It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you>, but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade.
A lot of genres have had a resurgence over the past five years, but none more successfully than management games. There are now more ways to direct trains, lay conveyor belts, coral visitors and profit, profit, profit than you could play in a lifetime. The question is: which of these famous timesinks is worth your time, and which of the whipsmart new hires can compete against the hagard, seen-it-all old dogs?
That’s what this list is for. These are 20 best management games you can play right now on PC, in no particular order, and updated for 2019.
Laid-back city-builder Cities: Skylines today enters the period of supreme slack with the addition of universities in its latest expansion. ‘Campus’ is its name, and building campuses is its game. You too can establish fine educational establishments for students to doss about, build sports arenas for them to shout in, and shape your city’s policies to enable their idleness. It’s possible you may find some benefits to educating and occupying young people, I suppose. Their vomiting in the streets might sate seagulls who’d otherwise be mugging grannies for chips, for example.
It s time to pack your Cities: Skylines inhabitants off to uni, where they will surely get up to nothing but sombre study. There will be no mischief, though there may be some handegg, which is essentially the same thing. The update will include five sports, in fact, along with other faculties, new policies, and new maps. You can get a glimpse of some of it in the trailer below.
OK, look, it isn’t a Red Dead Redemption 2 edition, because Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t out for PC yet. But if I keep typing Red Dead Redemption 2 into this Google is going to be SO TRICKED and the clicks will pour in and Graham will give me a promotion!
Until such time as we can seize the means of production and abolish capitalism, the smoggy skies introduced in Cities: Skylines‘s latest expansion – Industries – are just a fact of life. At least you can simulate it working in your favour, paying directly into your pocket. Released today, Colossal Order’s new expansion lets you define your city’s purpose in the world by creating goods and exporting them to neighbouring regions. There’s a lot of new systems, five new resource-rich maps to plunder and a bundle of new buildings to construct. Greedily ogle the release trailer below.
My body betrayed me last month, trapping me in my bed when it wasn t sending me rushing to my poor, overworked loo. I couldn t sleep, I couldn t work and so I turned to management games to take my mind off the virus squatting inside me. Juggling budgets, disasters and production chains might not sound particularly relaxing, but there s also a swathe of low-pressure sims that serve as a brilliant panacea for stress.
In the week that United Nations scientists declared we need to immediately make massive changes to society to avoid catastrophic climate change, Paradox have announced a new Cities: Skylines expansion focused on the smoke and thunder of industry. I suppose that’s a dose of grim reality to counterbalance the utopian optimism of the game’s earlier Green Cities expansion. And, Paradox say, Industries will be good for folks who want more city-management decisions in the largely easy-going and pleasant city-builder.
We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)
Base-building is de rigueur these days, what with all those survival games, Minecraft, Fallout 4 and now Fortnite, but before all that we had tiny top-down or isometric worlds in which we diligently built cities and dungeons and theme parks and rail networks. The central appeal of management games was and is that they give us an idealised sense of what it is like to create a game – to weave new worlds upon our screens, guided only by our imaginations, ingenuity and the limitations of the in-game taxation system. Magic, right there: the birth of your own universe.
For a while there, it looked as though the management flame was fading, choked by the low-grade tycoon games that littered supermarkets’ dusty games shelves. But this is The New Age Of PC Games, which means every near-abandoned idea of yesteryear has been revisited in thoughtful and ambitious new ways. Town sims and theme sims are now healthier and more vibrant than they’ve ever been, expanding. This round-up comprises the very best of the past and the very best of today: the twenty management games which are, by 2018 standards, most guaranteed to to consume your every waking thought.
These aren’t in any particular order, by-the-by: they are, simply, the 20 best management games. (more…)