Best simulation business games

Slime Rancher might look cute on the surface, but beneath its gelatinous, googly-eyed exterior lies a heart of pure chaos. Unlike the beasts you'll find in other animal management sims such as Planet Zoo or even Jurassic World Evolution, the smiling blobs of Monomi Park's farming slime 'em up excel at getting themselves into scrapes while you're off exploring and gathering resources, whether it's bouncing out of their respective pens and escaping, or accidentally eating the "plorts" or poop of other slimes and turning into all-consuming tar monsters.

If you've ever wanted to experience the anarchic world of rearing unpredictable livestock, then Slime Rancher is the management or maybe that should be wrangling?

Yes, the entire economy is based around the buying and selling of slime manure, but it sure puts a jolly old face on it. It's this sunny take on the farming games that makes Slime Rancher one of more approachable management games on this list as well. It doesn't get bogged down in the complexities of slime diets, pen conditions or anything else. All you need to do is make sure all that poop is scooped on a regular basis, because otherwise bad, bad things can happen while you're away.

Still, even if you do come home to find entire sections of your farm have gone up in smoke, one look at a slime's jiggling grin is all it takes to make everything okay again. You might be starting over, but d'awww just look at their little faces. Not every horse in Bullfrog's legendary stable of genre-defining 90s management games stands up well by today's standards, particularly in terms of interface, and that's why Themes Park or Hospital of old aren't here. Dungeon Keeper sails close to the wind, too, but it remains fiendishly playable, especially if you install the free KeeperFX fan expansion pack which unlocks all sorts of high resolutions and assorted third-party fixes and maps.

This game is about building a monster lair, keeping said beasties happy, and ultimately hurling them at invading 'heroes'. It might be a bit daft compared to more modern games on this list, but there's a palpable loneliness to Dungeon Keeper.

Its ill-tempered creatures shuffle through dark, rocky tunnels, angrily trying to sleep in their filthy lairs, collect daily pay they have no apparent use for, tinkering away to build traps and spells that only benefit a distant employer and But that's the thing: where so many management games in the Bullfrog idiom were built around a core of pleasing people, this is, frankly, built around abusing them.

Be it the monsters who toil and fight endlessly for your gain, or the humans you murder, imprison or torture to further swell your ranks, Dungeon Keeper is a deliciously dark game in a far more profound way than its snickering voice-over. Transport Tycoon Deluxe remains one of our favourite transport management sims, even if the original is no longer available to buy on today's PC storefronts.

Thankfully, we've got OpenTTD instead, a fan-made remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe that expands on Chris Sawyer's original by adding more map sizes as well as LAN and online multiplayer that supports up to players. The isometric countryside and urban landscapes are still beautifully tranquil in OpenTTD — despite the game's industrial core, settlements resemble picture-postcard villages and towns rather than smoggy iterations of Dickens' Coketown.

Watching the landscape develop in sync with your ambitions is as rewarding as watching a level 1 Squire become a level 50 Demigod. Business management games come in many flavours, but few offer the same kind of gentle challenges and immediately recognisable environments as this. Transporting goods and passengers might seem like a banal occupation, especially appearing alongside future wars and theme parks, but it's the familiarity of the systems that makes the game so engaging.

Where can I buy it: It's free. This red planet colonisation sim has come along way since it first came out in March Back then, it felt a little bit barebones and kept tripping over its own user interface. Today, it's a different story. With a greater variety of domes and buildings, a more coherent UI, and the ability to link up your various fragile settlements, Surviving Mars is extremely hard to put down. The slow growth from a handful of drones laying cables in the dust up to a thriving society of colonists is immensely satisfying, and the hostile environment and starkly limited resources means it feels like so much more an achievement than simply ordering some serfs to go build you a mansion by the river.

By twinning management sim tradition with a survival mentality - your colonists need air, water and heat as well as food, and woe betide you if you fail to provide them - what could have been an old-fashioned building game becomes a thoroughly modern one.

Most management games are about indulging yourself as opposed to providing a real challenge. They're about an ever-widening circle of building possibility - the more hours you put in, the more things open up. Frostpunk is different. Frostpunk's interest is in starkly limiting what options are available to you, to the point where you're frequently making some absolutely crushing decisions about what you have to sacrifice in order to gain or fix something else.

Set during a sort of steampunk post-apocalypse, you're tasked with keeping a handful of shivering, starving refugees of a new ice age alive. There are barely any resources, and anyone who does not live close to the life-giving heat generators won't last long. Sickness is inevitable. But you need the workers to bring in fuel and food to keep everyone else alive. Do you let the ill heal - or do you amputate? What about children? More hands on deck, or is having a childhood more important?

Frostpunk is management on the edge, where almost every decision you take - almost every building you erect - is a huge risk.

It can be mastered in time, but until then, it is desperate, harrowing and a deft inversion of the usual race-to-riches approach.

Theme Hospital might be the first popular management game to dwell on the dark side of profiteering, but Prison Architect is an even darker proposition. Can you keep your inmates happy? Can you make a profit? How important is it to process death row residents efficiently? What happens when a riot breaks out? The brilliance of Introversion's game is in its recognition that a prison is a series of systems - of housing and treatment, of security and recreation - and then in its application of sturdy simulations to each of those systems.

Like the best management games, it allows you to create a smoothly running machine, but it also embraces chaos and roleplaying. During the most intricate planning, you can forget what the theme implies about the resources you're processing, but Prison Architect is only ever a moment away from reminding you of the humanity within the machine. Honestly, throw a rock in the air and just play whichever Tropico game it lands on - they're all a solid good time and they're all based around the exact same concept: you're the comedy dictator of an initially poor island nation, attempting to transform it into a land of tourist'n'trade riches while ruling with an at least partially iron fist.

A great many of the complexities of, say, a Sim City are discarded - there's no real worrying about powerlines or water supplies, and instead you get on with the business of plopping down buildings, with the twin goals of making it all look lively and attractive and generating ever-more filthy lucre.

This is more of a toy box to rummage in than it is a strategic puzzle, but it has an extra layer of mild moral dilemmas that keep you hooked. For instance, the exile or death of troublemakers, bribing protesters, ignoring environmental concerns, rigging elections or cramming people into dangerous housing. Or you could stay the course, do the right thing and hope that it will all come good in the end. Tropico 6 also finally adds some much-needed spice to this most conservative of management series by stretching out your latest empire across an entire archipelago of islands, switching your traditional goal of expansion for expansion's sake to something you're actively striving towards.

It's a small change, sure, but as that old saying goes, even the smallest change can make a profound difference. Banished is a different sort of a management game. At first glance, it looks a lot like a Settlers or Anno - good-natured, brakes-on building and tree-chopping, enjoying the gradual and all-but-inevitable expansion from scruffy one-horse town to bustling old world metropolis. But no. Banished is about scratching out a rudimentary life in the dirt and cold, and maintaining that life even as the elements turn against you - striving to subsist rather than to explode into glory.

If approached wanting a cheery city-builder, you're going to have a horrible time. If approached as a sterling test of planning and resource management, in which failing to get it right means great suffering and even death for the handful of people in your charge, it's going to keep you very busy, challenged and, ultimately, feeling far prouder of yourself than most anything else in this list could hope to manage. It's cruel, but it makes the things we take for granted in other management games feel like titanic accomplishments.

Zeus: Master of Olympus might be as old as its Ancient Greek hills, but this 2D, historical city builder continues to hit the sweet spot of complexity, accessibly, prettiness and sheer charm. There is war if you want it, but really this is a game about making cheese. Also wool, olive oil and theatre. An artisanal colony all of your own. You build your own MMO world and need to keep players attracted with content and challenges.

Due to its age it's very clunky with weird controls and a bad tutorial, but it still makes fun and is very challenging. Build your own restaurant and create your own menu and its food. It's fun and slightly similar to Restaurant Empire. For 20 bucks you'll get a great and fun game. Check it out! Road to your city is a niche city building and simulation game with the aspect to handle your very own football club as well.

Keep your residents happy, get better football players and win the league! Not Recommended 23 March, Don't get this game, it's boring and way too simple. Reminds you on the glorious time of Port Royale and similar games, because this one doesn't hold up at all. Dodge this disappointment. Informational 23 March, It's literally a clone of Game Dev Tycoon with minor changes, a casual game and not really complex, but for a small price you get really entertained. Sadly it got abandoned by the devs.

No results found. Showing 1 - 10 of 44 results. Rollercoaster Tycoon was originally released in It is available for purchase on Steam and can be played on Microsoft Windows and Xbox platforms. Have you ever wondered what it'd be like to live in the early 20th century? When you play Rise of Industry , you become an early 20th century industrialist. During the game, you build and manage a growing empire. You can build factories, transport lines, keep an eye out for the next big thing, find gaps in the market and strike business deals.

Rise of Industry was released in Motorsport Manager takes you from behind the wheel and puts you behind the team. In this simulation game, you manage the team that is responsible for putting a driver on the podium. You will quickly find, as is so often the case with business simulators, that there is a whole lot more going on behind the scenes than you could have imagined. The early portion of the game is heavy on tutorials to ease you into things, so you aren't just left spinning your wheels.

From minute details, like the components of your car and race-day decisions, to big-picture tasks like assembling your team and voting on rules and regulations for the sport, there is a wealth of content at every level. Motorsport Manager is a single-player game that was released in If you love transportation and trains, you may want to check out Mashinky.

Develop a transport business on a procedurally generated map, manage your empire and improve your assets. You start the game in control of a transport company. During the game, you lay tracks on hard terrain, buy new vehicles, manage routes and make as much profit as possible.

While the full version of this game won't be released until later in , you can be on the forefronts and play in early access mode while the game develops. It is currently available on Microsoft Windows. There's probably no game title that suggests business simulation more than the simply named Job Simulator.

Unlike most business simulators that put you in charge of everything, Job Simulator places you in the role of an office worker, a chef, a mechanic and a convenience store clerk. The game takes place in where robots have replaced all human jobs, so humans who want to get a taste of what work was like hop into the "Job Simulator.

Job Simulator was released in and is available on all three of the current VR platforms. It can be accessed via PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows. Making video games for a living is a dream job for many, but if you aren't ready to take the plunge on that career change, try Game Dev Story. This game puts you in charge of a small game studio with big aspirations. You build from a few employees to dozens looking to sell millions of games or eventually create your own game console.

Despite the simple bit graphics, the game is remarkably deep with responsibility for every aspect of the business beyond simply creating games, including advertising, conventions, licensing, office space, hiring and training of employees. Business simulation does not always mean you are going to find yourself in an office.

Farming Simulator 17 lets you go hands-on and spend some time driving a variety of vehicles while doing jobs on your own farm or other farms. However, this is still a business, so at some point, you are going to need to attend to those spreadsheets. These will show your profits and loss on every crop, livestock and forestry.

Make the call on when to net the biggest gains from your goods, and you can buy or lease new equipment to make the next season even better. Farming Simulator 17 was released in