Cities: Skylines is a game coming in hot. The People want a expert city-building game to play, and it's been a long fourth dimension since they got ane. And so there'south a surprising amount of excitement and expectation for Colossal's attempt at fixing SimCity'southward mistakes.

Regardless of what yous've been hoping for, whether you lot've been interested in Skylines because of the programmer'due south pedigree (they fabricated the fantabulous Cities In Movement) or to fill up a Maxis-sized hole in your library, I've got some news. Mostly, information technology's skilful.

The Good News

Good news first! If you lot play city-building games to, well, build cities, this is the best you tin become. Never before have I felt similar I could simply walk up to an enormous tract of land, open some tools and just...build whatever I wanted, still I wanted. Direct roads, curved roads, designated office blocks, districts with their own tax rules, it's all at your fingertips.

If you despised SimCity for its tiny calibration, this is not a tiny game. Skylines begins small, but as your city grows, you lot're able to unlock more than and more of the surrounding countryside. It gets to the point where y'all tin start building satellite communities just for the hell of information technology, because your primary city is then damn big.

It'due south liberating. You never experience constrained, like you need to pack a sure surface area in because you'll run into an invisible wall. I mean, those walls are out there eventually, merely I've been playing this game not-finish for over a week now and haven't come up close to striking the map'south limits. Trust me, if you lot've filled in every surface area y'all tin eventually unlock, yous have made 1 hell of a big city.

In a higher place is the result of that calendar week. It's a huge city, big enough that it's spawned secondary business centres and some industrial/rural communities. Beneath, however, you'll see that it doesn't even accept upward half the available territory.

The game's default difficulty setting is pretty damn piece of cake, and that'due south practiced news for artists and builders. I built three cities in full in my time with Skylines, and not once did I run into money trouble. The game's need displays (indicating how many homes you need to build, etc) did the trick and I e'er had a steady flow of cash coming in, and so I'd always have money for the adjacent road or edifice or passenger vehicle station or whatever the hell else I wanted/needed to build.

If you lot are struggling, though, the game ships with a few mods you tin actuate to alter things up. Some will unlock all the state area, others will unlock every unique edifice, others granting you unlimited cash, while one flips all that and turns on a "hard manner". Nosotros'll get to why this is a bad idea a fiddling later.

Cities: Skylines is a gorgeous video game. Not in a "video game graphics" kind of way; fifty-fifty with the settings maxxed out everything all the same gets a footling blocky (anti-aliasing just isn't actually there). But it sets out to recreate the vibe of a model city/toy railway, and it admittedly nails it, from the vivid color palette to the fact it fifty-fifty has a tilt-shift setting in its menu.

This might sound trivial, but it's really, actually cool! After all, your job as a player in these kind of games is to operate as a God-like effigy crafting a imitation city out of nothingness. Instead of trying to somehow describe this as "real", or fifty-fifty video gamey, Skylines shoots for something more tangible, and it plays a big function in how much I enjoyed just scrolling around the streets of my urban center, basking in the cuteness and order of it all.

You'll do some very large things, like planning entire regions and suburbs, merely you'll also exist doing some very small things. There'south a surprising corporeality of micromanagement in the game once you lot progress and selection at it, and while some of it sucks (more on that below), other parts are great. Public transport is 1 such highlight: instead of just dropping depots, stations and stops on the map, Skylines lets you actually plan out specific routes for each mode of transport. Being able to manually assign bus routes and subway lines feels great, like you've got more precise command over the movement of the people in the city.

Probably the highlight of the game for me is just many tools and options in that location are for customisation. I love how you tin painlessly elevate roads to create expressways. I love how you can build sidewalks and paths between buildings, and then driblet individual trees to create tiny, freestyle parks. I love how the game has stiff Steam Workshop back up, where people (or you lot!) can design their ain churches (similar the ane in a higher place), houses and metropolis halls and everyone else can just drop them into the game, calculation an insane amount of variety and specialisation to their city's aesthetic. Sounds trivial, simply again, we're building model cities here, so the meliorate they look, the better.

Do y'all know what else is swell nigh building your own metropolis? Being able to proper noun it, and everything within it. And I really do mean everything. You can name the city, you tin can create and name districts, you can fifty-fifty proper noun individual stores. It's a simple thing, just letting you name that much stuff actually makes you experience like you own the urban center yous've created.

The districts are more than just names, though. It e'er felt weird in other city games that when you set up taxes and institute policies, you were doing so for the entire metropolis at in one case. Skylines instead lets you split up your urban center into districts — which you manually paint on the map — and in one case done not just name them, merely set up their own policies and tax rates, in means that yous'd only want to do for that i specific place. Want to ban heavy vehicles from your city middle? Done. Want to offer free public ship to a struggling industrial area? You can do that. Institute legal drug use on your beachside holiday areas? Knock yourself out.

(This is a 13-minute tour of the city I congenital for the review. It'll show y'all some stuff I couldn't get around to in the review!)

The Bad News

Now for the bad news. As enjoyable as it is to build a city in Skylines, actually managing i is a different story. Skylines asks you lot to practise a lot of tiresome stuff, from endlessly clearing abased buildings to laying your urban center's water pipes. Those activities require little strategic thought and seem to be purely to keep the player "decorated" in the most annoying ways possible.

It's a hassle, but it's bearable. Much worse is that the game's traffic system—the electric current most of import system in the game—is kinda busted.

Traffic is the game's primary means of determining how your services respond to their jobs (eg, whether a cop tin can bust a crime, or whether a burn down engine puts out a fire). With that in mind, accept a expect at this span, which despite having 3 lanes in both directions, has simply ane existence used. And everyone'south stuck on it.

Come across all those trucks backed up? In that location are fire engines, cop cars, garbage trucks and hearses there. Considering they're stuck forever in traffic, despite at that place existence TWO EMPTY LANES, the services they're trying to perform aren't existence performed. Meaning that my city, in spite of dozens of fire stations and cemeteries, and a 50% increase in health and emergency funding, is drowning in trash. And corpses.

That kind of thing happens all over my city, but the bridge is merely the all-time fashion of showing you lot in a single gif.

Annotation that this isn't a problem with the way my city is designed. There are enough large roads, bridges and alternating routes to service a city of millions here, allow lonely one with a population of under 100,000. I have parts of the city with a fire station or cemetery on every street corner, and as absurd as that is, those services still aren't being performed.

At times it feels like Skylines is a simulator where traffic is everything, instead of one of many design elements. Traffic should exist important, yes, but it shouldn't be having such a drastic and negative bear on on other parts of the city.

This kind of thing is heart-breaking, considering it tugs at the OCD many city-builders experience while playing. With no "victory" in sight, the goal for nigh folks in a game like this is just to go their city running equally smoothen as possible. Cut down on the problems and make everyone happy.

If that'due south you, there is no happiness with Skylines, at to the lowest degree for at present. No matter how perfect you recall your metropolis is — or how perfect you lot keep existence told it is via the game's imitation Twitter account, which serves equally your official feedback device — the bigger your city gets, the more information technology fills up with CRITICAL RED Warning BUBBLES, telling y'all OH MY GOD THIS City IS Total OF Expressionless BODIES WHY AREN'T You DOING Anything, and you're like I'G TRYING TO BUT THIS IS BROKEN AND *SOBS UNCONTROLLABLY*.

Hither's a more nuts-and-bolts example of what I'k talking about. In this small rump area of my city, at that place are three cemeteries and three crematoriums (highlighted in blue). They're taking up a crazy amount of real estate relative to everything else! Despite this, all those scarlet buildings and skulls are dead bodies, piling upwards amongst the living, driving down real estate values and making people sick. That shouldn't be happening.

Perhaps the almost annoying matter near the trash and corpse problems is that they didn't demand to exist at all! They're tedious, distracting and uninteresting at the best of times, allow lone when they're messing up your city.

The whole traffic mess is a disappointment, but at the finish of my calendar week with the game it couldn't actually dent how much fun I'd notwithstanding had with Skylines. The sheer joy of, well, everything else kept me going long after I'd learned to ignore the fact that my city's living were drowning in the bodies of the dead.

Cities: Skylines — which I'd like to point out was made by a squad of fewer than 20 people — is a city-builder's dream. On the whole, information technology's a scrap of a skilful news/bad news state of affairs, but while information technology may exist a flawed management game, busted numbers and weird traffic oasis't been enough to dampen my enthusiasm for all the things information technology gets right. From the tools at your disposal to the degree of customisation bachelor correct down to the tilt-shifted await of it all, Skylines knows exactly what it wants to do (be a game for people who desire to build cities, duh!) and just goes out and does it.