One of the biggest challenges of modern city-building games is the realistic simulation of road traffic. A new game on Steam aims to tackle this challenge – and without forcing your CPU to its knees.
What game is being talked about? The game in question is Metropolis 1998. The city-building game is being developed by Yesbox Studios and is set to release in the fourth quarter of 2025. However, there is already a demo available for download on Steam.
Visually, the game’s retro pixel look strongly resembles old city-building games like SimCity. However, Metropolis 1998 already proves in its first trailers a significantly higher level of detail than previous city-building games of this caliber.
The following trailer shows what this level of detail can look like:
As the mayor, you see everything in Metropolis 1998
What makes Metropolis 1998 special? Unlike in SimCity, for example, buildings are not just facades: You can also take a look inside at any time and watch the residents of your city hustle and bustle. Like in The Sims, you can even build buildings from scratch and customize their interiors if you wish.
Although you can get very close to the lives of your inhabitants if you want, the game remains at its core a city-building simulation. As usual, you will lay roads, determine where things should be built, and worry about the needs of your growing city.
The inhabitants of your city want to work, sleep, relax, eat, and more – the developers promise a complex simulation here, as well as for road traffic.
The simulation in Metropolis 1998 is said to run smoothly even with over 100,000 inhabitants and vehicles without significant performance loss in the game. There should be no technical disaster like in Cities: Skylines 2.
That a complex simulation of the population in a city-building game is no easy task has been shown by Cities: Skylines 2. The SimCity killer has been plagued by many problems since its launch, some of which make it nearly unplayable in the long run: In Cities: Skyline 2 on Steam, there are so many retirees that hardly anyone is working anymore.
