City-building games and other similar types of games that focus on building and creation are often focused on campaign and scenario modes in which players have specific targets to meet. However, some of these games also include other ways to play than the regular mode.
Sandbox modes allow players to freely explore the world of the game and discard limitations. Sometimes sandbox modes feel out of place in this type of game, but others have nailed the idea and allow players the open-world sort of freedom that can be extremely difficult to get just right.
5 SimCity 4
The SimCity series is one of the better-known city-building franchises, and SimCity 4 was praised for a number of reasons, including being the first game in the franchise to render environments in 3D and for adding a lot of features to the previous installments in the SimCity franchise. But there was a major point that led fans to have some complaints about this entry as well.
The major issue with SimCity 4 among fans was the sheer level of difficulty involved in attempting to manage the entire city and all the finances associated with it. The number of features required to find success in a newly built city was expansive, making the game by far the most difficult in the franchise. This made the excellent sandbox mode all the more popular since players wanted a break that allowed them to build beautifully structured cities without quite so many limitations.
4 Settlers 2
A city-building game with real-time strategy elements, Settlers 2 contains both a single-player campaign that is story-driven and a free-playing mode that allows players the opportunity to have unique experiences in-game without having the restrictions of following the campaign or its objectives.
Settlers 2 had an excellent map editor mode that allowed players to build their own areas, and then use the free-play mode to build cities and play with their versions of maps from throughout the game. All of this helped Settlers 2 stay popular enough to be remastered multiple times since the original release of the game in 1996.
3 Castle Story
A fascinating sandbox city-building game that was originally crowd-funded through Kickstarter in 2012 and stayed in early access for four years before a full release in 2017, Castle Story is a unique entry in the genre. Set on a series of huge floating islands, players take control of small workers called Bricktrons who can build mighty castles one brick at a time, providing a unique experience where players will be able to put together massive bases and gather enough resources and defenses to survive enemy and enemy player attacks.
Castle Story wanted to create a fun city/castle-builder that was completely sandboxed in style, and it succeeded in making something hugely fun to play and replay. Castle Story was a massive success on Kickstarter due to the endorsement given online by Minecraft creator Notch, hyping the campaign up enough to meet the goal within five days of the campaign beginning.
2 Caesar 4
If players are looking for a whole franchise of various city-building games, then the long-running series published by Sierra Entertainment is a great place to look. With twelve games in the franchise of historical city-builders so far, there are a wide variety of locations to explore and great features within them. Probably the best of the lot as far as a sandbox mode goes is Caesar 4, the last (to date) in the franchise to take on the Ancient Rome setting.
Caesar 4 was the result of nearly a decade of previous work on the style of the Caesar franchise after the release of the third game. The in-depth management of an Ancient Roman city was well planned and executed in this entry of the franchise, the first to include a variable 3D view over the previous isometric view used in the earlier entries. The sandbox mode produced a huge number of custom, user-made scenarios, which helped given the fact that Caesar 4 received some criticism for the repetitive gameplay formula.
1 Banished
Banished is another game that has a heavy focus on economic and environmental development, trying to build a city in an isolated area. Released in 2014, Banished comes with a great sandbox mode in addition to having complex explorations of real-world economic theories. This makes the game sound hugely complicated, but Banished is an ideal strategic city-building game about survival that has a great quality of difficulty.
Players get to control the entire town of “outcasts” as they attempt to grow the town and manage the citizens as simply another resource. Players simply have to manage the citizens and order them into completing various tasks so that more resources can be gained for enlarging the city so that more citizens can be housed across it. If players want the town to continue prospering, then they must keep the citizens happy and healthy, meaning there has to be a careful balance found between resource usage and hoarding. The sandbox mode provides unique ways to create new challenges and is a fantastic example of how city-building games can use the sandbox mode idea to add something great to the mix.