One of the greatest challenges of modern urban planning games is the realistic simulation of road traffic. A new game on Steam wants to tackle this challenge – and without killing your CPU.
What game is we talking about? What is meant is Metropolis 1998. The urban planning game is developed by Yesbox Studios and is scheduled to appear in the 4th quarter of 2025. However, there is a demo on Steam that you can already download.
Visually, the game with its retro pixel look is strongly reminiscent of old urban planning games like Simcity. In 1998, however, Metropolis already proves a significantly higher level of detail in the first trailers than previous urban planning games of this caliber.
The following trailer shows how this degree of detail can look:
Metropolis 1998: New urban planning game on Steam shows high level of detail in the trailer
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As a mayor you can see everything in Metropolis in 1998
What does Metropolis particularly do in 1998? Unlike, for example in Simcity, buildings are not only facade: you can also take a look into it and watch the residents of your city scurry. As in the Sims, if you want, you can even build buildings on your own and adjust their interior.
Although you can use the life of your residents to be very close to request, the game in the heart remains an urban development simulation. Classically, you also move streets, determined where something should be built and take care of the needs of your growing city.
The residents of your city want to work, sleep, relax, eat something and even more – the developers promise a complex simulation here, as well as in road traffic.
The simulation in Metropolis in 1998 is also said to be in over 100,000 inhabitants and vehicles without major losses in the performance of the game. A technical catastrophe like in Cities: So Skylines 2 should not exist here.
Cities: Skylines 2 has shown that a complex simulation of the population in an urban planning game is not an easy undertaking. The SimCity-Killer has been plagued by many problems since launch, some do it even for a long time: In Cities: Skyline 2 on Steam, there are so many pensioners that hardly any who works