I like the pressure of strategy and city-building games. Going back as far as the original SimCity, the gratification, partly, comes from solving difficult problems – everyone is banging on your door demanding houses, hospitals, and better schools, but if you work hard enough, you can create an effective utopia. On the contrary, sometimes I just want to relax. The simulations in Manor Lords and Cities Skylines 2 can become so complex I feel like an actual real mayor. So how about an alternative, boasting unique construction mechanics, City Tales is a calmer, kinder take on the medieval builder genre, and you can try it right now.
Developed by Irregular Shapes, City Tales: Medieval Era casts you as the land baron of a burgeoning Middle-Ages township. Your people need food and amenities – there are more than 50 different resources to farm, and 60 building types. What’s fundamentally different, however, is how you actually plan and construct your dream fiefdom. In most city-building games, everything is done by tiles. You paint residential, commercial, and industrial zones across a number of flat squares, and fill in the blank land grid by grid. In City Tales, it’s all free hand. You can create zones and areas for building in whatever shape or style you want.
Using similarly elegant building tools, you can tell your boroughs to share resources with one another, creating small, pseudo supply chains with a single brush stroke. Maps are huge and vibrant. Your citizens will build roads completely of their own volition, eliminating some of the municipal micromanagement that makes other strategy games occasionally feel fussy.
Essentially, the idea with City Tales is that you can swiftly and intuitively build whatever you like. During our exclusive preview, in just an hour or so of playing, we were able to convert a totally empty map into a teeming, upcoming medieval metropolis.
If you want to try it for yourself, the City Tales demo is available now, and will stay on Steam until Monday March 3. Just head here.
Otherwise, you might want to try some of the other best medieval games, or maybe the best building games on PC.
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