One of my favorite games I own.


Cities: Skylines combines two aspects of successful city management games into one. The first aspect is the actual city building section where you plop and place buildings and streets to make a city. The system is similar to Simcity 2014, where you place roads and then zone housing, industry, and commericial. The significant amount of ploppable buildings usually amount to either eye-candy to bring in tourists or decorate the landscape, or actual city services which your citizens will use.

The second aspect, and by far my favorite aspect is the traffic management. Colossal Order also made Cities in Motion, and it shows. The traffic simulation is detailed and intricate. I've had entire cities flourish early only to suffocate by traffic problems later. This game made me learn principles of road design used in the real world. I can only think of two other games that forced me to deepen my real world knowledge in order to play it more effectively. I literally spend hours tweaking my public transport network and watch the city move itself about.

The Workshop content for this game ensures that even if the expansions come sparingly, you will have more than enough unique and varied buildings, vehicles, and other objects to make a visually unique city every time you visit the game.

That said, the game does have some quirks, though. Unmodded, you'll hit a "death wave" segment where your first generation dies off in staggering amounts to overwhelm your deathcare. Without understanding the resource system, you can kill your city by overproduction in a way that isn't explained in tutorials. Drive time to services does matter, and can also kill your buisnesses in ways which the tooltips are not adaquate to explain. There's a lot of trial and error in learning what's going wrong and why, and your first city will most certainly not be perfect.

That said, once you can look past those flaws, Cities: Skylines is a worthy successor to games like Simcity, and I'm having a blast playing it.

One of my favorite games I own. Cities: Skylines combines two aspects of successful city management games into one. The first aspect is the actual city building section where you plop and place buildings and streets to make a city. The system is similar to Simcity 2014, where you place roads and then zone housing, industry, and commericial. The significant amount of ploppable buildings usually amount to either eye-candy to bring in tourists or decorate the landscape, or actual city services which your citizens will use. The second aspect, and by far my favorite aspect is the traffic management. Colossal Order also made Cities in Motion, and it shows. The traffic simulation is detailed and intricate. I've had entire cities flourish early only to suffocate by traffic problems later. This game made me learn principles of road design used in the real world. I can only think of two other games that forced me to deepen my real world knowledge in order to play it more effectively. I literally spend hours tweaking my public transport network and watch the city move itself about. The Workshop content for this game ensures that even if the expansions come sparingly, you will have more than enough unique and varied buildings, vehicles, and other objects to make a visually unique city every time you visit the game. That said, the game does have some quirks, though. Unmodded, you'll hit a "death wave" segment where your first generation dies off in staggering amounts to overwhelm your deathcare. Without understanding the resource system, you can kill your city by overproduction in a way that isn't explained in tutorials. Drive time to services does matter, and can also kill your buisnesses in ways which the tooltips are not adaquate to explain. There's a lot of trial and error in learning what's going wrong and why, and your first city will most certainly not be perfect. That said, once you can look past those flaws, Cities: Skylines is a worthy successor to games like Simcity, and I'm having a blast playing it.