What’s not to love when it comes to a city builder? It’s like an RTS without having to kill anyone, unless you’re titanically bad at sewerage management. Luckily, that last issue won’t rear its ugly head in today’s topic as Town to City is a much cozier experience, mostly focused on your ability to control every visual detail of your settlement as it sprawls out from humble beginnings.
What Is Town to City?
Town to City is a city-builder from Netherlandish developer Galaxy Grove, creators of Station to Station, a railway management game with a very similar voxel-based art style. In this outing, you’re charged with taking a tiny settlement of a single dwelling all the way up to a thriving urban district, hence the whole ‘town to city’ thing. As you go, you spend your time keeping your citizens happy and their various needs fulfilled while continuing to unlock more and more that you can build in your city.
The appeal here comes from both the beautiful world that these voxels have been used to construct and the insane level of detail that you can get to as you play. While it’s pretty normal to have a game that tasks you with managing the various needs of your citizens, it’s pretty rare for you to be able to go down to a super minute level and apply various custom decorations directly to specific buildings and areas as you go. Not only does this game give you more than enough to pick away at, but it also means that each and every town you produce can look insanely different depending on how you decide you want to decorate it.
Town-Builders Ho!
As with any city builder, in Town to City, you start with basically nothing. You have to plop down your first house and street, and as time goes by, more and more people wish to move to your town. It’s a pretty familiar system, really. The entire settlement is defined by the paths. Before you can place most buildings, you need to have a road for it to go against, but the building is a bit more direct than something like Cities: Skylines, where you really only control zoning and special buildings.
Here, once you’ve created enough roads, you need to put down everything that is ever built in your town. Every tree, every bench, every store, and every home is something that you, personally, will have to place. It’s part of the reason why the towns can end up feeling so unique. Sure, in other games, you have a different layout from everyone else, but in Town to City, everything from the layout of the local park to the specific flowers growing outside of your town hall are completely down to the player, and that’s just an insane level of detail to give an obsessive player like me.
Where Am I? What Time Is It?
Town to City has a really laid-back tone. While you certainly are required to get things right or risk upsetting your citizens, it never feels like there’s a lot of pressure to perform really well. If you do poorly, there’s plenty of time for you to fix your mistakes. If you accidentally build yourself into a corner and have no room for more roads or houses, you can just bulldoze a house and then rebuild it again, and it’ll mostly affect your town’s mood for a brief period.
Rather than a high-pressure, disaster-inducing style of gameplay, you’re left with a game that basically has you sinking hour upon hour into tinkering with your own private miniature town, complete with real tiny people moving around and living their lives. The fact that you can zoom right into them and add little decorative touches to their homes is the icing on the cake. It’s easily possible to get absorbed into your town and let entire days pass by in the real world without much notice.
A Little Town All My Own
The main goal in Town to City is exactly what you’d expect: keep watching your town grow. As you go, you hit milestones of population that see you gain a new title, such as Hamlet or Small Town, and unlock a bunch of new stuff to research, from decorations to production buildings. Then, you have more stuff to keep adding to your town. It’s well-paced, drip-feeding you enough stuff at a high enough rate that you’ll always have something to work towards and something to build. After sinking enough time into it, you’ll end up with a sprawling mess of rustic houses and shops that spans miles beyond the tiny shack that you started with, which is immensely satisfying.
That said, it’s not all sunshine and roses. While the open-ended nature of the design system does give you a lot of freedom, it can also lead to opportunities to cheat the system or to come up with complete crap because you just want to fulfil the requirements of the game rather than the actual spirit of it. In short, you’ll only get as much out of the game as you’re willing to put into it, and unless you’re already into the idea of a more relaxed and cosy town builder, it’s not likely to sell you on the concept.
Summary
Town to City is a great city builder for anyone looking for a more relaxed experience where you can minutely tinker with your own private kingdom. The sheer amount of detail available is slightly baffling, and anyone interested in a game that lets you pick the specific balcony furniture of one of the hundreds of houses in your city has found exactly what they’re looking for. Just remember to come up for air at some point, or you’ll drown in it.
Developer: Galaxy Grove
Publisher: Kwalee
Platforms: PC
Release Date: 16th September 2025
