Station to Station the debut title from Netherlands based games studio Galaxy Grove, released back in 2023 was well received by its audience due to its charming voxel graphics and relaxing blend of simulation and puzzle solving gameplay based around building railway connections. Their new game Town to City has just released into Early Access on Steam and massively expands on the formula of their original game, by focussing less on the trains and more on building a city from a blank canvas.

City builders are a dime a dozen these days, so it takes something special to make a new title stand out from the crowd, unique gameplay mechanics, a unique setting or in the case of Town to City, style. The unique voxel-based graphics really shine and are overloaded with charm that helps help to immerse you in your objective of building up a 19th century Mediterranean town into thriving and bustling city with infrastructure to match.

On starting the games campaign mode, you are greeted with a blank canvas, apart from a train station and a well thought out tutorial guides you through navigating the user interface and the early stages of the game. Your main goal is to build up your town and reach milestones that will allow you to upgrade your settlement and unlock newer amenities, houses and decorations to use in town. The train comes into the station in your town on a regular basis and has a chance to bring a family along with it that is looking to settle down, it is up to you to build them a house to settle down in, some of these families will even have preferences such as living away from other people, living near water or a cliff or wanting to live in high density areas, fulfilling these preferences will provide a boost to the new residents happiness rating, which is very important as happiness rating in the game controls how many residents are likely to come settle in your town, let your residents happiness rating fall far enough and you may even notice that some of them choose to leave your town for greener pastures.

Of course, housing is just the start of it, and you will need to provide much more than that to meet your residents demands. Residents need food, roads, clothing, entertainment and many other services to remain happy. One of the best features of Town to City is its grid-less building system which lets you lay out your town exactly how you like, this comes to the forefront once you start to build roads and realise you aren’t restricted to just building roads in straight lines and having your city restricted to square grids of streets, you actually have the freedom to free form draw roads on the map wherever you like, this gives you an amazing sense of freedom to design, construct and upgrade your creation exactly the way you like.

You don’t just want new townspeople to move in though, you want to send them to work and you can do this by placing down various stores and amenities that your denizens need such as food stalls, entertainment and barbers amongst many others, Once you lay down a store the citizens living around the area it is placed in will cause it to have a demand rating, the more housing around it the higher this will be, you can then assign workers to the particular business to meet the demand rating, just be careful not to assign too many as then you will have potential workers sitting around idling when they could be used somewhere else. The game starts off slow but after an hour or two it starts to become a bit of a challenge to balance budgets, space and amenities and attractions to meet your citizen’s needs. You will also need to assign some of your citizens to research which will in turn supply you with research points you can use to unlock new buildings and even upgrade your houses to become two- and three-story dwellings. Once your town reaches a certain size you will then gain access to the farm map, which is a second map you can start developing that is based around agriculture, developing this is intrinsic to success of your town as it will help to supply your citizens with produce for businesses such as restaurants. There is also a third map to be unlocked but this is not yet available in early access.

Town to City is steeped in charm thanks to its voxel graphics and absolutely shines as a relaxing city builder, just don’t start playing if you have work the next day, you might find yourself still awake at 3 am planning out your next few buildings. I got around 6 hours out of the game in its current state in campaign mode; the game also does have a sandbox mode where you can build to your hearts delight without worrying about some of the enforced goals from campaign mode. The developers also seem to have a steady influx of future additions throughout early access if the roadmap is anything to go by, if you are into city builders then I would consider Town to City a must purchase game and one that has the chance to become the industry standard in what games in this genre can offer.

The game is now available in early access on Steam, thanks to Galaxy Grove and Kwalee for providing the code.