Roads. Cities Skylines 2 is all about the roads. You can pour millions into the school budget and build the best healthcare system in the world, but if the roundabouts are in the wrong places and the highway lanes aren’t correctly laid out, it doesn’t matter. Given Colossal Order’s formative project, the intensely detailed transport series Cities In Motion, it makes perfect sense. But while CO has turned its attention towards bigger, bolder, city-builder visions, a new strategy game has emerged to fill the gap in robust traffic and tarmac management. It’s just been signed by Manor Lords and Cataclismo publisher Hooded Horse, and it turns the best and most vital part of Cities Skylines 2 into a complete, standalone strategy game. This is Junxions.
In Civilization 6, when you’ve done your work, you can sit back and marvel at the expanse of your empire. In Junxions, a strategy game of immense detail, the joy comes from easing gridlock, speeding the flow of traffic, and imagining ingenious methods of routing cars around existing structures.
You can play on either handcrafted sandbox maps or choose scenarios, where you have to meet specific traffic goals within a set time. In some cases, it’s all about designing and constructing entirely new road types, combining expressways, turnpikes, bus lanes, and tunnels to skillfully weave through a city. Other times, you can just use the brute-force method of widening existing roads and condemning everything in your path.
There are two specific features in Junxions that really leap out to me. First, if you input map or coordinate data of any real-world city, the game will create a map based on that actual layout. Have a terrible drive to work? Tired of the lack of decent public transport links close to where you live? In Junxions, you can solve those problems yourself. And for the Cities Skylines 2 devotees, still waiting on the all-important update from Colossal Order, there’s even better news – Junxions lets you build bike lanes. For all intents and purposes, this looks like the most comprehensive, detailed road-builder in recent years.
Developed by CyberStorm and published by Hooded Horse, we’re still waiting on the Junxions release date, but it’s currently slated to arrive at some point in 2025. For now, you can already wishlist it on Steam right here.
Otherwise, get the other best management games on PC, or maybe paint on the biggest municipal canvas of all with the best city-building games available now.
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