I have a decent history with City building games. I’ve played titles like Tropico, Zeus, Caesar, Banished, all which I’ve greatly enjoyed. Although, besides a few cursory glances I haven’t actually played the epitome of city building games, SimCity, all that much. I heard of Cities: Skylines after it came out, because I kept getting bombarded by the praises people were giving this game. It got me interested to see if all it was truly worth it.
Story
There is no story in the game. There aren’t any defined objectives, there’s no major reason given to be building at all, it just lets you choose from a location and have at it. I enjoy having storylines tying the game together, like Tropico, or a unique plot, like Banished, so I did find it disappointing that there isn’t anything besides sandbox mode in this. The closest the game does get to objectives is milestones which unlock new buildings and city management abilities after a certain amount of population is achieved. I personally think it was a missed chance to not have any form of a story, but it may not be that important to most.
Gameplay
Cities Skylines has you build your sprawling metropolis from scratch. You have to manage your electricity, your water and sewage systems, the city’s garbage, trade, and traffic, amongst other things. As the game progresses and new elements are added, the difficulty increases with the amount of things needed to manage. However, I’ve heard from experienced players that the difficulty never gets too challenging. I personally had a bit of learning curve when I first started, but after a couple hours it became pretty easy. Most of the time, even when you have a poorly designed city, you’ll still probably be getting a lot of money to pull you out of your hole.
Homes, offices, and industrial buildings aren’t made individually in this game. You can only build the municipal aspects of your city like Fire and Police stations, or power plants. Instead, to create homes and stores, you zone areas where buildings are automatically generated. The four main category of zones are Residential, Commercial, Industrial, and Office zones. You zone out the buildings along roads, paying attention to possible issues, like noise pollution from highways for residential zones, or actual pollution from industrial zones.
The buildings you can put down, work on a distance system. People are happiest when, say, a fire station is close to them and can get to their house quickly. It’s dependent on the length of the drive needed rather than a raw geographical distance, so having a good system of roads is very important.
This echos another game by the developer, Cities in Motion. Traffic is a large part of making your city function properly. You can create bus routes, train lines, and a metro system. Eventually you can also make a harbor for ships and an airport for planes. Instituting public transport unclogs the streets, making everything flow smoothly, with the ultimate goal of having your industrial trucks be able to get goods in and out of the city efficiently, and also having good access to your city’s services.
A great feature to this game is the ability to mod it. There’s already a huge amount of custom buildings for the game that’s available in the Steam Workshop. It makes you wonder why anyone would pay 10 more dollars for the deluxe edition which just adds 5 custom buildings. Other mods enable you to edit your own maps, which is provided with the game.
There are a few tiny things that annoy me in this, though.
You never get all your money back from buildings and roads, which is fine after they’ve been there for awhile, but the value decreases instantly after you put it down. For example, I’m trying to make a complicated roundabout from scratch. I put my first part of the loop down, but uh-oh, I accidentally misclicked. There isn’t an undo function in the game, so the only thing I can do is bulldoze it, and now I have less money. You can relocate buildings if you misplace those, but that also costs money to do.
It’s also disappointing that even though there’s a huge emphasis on traffic, you can’t choose whether an intersection should be a 4-way stop, have traffic lights, or if cars should yield. When I was trying to make the roundabout, the game was insistent on having lights and treating it as an intersection, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place.
The lack of disasters is another thing that would’ve been great if it was put in this game. City management is fun and all but nothing can really go wrong if you’ve set up everything properly. Even if you didn’t set up things properly, you’ll usually have a ton of money eventually. There’s not really a way to lose in this game. Just annoyances at your design will cause you to quit. Having a stock market crash or a tsunami would help make things fresh in the later stages of the game.
The gameplay has all the elements that you would expect from a city building game. They’re implemented flawlessly, and you can understand the value of each. However, while not missing any major parts, the game would be better if a few minor tweaks were made here and there, and some extra features would be added.
Graphics & Sound
Cities: Skylines runs fine on my 660 Ti. The graphics and user interface look clean and polished, and it’s good for what atmosphere they were trying to achieve. The music as well sounds nicely produced, and it reminds me of other Sim games.
The only tiny issues I have with that the graphics is they are very standard, and I wish when I zoomed in on my people they were a bit more detailed. However there’s not much to complain about with the graphics in this game.
Conclusion
Cities: Skylines is a great entry in the city building genre. It’s good for newcomers who want to be introduced to the game type, because it’s nice and polished while being uninhibited by a story. It’s also good for experienced players with its flawless design and implementation of the game’s elements. Of course the lack of a story is disappointing for casual players, and the difficulty may be rather on the easy side for experienced players, but overall this is a good game in the genre. If you’re interested in City-Building games, this should be one of the first you look at to see a prime example of what is offered today.
However I personally didn’t like the game being completely sandbox based and barebones. I got pretty bored of it quickly without the need to accomplish any objectives, and not having any disasters to shake things up. I can tell it’s a really good game as city-building games go, but it’s not the best game for me as someone who isn’t super interested in pure sandbox based city management games, and that’s what the score reflects. If you’re totally into the idea of creating your perfect city, and don’t mind there’s not a story, your score would probably be higher than mine. But, I enjoyed playing the game, even if it did leave me wanting just a bit more.
7/10
