Our favorite city builders are super cheap in the Steam Base Builder Fest

Cities Skylines — (Image credit: Paradox Interactive)

The Steam Base Builder Fest is underway, and it's already proving to be an excellent occasion for us to indulge our mayoral dreams in some dirt-cheap city builders.

As the name suggests, the Base Builder Fest encompasses an array of genres, including excellent survival games like Subnautica and Valheim or great factory-builders like Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program. But SimCity's long absence means that I'm always hungry for urban planning and macroeconomics, so here are a few of the best city-building games, colony sims, and management games you can get as part of the sale.

Cities: Skylines ($8.99 at 70% off) is the city builder of record in this post-SimCity world, and it's not the most strategically deep management game on the market, it still provides some incredible tools for building the city of your dreams.
Frostpunk ($7.49 at 75% off) is for those of you who've always wondered what city-building games would be like if you could freeze to death in the middle of a bad winter - the answer is in this fantastic, intensely challenging strategy game.
Dorfromantik ($9.79 at 30% off) exists on the complete opposite side of the spectrum from Frostpunk, letting you zen out by simply placing landscaping tiles how you want.
Townscaper ($3.89 at 35% off) completely pulls the stress out of city building, giving you something more akin to a toy than a game - but it's a wonderfully chill, relaxing toy nonetheless.
Surviving Mars ($7.49 at 75% off) takes the city-building concept to Mars, where you've got to serve the needs of colonists attempting to make their way on the red planet.
Two Point Hospital ($8.74 at 75% off) is smaller in scope than the other selections here, but a robust simulation and charmingly goofball sensibilities make it one of the most memorable management games out there right now.
Dwarf Fortress ($26.99 at 10% off) is not just a city-building game, it's a history-building game, and perhaps the most robust simulation ever to exist in the world of video games.
RimWorld ($27.99 at 20% off) might be best described as the friendlier version of Dwarf Fortress, and it remains one of the best colony-building games out there.

Check out our guide to the best city building games for more you might be interested in.

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.