Hellfire Games is looking to fuse together the genres of city-building, open-world, and MMO with its latest free-to-play game: Big City Stories.

Coming August 23rd, Big City Stories is the culmination of 18 months of development by Texas indie studio Hellfire Games and an attempt to revolutionize the city-building genre.

In addition to being a standard city-builder, Hellfire wanted players to have the power to interact with and enjoy their city from street-level (with no loading screens) via third-person.

The developer provided a short list of features that makes its game unique within the genre:

• Highly customizable avatars with a large selection of clothing items and emotes/animations.
• A vehicle system that lets you commandeer and drive vehicles.
• Interactive objects such as stunt ramps and air jets that you can place anywhere.
• Action-packed mini-games.

Big City Stories also ties in MMO elements by making cities persistent spaces where your friends can hang out with you, or even check your city out when you’re offline. Additionally, the game consists of public spaces like train stations where you can meet other players.

Jeff Posey, president and co-founder of Hellfire Games added the following via the PlayStation Blog:

“Like MMOs, Big City Stories is designed to grow and evolve. We intend to constantly update and improve the game, adding more content and features. As you can tell from this description, Big City Stories is much more than just another city-builder! Big City Stories gives players the tools, freedom, and control to build their dream cities, and we can’t wait to see what you do with it!”

Big City Stories will launch August 23rd on PS4 in the US. Though the developer said it will be expanding to other regions soon.

My Opinion:

If this is PlayStation’s response to Xbox One’s Cities Skylines then it’s not a shabby one. Still, if we’re being honest, I rather just have Cities Skylines.

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Tyler Fischer is a Senior Writer for MONG who plays video games when he’s not busy researching alien conspiracy theories at 2AM. You can find him on Twitter.