The Best SimCity Successor You've Probably Never Played

Highrise City is, at first glance, a healthy replacement for Cities: Skylines. You’re creating vast urban spaces filled with people and life, sprawling districts and towering skyscrapers. But, the more I played, the more I saw other similarities. It’s a bit more arcadey than Skylines and lands somewhere closer to SimCity. It has a big focus on industry, resource chains and filling citizen needs, just like Anno. To top it off, there’s logistics problems, and the goal of creating something self sustaining akin to Worker & Resources. But a lot less scary. 

It creates an intersection that feels simple enough to pick up and play while boasting plenty of moving parts and depth. There’s always something to do. You’re constantly expanding and advancing, and before you know it, hours have passed. As I said, I missed the boat when it was released last year, but it's coming back around with a new DLC so I figured I’d give it a try. 

Nailing Down the Basics

Let’s look at the top layer before we dive too deep into any individual system. What’s the core gameplay loop? Well, you are building a city, obviously. But here, everything doesn’t come back to money being the be all and end all. Yes it’s important, but it’s resource driven first and foremost. 

You’ll need building materials to develop your city: wood, insulation, bricks, and this gets more elaborate later. Advancement is tied firmly to industry. You’ll need to set up logistical solutions to keep the whole thing ticking but this is nearly all automated. Your industry has running costs, and requires workers. So you’ll need residential areas. To expand further, you’ll require more material, more industry, and then, more homes to fuel your personal industrial revolution. And this core loop of expansion, and growing to meet the needs of your citizens is what keeps the game ticking. As you develop, you’ll unlock more advanced citizen types with greater needs and expectations, and more money to tax.

You can fill in any blanks by trading with the outside world but the aim is to be as self sufficient as possible. Offload excess resources to cargo ships, and get a steady income flowing. Buy more land. Build more industry. Expand your city centre. Agriculture, mines, factories, offices, homes; they’re all tied together and you’ll need to dabble in all of them to progress. 

Let’s break that all down a bit more and look at the individual areas so you know what to expect. And if you’re here checking out this game, chances are you want to build a sprawling, massive city of steel and glass. So let’s start with your city centre and your citizens. 

Your Residential Districts

As your city grows, you’ll hit milestones, and each will unlock a slew of new buildings. While your industrial areas are the fuel that feeds the machine, you won’t advance without developing residential districts. This all starts quite basic. You’ll paint out an area, and folks will move in and build a home. These lots are the bottom rung, and don’t have many demands. They want food. They want basic amenities. They want a job. You want them to have a job. You aren’t running this place for freeloaders after all. 

Citizens want to earn their keep, but they don’t want to be lumped next to the factories they’re working at. They also don’t want to spend multiple hours of their day commuting — as a Londoner, I totally get it. So you’ll have to work on balancing them being close enough to their workplace, without being enveloped in factory smog. You can set up buslines and, with the DLC, a metro loop to give easy and cost effective solutions. Or alternatively, you can tell them to suck it up and build slums next to factories, which was my approach. Can’t say I’m proud of myself, but public transport systems are expensive, okay?

As you fill their needs, providing police stations, fire services, healthcare and giving them a variety of foods and basic luxuries, they’ll grow to like their life. More people will want to move in. You can start to expand, and unlock higher tiers of residents. These areas are more costly to make, but each building houses more residents, and each resident pays more tax. They’ll have more needs, but you’ll have the tools to meet them. Once you get to grips with it all, the acceleration can be very fast, meaning in no time at all you’ll see high rise buildings springing out of the ground and setting the silhouette of your budding city. 

But with each new tier of citizens, there comes challenges. Yes, they’ll bring in more money, but their expectations will be higher. They’ll want more elaborate goods that require multiple factories and several resources. Advanced production chains that feed into multiple buildings, all working on different things. This should all be familiar to any Anno players out there. 

The Industrial Revolution 

Going into the game, I was expecting a Cities: Skylines experience with more attention on industry, but that view quickly shifted. The game is really geared towards resources and production chains, which I’m very okay with. 

All around the map are deposits for you to exploit at some point. Some are quite simple, like clay which gets turned into bricks. Some are a bit more extravagant and late game. These will essentially dictate your placement. You don’t want to go building your financial district over a hefty coal deposit after all. 

These raw materials get taken out of the ground, and passed on the next step in the chain. Then, they get passed on again, and again, until the final product is created. Some of these chains are things you use directly. Planks, iron ingots, glass and ferroconcrete. All important for building homes and infrastructure. 

Others are there to satisfy citizen needs and fuel your economy. At the start, it’s fruit, veg, fish, with no production chains involved. Your loftier residents prefer a bit more luxury however: electric bikes, designer suits, fine wine. The kind of thing that requires several businesses working in unison. There is a logistic element, but it’s not too complex. Depots will collect from factories and that’ll go straight into storage. No need to stock shops or anything like that. So it’s a factor, but not one that’ll give you a migraine. 

Agriculture is also important, and there’s all sorts of produce you'll grow for one thing or another. I like the farm placement in this. You enclose an area in roads, plonk down a farmhouse and the fields will fill in the space. Great for achieving that patchwork look. 

As your population grows, you’ll need to scale up to meet demand, meaning every little step requires expansion elsewhere. More factories, more farms, more space and more planning. In some cases, certain industries require office space to function, like the white collar jobs that keep the operation ticking. These provide extra jobs, and it’s a good idea to build these in excess so your elite citizens have a cushy job, rather than being sent down the mines. 

Advancement & Progression

As mentioned, you get more advanced buildings through hitting milestones. But the game has a few other systems in play to keep you feeling like you’re constantly making steps forward. The first is quite simple: research. You earn research points by hitting minor goals, and you can use these to get small passive bonuses. Maybe you increase the output of your farms, get more slots for trading, or simply make buildings cheaper. It’s nice, offering little specialisations that can help you hone in on your style of play. The other method is a bit more out there: tasks.

Every now and then, you’ll get a little request. Build X building. Donate Y resources. Completing this won’t unlock a new building, but it’ll upgrade an existing one, making it more efficient. This gives vertical progression. Rather than building ever more of a factory to keep up with demand, you can upgrade your existing ones.

As far as I could tell, these are random. You might suddenly find yourself with a bunch of upgrades to different farms, allowing you to lean further into those industries and start pumping out things for export. I won’t lie, this was quite arcadey but I liked it. It added something unexpected, and while they were a nice boost, you can’t rely on them. It’s just a pleasant surprise you’ll get every now and then. 

Alternatively, the game might give you a more unorthodox mission. Deliver these materials. No, I don’t mean hand them over from your storage. Literally deliver them. I’ll be honest, this was pretty janky and the physics was nuts, but equally, it was some slapstick fun. Reminds me of the silliness of SimCity 4. As I got further, I started to skip these as they take a bit of time, but they’re fun to do here and there. It’s also nice to see how your city is shaping up right on the ground.

Robust Construction

There’s a lot about Highrise City I like. There’s many moving parts, but it's simple enough to get a handle on. It’s all very intuitive, and systems were drip fed little by little. With my first city, I got carried away trying to rush through milestones and the result was a misplanned and confusing hellscape. Second time around, I dug into my Anno experience, making myself stable before each jump. The result was much less chaotic, and much more manageable.

There’s a constant feeling of advancement. You’re always unlocking something and progressing, and that is what made it such a time sink. There’s always something to do, a new area to carve out for agriculture, or a way to increase your output. There is an economy in play but it isn’t that punishing. Any bad situation I got into could be salvaged. 

I like the building system, for the most part. Farms filling gaps between roads and painting areas gives an organic feel. Naturally you’ll place districts, squeeze your bigger buildings together, and the end result is something that feels like a bustling city without much effort. The game chooses the best fit for the shape so the space is always used, creating a dense, diverse silhouette. It’s easy on the eyes too. It’s vibrant and colourful and populated. 

I played with the DLC which introduces tourism, and this adds a decent amount of content. More production chains, new systems, new mechanics. For the price you put down (and this goes for the base game too) you get a lot of bang for your buck. It's a very dense game. It’s even more impressive when you consider this is the work of a tiny team, and for a lot of the game’s development it was a solo project by one of the developers. 

And while that’s obviously a great achievement, it’s also a double edged sword. The developers have gone very wide with content and included so many things, but the downside to that is a lot of rough edges. There’s a general feeling of jankiness. Road placement is okay for the most part, but sometimes it seems to break its own rules. The camera sometimes judders around, making it difficult to navigate. As my city grew, I’d have to knock down settings to keep it running smoothly, and after a few hours of playing I’d have to restart the game as things would start to slow down. 

Now these are all things I worked around, but they did grind me down here and there. The devs are adding a lot of content to an already rich game, but I really do hope they step back a bit and just tighten up that base experience. 

A City With a Dream

The game has promise. It feels familiar and easy to play, while having enough going on that I felt challenged. It was arcadey at times, but it didn’t feel dumbed down, and there are so many systems to really sink your teeth into. To me, it fills in this midpoint between different titles, feeling like Cities Skylines, SimCity, Anno and Workers & Resources rolled into one. But the output feels very individual. 

There’s the underlying jankiness, and things that will frustrate you. Ultimately, it’ll come down to how much patience you have with that sort of thing. I found the gameplay loop to be engaging. The feeling of advancement, satisfying. And the general vibe of the game is welcoming. Bundle all that together, and you have a game that really sucks you in and tears through your time. You’ll fall into that zen state of city planning. A mindset I know many city builder players love. And the only thing that brings you crashing out of that, is the aforementioned bugs and performance issues.

To be frank, I’m surprised this hasn’t had more buzz around it. Yes it’s got issues, but it’s a lot of fun. If you’re on the fence or hesitant about some of the issues mentioned, go check out the demo on Steam. It’s got flaws, it’s got issues, it’s got problems. But chip away at it and you’ll find a really compelling city builder both dense and engaging.