Unlimited creativity and freedom are the driving force behind Cities: VR and other games like it.
During the UploadVR Showcase 2021, Swedish VR studio Fast Travel Games announced Cities: VR, a VR spin-off of the popular city-building game Cities: Skylines. As the mayor of a bustling city, it’s your job to design neighborhoods, construct buildings, establish utility lines, and even direct the flow of traffic.
You’ll also be in charge of your city’s economic plan, emergency services, entertainment, and other important amenities that’ll help your city flourish into a popular destination to visit or even call home.
Cities: VR can be experienced sitting or standing. You can view the action from a god-like perspective or zoom in to give yourself a street-level view. Building your city is a fairly straightforward process. Just pull up the item you want from the menu using your Touch controller and pull the trigger to drag-and-drop it anywhere you’d like on the map.
“You get to see your skyline rise from an expansive birds-eye view and be a part of your creation by watching it come alive on the streets,” said Fast Travel Games Creative Director, Erik Odeldahl in a video posted on YouTube.
Cities: VR is a spin-off of Cities: Skylines from developer Paradox Interactive and just the latest in a new wave of city-building VR experiences. Little Cities, Spacefolk City, Townsman VR, Tiny Town VR, and Super Island God VR all borrow from this model where each decision you make will either grow your city or cause it to fail. The more intricate your city becomes, the more important choices you’ll have to make to ensure your visitors and citizens love being there.
The appeal of these types of games revolves heavily around having unlimited freedom and creativity to build the city of your dreams and then protect said creation from various disasters, both natural and manmade. In most cases, there’s no storyline to follow or end of level boss to beat.
At the time of this writing, Tiny Town VR has 380 reviews, 92% of which are largely positive. Sifting through the reviews, you’ll notice a recurring theme with gamers mentioning how much they just enjoyed using their imagination.
One gamer posted their enjoyment of playing city-building VR games on Reddit saying, “Enjoying the quirkiness of the city and its occupants. Especially like being able to stack buildings in order to build up/down for the sheer creativity of it. Look forward to seeing/playing more VR Sim building games.”
In an official statement from Odeldahl, he says “The city-building genre has huge potential in the VR market and we couldn’t wait to work on this IP. We’ve spent a ton of time, research, and energy to translate Cities: Skylines to VR in a way that is both approachable for new players and a new challenge for Cities veterans. We can’t wait to see what players build!”
Cities: VR and Little Cities will launch early next year for the Quest 2, and with gamers leaving positive reviews of city-building games currently available, there’s a good chance we will see more of these games to follow.
To keep up on the latest information on Cities: VR you can follow them on Twitter, Facebook, and on Instagram. Or head on over to the Fast Travel Games website by clicking here.
Feature Image Credit: Fast Travel Games
