7 City Builders With Ridiculous Creative Freedom

Creative freedom is obviously a huge part of why city builders are so easy to sink time into. Give me an empty stretch of land and enough tools to start messing around with it, and there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to lose track of time before I’ve even figured out what the city is supposed to look like. That’s kind of the appeal, though. The best city builders give players a general idea of what they’re trying to accomplish, but they don’t necessarily tell them exactly how they’re supposed to get there.

Of course, some city-building simulators are much better about that than others. There are some where I eventually start feeling like I’m solving the same basic layout problem over and over again, only on a different map. Then there are games where I can spend half an hour changing one little section simply because I suddenly decided I hated the way it looked. Those are the games I’m interested in here, because each one gives players enough room to experiment that the city they finish with can feel completely different from the one someone else builds.

For added context, the games below were selected for the amount and variety of creative freedom they give players, whether that comes through building tools, terraforming, infrastructure, organic development, or mod support. They are presented in no particular order.

Urbek City Builder

Your Neighborhoods Become a Reflection of How You Build Them

• Neighborhoods evolve based on nearby conditions.
• Uses resources instead of money.

Urbek City Builder is probably one of the more unusual games here because it doesn’t approach creative freedom by simply removing every rule and letting players do whatever they want. Instead, it gives them a bunch of conditions to work with and then lets the city naturally respond to what they’ve built. There’s no traditional money system, which already makes it feel a little different, and progression is much more about figuring out what certain areas need before they can become something else.

I actually like that because it means I’m not simply choosing a neighborhood from a menu and placing it wherever they feel like it. If I want a certain type of district, I have to create the right environment for it first. To me, that makes the city feel like something that developed over time rather than something that was completely planned before I put down my first building, and I’m all about the authenticity that comes with that. There’s still plenty of structure underneath everything, but in the end, Urbek gives players enough room inside that structure to end up with cities that can feel surprisingly unique at the end of the day.

Ostriv

Forget the Grid and Build Something That Actually Looks Organic

• Gridless building allows organic town layouts.
• Buildings can be freely rotated.

I’ve played enough city builders to know that grids are convenient, and I can even find myself getting frustrated when certain games don’t include one. However, I’ll admit that they also have a nasty habit of making everything look a little too perfect after a while. That’s not necessarily a problem in every game, but it would feel especially strange in something like Ostriv, where the whole idea is to build an 18th-century town that looks like it actually belongs in that period.

Thankfully, Ostriv doesn’t force players to build around a traditional grid. Buildings can be rotated freely, which immediately makes it easier to create towns that don’t have that uptight and rigid box design that grids generally produce. The dirt roads also develop organically, and that’s one of those little things that ends up making a much bigger difference than it probably sounds like. Once the town starts growing around all those uneven angles, it can genuinely look like a place that has been there for years instead of something a player who has never built a city in real life before managed to lay out in half an hour.

Anno 1800

Creative Mode Lets Players Stop Worrying About the Economy

• Creative Mode removes major building restrictions.
• Stamps let players reuse custom layouts.

Anno 1800 can get overwhelming pretty quickly if players let it, but to this day, it’s one of my all-time favorite city builders for the freedom it offers. One minute everything seems fine, and the next some part of the city apparently needs something nobody was worried about ten minutes earlier. That’s part of what makes the game so good when you’re in the mood for the management side of it, but sometimes I just want to build without constantly checking whether I’ve accidentally created a new problem somewhere else.

However, that’s where Anno 1800‘s Creative Mode comes in. In this mode, the usual pressure that comes with money and construction is completely removed, which means players can spend more time worrying about what they actually want the city to look like than all the natural problems that would normally come with managing it. Workforce requirements are taken out of the equation too. The Stamps system is another nice touch because it lets players save layouts they’ve already created and use them again later. If you’ve ever spent way too much time getting one neighborhood exactly right, only to realize you’ll have to rebuild the whole thing in another save, you’ll probably understand why that’s such a nice feature to have.

Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic

The Freedom Comes From Figuring Out How Everything Works

• Deep control over infrastructure and logistics.
• Players design complex transport networks.

Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is a completely different kind of city builder from something like Anno 1800, because most of its creative freedom comes from how much control players have over what is actually happening behind the scenes. This is a game where moving something from one side of the map to the other can become its own project if you let it, and I mean that in the best possible way.

And there usually isn’t one solution to a problem either. For example, players might decide a railway makes sense in one part of the republic, while another area is perfectly fine relying on trucks. Once the city gets bigger, those smaller decisions start feeding into one another until the infrastructure underneath everything becomes almost as important as the buildings sitting on top of it. Realistic Mode can make that even more intense because construction itself has to be properly supported instead of simply happening instantly. There’s definitely a learning curve, but the payoff is being able to look at the finished republic and know pretty much every part of it works the way it does because of a decision that you made along the way.

Timberborn

The Map Doesn’t Have to Stay the Way You Found It

• Terraforming lets players reshape the map.
• Vertical building opens up stacked settlements.

Most city builders give players a map and expect them to figure out the best way to use it. Timberborn, on the other hand, eventually gets to the point where I stop looking at the map as something permanent altogether. Water is obviously a massive deal when you’re trying to keep a colony of beavers alive, so players spend a lot of time thinking about where it is and where it isn’t. The nice part is that they aren’t stuck accepting those conditions forever.

As the settlement develops, players can start taking much more control over where water goes and how useful certain parts of the land actually are. The fact that buildings can be stacked changes things too, because suddenly running out of room on the ground doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily run out of room at all. That’s where Timberborn gets especially fun for me. A location that looked awkward at the beginning can eventually become the centerpiece of the entire settlement once you’ve had enough time to mess with it. The game gives players problems to solve, but it leaves enough room for the solution to look completely different from one save to the next.

Foundation

The Towns Look Better When Everything Isn’t Perfect

• Gridless construction encourages natural layouts.
• Modular buildings can be customized piece by piece.

I absolutely love medieval city builders, but there has always been something about a perfectly straight medieval road that immediately looks wrong to me, and Foundation clearly understands that. Since the game is built around gridless construction, players can stray from building perfectly square neighborhoods. Instead, settlements can grow in a way that feels much more natural, which fits the setting considerably better, in my opinion.

I also really like how much of the town can develop without the player manually placing every single thing. You can guide where certain types of development should happen and then let the settlement fill in around those decisions. At the same time, the modular building system gives players more control when they actually want it, since some larger structures can be built out of separate pieces instead of being placed as one finished design. The result is a game where the little imperfections end up being some of the best parts. A road that bends strangely or a building sitting at an odd angle can make the whole town feel more authentic.

Cities: Skylines

• Extensive control over roads and city planning.
• Mods dramatically expand building freedom.

There was really no way I was going to talk about creative freedom in city builders without bringing up the original Cities: Skylines. Even before mods enter the picture, the game gives players plenty of ways to make a city their own. Roads can completely change how an area develops, and districts give players another way to shape different parts of the city around whatever they have in mind.

But the Steam Workshop is where things start getting ridiculous. The original game has had years of community support behind it, and that means players can take what was already a pretty flexible city builder and push it much further than the base game ever could on its own. Some people use that freedom to recreate real cities as closely as possible. Others apparently decide one highway interchange is going to become the most important thing in their life for the next three hours. That’s kind of what I love about Cities: Skylines, though. It gives players a framework, but it doesn’t really care what they decide to obsess over once they start building.