubled sequel.

Now though, Paradox Interactive might have some competition as the city-builder's de-facto mayor. City Masterplan is a newly announced metropolis sim that files its zoning permit request squarely in Skylines' home turf.

Developed by 1:1 Studio, City Masterplan is a "highly realistic" city-builder aims to strike "the perfect balance between 'ultimate realism' and 'smooth control'" according to its Steam page. It offers environmental canvases of 24x24km upon which to construct your cityscape, which can range from a traditional American metropolis to a "Chinese-style" city.

More specifically, City Masterplan promises freeform road building tools that are decoupled from typical grid-based construction and "true-to-scale" iconic buildings. Cities also develop from an extensive architectural library and "advanced" procedural content generation.

The trailer shows a game similar in visual style to Cities: Skylines 2, with a strong emphasis on realistic skies, lighting, weather conditions and so forth. Hopefully it can avoid the performance problems that dogged Skylines 2 on launch, though I don't know whether the fact it's built in Unreal rather than Unity makes this more or less likely, given how many Unreal Engine 5 games have struggled to perform on PC.

That said, there's undoubtedly room for a game like City Masterplan. The original Skylines is now twelve years old, and Skylines 2 has, so far at least, not been the successor that fans hoped for. The game's recent reviews seem to have taken a more positive turn since Iceflake Studios took over development duties from Colossal Order, but the general consensus of the game remains decidedly mixed.

Could City Masterplan do to Skylines what Skylines did to SimCity? The early footage certainly looks promising, but as we discovered with Skylines 2, the proof is in the playing. There's no release date for City Masterplan yet, but I would be surprised if we saw it much before 2027.