Cities: Skylines (2015)

After the epic fail, that was SimCity, I gave up hope for a good, relaxing city building game. Then, I came across Cities: Skylines and my hope was restored.

Right from the start, the appeal, calm music and peaceful, non-forced gameplay had my deepest respect. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want. You start with your piece of land, which you choose at the start of the game, and start building your glorious city.

The mechanics are well implemented and work great. You start small, having limited building, roads and facilities at your disposal. As your city grows, new buildings will unlock. This keeps the game in balance and is, at the same time, some sort of tutorial which lets you know what you might need next, now that your city has grown.

If you want more control and freedom, you can also play sandbox mode, in which you can choose unlimited funds, create your own landscape and make everything exactly the way you want. I used this mode a lot to create (or trying to do so) a realistic presentation of my hometown and its districts.

Although the game never really ends, the goal is to create a healthy, accessible and proper functioning city, in which your citizens are happy. At the start of the game, this is easy, because the city is small and does not require that much facilities and work, but later on, you are managing fifty things at a time, constantly keeping an eye on your finances, happiness in the city and problems that need your attention. Although I really liked playing the mayor of my humble city, later on in the game, I sometimes lost a little control and overview of what needed to be done and were some problems originated from. However, this is to be expected when your city grows and grows.

Visually, this game looks amazing. The detail does not just include landscape and buildings, but also people, cars, traffic lights and much more. Every person and car is animated properly and, when zooming in, the game almost feels like watching a movie. I could enjoy myself for a good hour just looking and checking out my city while zooming in.

In terms of sound, the best aspect of this game is the ambient, calming music. The little ping sounds when something is happening, the many voices when a lot of people are in the same place, the sound of cars stuck in traffic, it is all just right.

The buildings and options in Cities: Skylines are endless. Besides the public service buildings, you can build parks, monuments, wonders, art, and so much more. Each new building adds something to your city in terms of functionality and look, and it makes your city look so much more alive.

The modding community for this game is awesome. So many new vehicles, buildings, skins, landscapes and mechanics are added each day and, when you are finally done with the base game, it opens so many new possibilities.

By far, the best aspect of this game is it’s calming and relaxed nature. You are playing a videogame, but for me, it feels like a little vacation in which I certainly do stuff, but can just relax and watch my citizens go to work, read some info about them, give them a new name, attach myself to that person and then realize that I am playing a game.

It is the experience from this game that I missed from SimCity and I am really happy that this game came along my path. Needless to say, I definitely recommend this game.

This game is perfect, maybe DLC's are too expensive, waaaay too expensive.

Learning how everything works is one wild ride to YouTube, but, when you make it work the satisfaction is enough to push you to try do new things and keep progressing.

The only grip I have with this game is the music, good fucking lord I can't handle the main theme anymore, this game gave me PTSD trough bird noises and pop-up notifications.

10/10

As far as simulation games go, there haven't been too many that can keep my attention for more than a couple of hours, but when it comes to Cities: Skylines, I could put it down!

Acting as the town mayor you build communities that grow or shrink depending on job availability, environmental risks, and happiness of those who live there. The happier your residents are, the more your economy grows.

Gameplay is very basic, in a Sim City sorta way, you build roads, houses, stores, industrial plants, and a wide variety of unique buildings to bring attributes to your community.

All in all, Cities: Skylines is a graphically sound entertaining city building simulator with highly addictive qualities that gives Sim City a run for its money.

I'm old enough to have played the original SimCity from 1989 (!). I remember i would always give residential areas their own 'driveway' and two bits of green because i thought that would be nice.

Cities: Skylines is more or less the same game, it mostly just seems to have more options and stuff to do - pretty sure there was no garbage collection in SimCity. It's a competent city-builder, but it's kinda dull and limited. There is no campaign. There is no jolly advisor. There is no "sandbox" mode that lifts the restrictions, or it is hidden really well. You can't even look at the things that are in the categories for bigger populations. I think the base game doesn't even have disasters, but i'm not 100% sure.

There's just city-building. And honestly even that isn't great because the most popular mod is one that lets roads function as power poles so you don't have to bother with that stuff. The best mods are only updated on Steam too. And heck, even something as basic as filling a zone is weirdly clumsy. After about 10 minutes i thought: "i could be playing Tropico and actually have fun instead".

This is the best city building game, hands down. It is not a perfect game. However, due to consistent upgrades and updated, as well as user generated content, the game continually approaches the perfect city building and management simulation. Mods likewise alter the game-play experience, ensuring that one can play without any of the limits that otherwise would be placed on the simulation.

City-building simulations have a long history. Cities Skylines manages to blend essential pieces through the genres history. Standing in a ling line of games, Skylines is able to take the best from each and blend them into something fresh. A sandbox game is judged by the variety of the results it is able to facilitate. The depth and the complexity of the many systems that go into the simulation encourage experimentation. There is never a perfect ideal set by the simulation; rather the simulation presents a broad set of tools that is limited only by the player's vision. At the same time, experience with the systems themselves shapes the player's vision as one's perspective on the game's possibilities are expanded. This cycle, rather than breeding frustration, entices continued refinement as the ideal city is brought closer to fruition. Truly, this is the obsessive city-planner's dream.

If the game has a fault, it is in creating cities that are too Utopian. The trajectory is ever upward, there is no place for economic and social diversity. While no city-planner envisions creating slums, it is unrealistic that a city so easily overcomes poverty by placing a few city services. If the game's major fault lies in it allows one to construct too perfect cities, then it is doing well.

Cities Skylines is the perfect culmination in a long line of city building simulations, granting unlimited potential to fulfill one's vision for a perfect metropolis. The developer's commitment to the game is demonstrated not only in the quality of the product and their continued support with robust add-on's to the base game, but their comfort in allowing the public to offer substantial modifications. This symbiosis between developers and players ensures that Skylines remains the dominant entry in this genre.

I tried SimCity 4 & wasn't very good at it, but I liked the idea of the city simulator game. A few years back I tried Tropico 5 which brought me back into the idea I could play a city sim. After watching the whole LGR series on it, Cities Skylines sounded like the game to try getting back in with.

I like this game a lot better than SimCity 4, maybe partly because it's a newer, prettier looking game, and I was able to get a crapton of mods to make my city a New Orleans-esque city set in the 1950s. I did play the unlimited money sandbox mode, cause I like the power to be creative more than the managing aspect. But they give you lots of different graphs and charts that make seeing what you need and how to build it easy, whether an industrial park or a new water line.

This game is best suited as one you come back to and check in on every now and then. Build a new district, add a train line, or that kind of thing. And they give you lots of customization, naming buildings, districts, roads, everything. You probably won't do that, but you can if you want. I liked building up an industrial park, downtown, the financial uptown, two or three small towns on the outskirts, the riverfront entertainment district, the historic district with it's winding streets. I just like making up my own city.

it's good for a while but i dont think i can keep playing it, (i also accidentally'd my save and lost a huge amount of work!) it's quite impressive how the game simulates some things like traffic congestion and other things that are actually occurring in your city (like tens of thousands of people having a daily schedule of tasks they must do) and how problems can suddenly become big problems. As a simulation this is really impressive, this is well beyond the kind of stuff that would make my computer choke in AdverCity.

As a game its kind of okay... Usually these kinds of games have a quirky design, or logic to how things work, and beyond that of placing roads and planning your city its not that alienating. You can lose but its somewhat difficult to do so. a city with a ton of problems will still make you money. The game more or less seems to be 'won' by hitting the metropolis population quota. And the fun is in improving efficiency and slowly fixing things and eternal expansions, or endlessly creating new cities in different climates, with different themes or with a different focus or aesthetic look... Which is great if you love tinkering with stuff you build or endlessly building something bigger.

As well made as the game is it doesnt much provide in the way of offering an experience or a message beyond 'the city you live in took a lot of work to build' and gives you some appreciation for civil engineering. You can rename just about every object in your city and even produce custom buildings, pedestrians, vehicles in an in game editor, but i cannot really see the point to it.

The engine is really good on many levels, it could make for an excellent Godzilla mod. I probably wont pick this one back up though.

This game crept on me unexpectedly. I wasn't aware it's coming out, haven't heard anything before it released and was really positively surprised when it came out.

This game is good. It really is. It's a city builder that just makes sense. The graphics are amazing. The sound, the ambience - everything is as you would like it to be. Even more they've added day and night cycle for free.

It's really enjoyable to build a city here. You get a wide array of tool that lets build the city in the way you want to. You will need to keep an eye on traffic and population happiness. Not really much more to say. At this point probably the best sim city like game out there.