Build the city of your dreams, and your graphics card's nightmares, in hyper-shiny mayoral sim City Masterplan

Prettybuilder

Newly formed dev outfit 1:1 Studio have announced their first game, a glossy citybuilder that, appropriately, promises "true 1:1 scale" construction across enormous 24x24km maps. City Masterplan doesn’t have a release date, but it does have a Steam page that’s full of feelgood marketing bumf like "Say goodbye to rigid grid constraints" and sensual whispers of "realistic traffic simulation."

Less titillating than all this talk of logistic networks and architectural asset libraries are the currently listed system requirements, of which key minimum specs are "Pending" while the recommended specs list luxury gear like the RTX 3090, Radeon RX 6900 XT, and Ryzen 7 58000X3D. That’s... bold, given the sluggish performance of Cities: Skylines 2 went down about as well as a sewage works-adjacent apartment block with inadequate road access.

City Masterplan, if it could build itself a mouth, would probably reply that it needs all that PC power for its plus-size map limit and relatively intricate street-level detailing. The mayoral simming also extends to managing "realistic supply chains" to "ensure resources can smoothly support the massive appetite of your city," so citizens will need more than parks, schools, jobs, and Unreal Engine 5 lighting tech to keep sweet with your citybuilding regime.

With the caveat that I can't claim to be a particularly accomplished player of these kinds of games – I will not be taking questions on how my attempt at a Skylines 2 town had worse electricity access than most of rural Australia – I’m struggling to see how City Masterplan has a standout gimmick in the same way that, say, Nova Roma does with its vengeful god attacks. Even I’m sure I’ve seen freely bendable roads in other CMS games, and while the prospect of consistent, 1:1 building sizes should please anyone who rolls their eyes when their new school has the same footprint as a nuclear power plant, it’s still a hard sell when the asking price is an RTX 3090. It’s evidently still a ways off launching, mind, so those recommended specs could lower in time.