PREVIEW | CITY MASTERPLAN | BUILD BIG, PLAN EVERY METER
A narrow country road cuts across an empty landscape, bends around a hillside and eventually reaches the first group of buildings. Hours later, that same road may have become the overloaded spine of a metropolis, carrying commuters, freight and public transport through districts that did not exist when the first piece of asphalt was placed. City Masterplan wants every stage of that transformation to remain visible and physically believable. Developed and published by Hangzhou-based independent team 1:1 Studio, this upcoming PC city builder is being designed around true 1:1 scale, unrestricted road construction and a simulation in which traffic, citizens, employment, services, logistics and the economy operate as connected parts of the same urban system. The studio spent more than three years developing the project before revealing its first trailer in April 2026, but there is still no confirmed release date and the Steam page currently lists the game simply as “Coming soon.” That makes City Masterplan an ambitious proposal rather than a proven successor to anything already on the market. Still, its direction is unusually clear. It does not merely promise larger maps or prettier skyscrapers. It wants players to think like planners: understand terrain, anticipate movement, connect production with consumption and build streets that continue working after a quiet neighborhood becomes the center of a much larger city. The early footage is visually impressive, but the real test will be whether the simulation beneath those streets can carry the same weight as the presentation.
true scale changes the plan
Building at 1:1 scale sounds like a visual feature, but it could fundamentally change how a city develops. Roads, structures and landmarks are intended to use believable dimensions rather than compressed proportions designed only to fit more content inside the camera view. A major interchange should therefore occupy a serious amount of land, an airport or logistics district cannot be squeezed conveniently between residential blocks, and the distance between outer suburbs and the city center may become an actual planning problem rather than a decorative gap. City Masterplan supports terrain sculpting and a continuous landscape capable of holding dense urban centers, distant outskirts, coastal settlements and mountain towns, allowing geography to determine where expansion is practical and where it becomes expensive or inefficient. The game’s grid-free construction tools are central to this freedom. Players can draw curves, rural roads, elevated bridges, highways and complex interchanges without forcing every district into rigid squares, while non-square zoning is being developed so buildings can fill irregular spaces more naturally. That last part is especially important because freeform roads mean little if every curved neighborhood still produces unusable empty triangles between rectangular plots. The developer says the system is still being refined, but intends to support non-square zoning across most building zones at launch. Heightmap importing and basic terraforming tools are also planned, potentially giving dedicated players more control over the landscapes they build upon. These promises suggest a city builder that understands the difference between removing a grid and creating genuine planning freedom. The concern is that realistic scale can also produce enormous areas that look impressive from above but feel empty during normal play. City Masterplan will need strong pacing and meaningful regional development so that distance creates decisions rather than simply requiring players to draw longer roads across unused land.
roads are the skeleton, not the decoration
The road system appears to be City Masterplan’s most immediate strength. Every street shapes how residents, services and goods move, meaning the player is expected to solve congestion through infrastructure rather than rely on a few universal upgrades. A poorly positioned highway exit could overload a local junction, while a commercial center built without enough access may turn surrounding residential roads into permanent queues. The game promises traffic that responds directly to layout, allowing players to adjust routes, redesign intersections and distribute movement across a wider network. It also plans modular elements for transit hubs, including control over platform numbers and lengths, which could make stations fit the actual capacity and geometry of a district rather than arrive as fixed oversized buildings. The developer has been careful not to claim that every requested traffic feature will exist immediately. Dedicated waiting areas for specific intersection movements are not currently planned for launch, for example, although the idea remains under consideration. That honesty is useful because realistic road tools can quickly become marketing language unless lane behavior, pathfinding and public transport remain understandable under pressure. City Masterplan needs more than cars that follow roads convincingly in a trailer. It needs citizens and freight to choose sensible routes, react to new connections, transfer between transport types and expose the reason a network is failing. Clear information panels and real-time data are promised to help players read those problems, but the interface will be as important as the simulation itself. A deep traffic model becomes frustrating when congestion appears without an understandable cause. The strongest version of City Masterplan would let players zoom from a regional highway plan down to one failing junction and clearly see how thousands of individual decisions created the problem. Roads would then become more than attractive lines drawn across the map. They would record the history of every good and bad planning choice made while the city expanded around them.
a city must produce, move and consume
City Masterplan is not presenting itself as a pure city painter. Housing, jobs, essential services, production, logistics and consumption are intended to form a working economy that must remain balanced as the population grows. Industries need connections, goods need routes into commercial areas, residents need employment and the city must provide enough services without allowing expansion to outrun its infrastructure. The Steam description specifically emphasizes realistic supply chains and data-driven decision-making, suggesting that resources will move through a visible sequence rather than simply disappear into a general citywide inventory. That could give industrial districts a much stronger purpose. A factory would not exist only to fill a zoning demand bar; it would depend on materials, workers and transport capacity, while its output would contribute to another part of the urban economy. The same interconnected approach should apply to residents. Citizens are described as part of the fully simulated system, although the developer has not yet demonstrated enough uninterrupted gameplay to show how individually they will be represented or how deeply their daily routines will be tracked. This distinction matters. A city can contain animated pedestrians and vehicles without truly simulating the choices behind them. City Masterplan will need to show that changes in housing, employment, service access and travel time create measurable behavior rather than simply alter abstract percentages. Its progression system will reference the historical development of real cities when gradually unlocking buildings, although a dedicated mode that begins in a chosen historical period is not planned for launch. This sounds like a practical compromise: technology and infrastructure can expand over time without forcing the entire game into a historical simulation. The challenge will be maintaining accessibility. Supply chains, traffic, zoning and citizen needs can create excellent strategic depth, but only when the player understands which system caused a decline and what kind of intervention might fix it. The promised reports and visualized data cannot be an optional layer for experts; they must be the language through which the city explains itself.
the city must survive the close-up
Unreal Engine 5 allows City Masterplan to present streets, vegetation, weather, materials and buildings with a level of detail rarely associated with large-scale management games. The architectural library will include multiple cultural styles, allowing players to create American-inspired metropolitan areas, distinctly Chinese districts and neighborhoods with their own visual identities. Landmark structures are being modeled with true-to-scale proportions, while procedural generation is intended to add variation across residential and commercial zones. Weather and lighting change over time, and the studio wants detail to remain convincing whether the camera is observing an entire district or moving close to a single building. Even wear and dirt are already visible on some roads and structures, although a fully dynamic weathering system is being considered for development after launch rather than promised for the initial version. This visual ambition is attractive, but it also creates the preview’s largest technical concern. The current recommended specifications list an Intel Core i7-12700K or Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 32 GB of RAM and an RTX 3090 or RX 6900 XT with 16 GB of graphics memory, while an SSD and 60 GB of storage are required. Those requirements may change before release, and the studio says it plans to include graphics presets for a wider range of hardware, but they show how demanding the current target could become. A city builder must maintain stable simulation and camera movement after the map contains far more than the carefully framed streets seen in a reveal trailer. Thousands of vehicles, citizens, lights, buildings and economic calculations will need to operate while the player rapidly changes altitude and crosses large areas. The studio is planning a single-player experience and has ruled out multiplayer because adding shared resource management would require major changes to the game’s architecture. It is also aiming to provide a basic content editor and custom-asset guidelines, although the editor may not arrive exactly on the first day. That focus on a single planner and eventual customization is sensible. City Masterplan already has enough technical pressure without adding network synchronization to the list.
