Metropolis 1998 feels like the return of classic SimCity, and you can try it now

I maintain that city builders, as a genre, are some of the best-looking games on PC. Manor Lords leaps off the screen. Cities Skylines 2 (for its various shortcomings) provides some fantastic vistas. When you look at a completed map in SimCity 3000, it’s like a circuitboard, intricate and elegant at the same time. It’s the symmetry and the density. Rollercoaster Tycoon has it, too, with all those colorful sprites pushed together - all that microscopic life. Created by a single developer, under the label Yesbox Studios, Metropolis 1998 is one of the most beautiful city-building games on Steam. We’re still waiting on a full release, but you can try its newly expanded playtest version for free right now.

MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best city building games, Best old games, Best strategy games