Cities: Skylines Review

Title: Cities: Skylines
Developer: Colossal Order
Publisher: Paradox
Format: PC
Type: Game, Single Player
Genre: City Builder, Sim

Synopsis:

Cities: Skylines is a modern take on the classic city simulation. The game introduces new game play elements to realize the thrill and hardships of creating and maintaining a real city whilst expanding on some well-established tropes of the city building experience.

Disclosure: Huge thanks to Paradox for providing a review copy!

Let me start off this review by saying that I’m one of those that actually enjoyed SimCity, and while I was disappointed at how shallow it was, it’s still not a bad game; one I’ve dropped several hundred hours in. Yet since I got my Skylines game I’ve not played it once, that’s how good and addicting Skylines is.

So, Skylines is your typical city builder, you start off with a wad of cash and that’s it. From this you have to build yourself a working, profitable city. This is very important to understand, this is not a progressive game, it’s not reinventing the wheel or adding anything new. In fact it’s a very iterative game, however it does it really, really well; and that’s the crucial thing in games like this.

So let’s talk city size:

As you can see in the above screenshot the city is the same size as that of SimCity, but wait! Before you flip your lid and storm off to rant on the forums read on! While the starting area is the same size as that of SimCity there’s several things to note. Firstly, this time it’s a more compact city. Remember in SimCity making an Ore/Oil town meant wasting huge amounts of space because the oil fields and Ore mines were huge and dominated the map. Well that’s not the case here, you still get them, but they’re more compact, making better use of the surrounding space.

This goes for all of the utilities, police, fire, medical, etc. etc., none of them have the additional modules that the SimCity ones had. Rather to get the same effect you boost the budget for said utilities. The higher the budget the higher number of vehicles the utility spawns. What’s more the asset (whether it’s the police, fire, trash or hospital) tells you the maximum a single building will spawn. So a fire house on standard budget my produce 8 engines, boost it to 150% and it’ll have 12 engines, so on and so on. Personally I love this. Gone are the wasted spaces because of the fire engine huts or trash truck garages. Though we do still get some dead spaces because of the way the game does its zoning.

The other thing to note is revealed in this image:

Each of those squares are expansion zones, not new cities (aka SimCity) but just normal expansion zones. Your city grows and expands, each square is 2km by 2km. In the un-modded version of the game (mine is modded) you have room to grow 9 times, that’s giving you a grand space of 32km². If, you use the mod to unlock the rest of the squares you can grow a staggering 25 times, giving you a whopping 100km². Now that’s not a city to call small!! 😀

So why does it have to be unlocked through a mod? Good question, and it probably comes down to a design choice. To make the game as accessible to as many people as possible they obviously wanted to keep the ‘minimum’ requirements to a…err…minimum 😛 So they set a threshold that would give you a decent sized city to play in, without it being too demanding. For those people with more beefy systems, the option to unlock the rest of the space through the mods are there if they want to. However, as you go up in size it’s going to get more CPU intensive as you have more people running around the city and more simulation needed. Any bugs that crop up from this are not ‘officially’ supported.

Did I mention the game has population limit of 1,000,000, yup that’s one million, of course getting there won’t be easy!

So, one of the biggest issues SimCity had, it’s size, was addressed, for me that was an instant reason to buy. However it got even better, SimCity (until recently) was online only, it was essentially a MMO hybrid. Skylines however is 100% offline, yup no servers crapping out losing your saves, or not allowing you onto them. No idiots joining your region, making a crappy city and abandoning it, and best of all, no trolls!!

Then we have the official mod support with steam workshop integration. The game comes with both a map and asset editor, so creating things and adding them to the game is easy (if you’re that way inclined!) though not without its issues.

So, let’s stop the comparison to SimCity here and get into the game! How does it look? Well, it’s a city builder, and not to be harsh, they all pretty much tend to look the same to me. UI is different of course, but roads look like roads and buildings look like buildings.

Here’s some screen shots from my current city:

While they the models aren’t super high res, I honestly don’t find it that ugly. Graphically the only thing I would say is against it is variety. In one map I had a traffic jam made up entirely of donut vans, I mean seriously come on guys! How many donuts can one city eat lol. The same is with buildings and stuff, they just don’t have variety. That said though it’s only a minor complaint.

However that’s not say the game isn’t without its issues, it has a lot of them. One of the biggest, and probably the most irritating, is the way traffic works. You end up with huge traffic jams because they all stay in a single lane, rather than using the multiple lanes that are available, they need to fix this ASAP.

When I was initially playing the game for the first few maps I ended up with a load of complaints. However as I spent more time, different maps, I learnt how the game works and pretty much every one of the complaints I had disappeared.

First one I had was the difficulty curve, I found the start of the game to difficult, no matter what I did I’d end up bankrupt. However you learn that the best way forward is small incremental building and changing. It was the same with all my other complaints, other than the damn traffic!

The game is lacking in a lot of areas, but the core part is all here, so as time goes by Paradox can expand the games workings with new features through DLC. Indeed they’ve already committed to do this, with both free and paid DLC. I’m being more lenient with Skylines than I would with any other for a simple reason, the price. Rather than being near £60 on release (which SimCity was if you pre-ordered the deluxe edition), we have a deluxe version of this game for £20, a third of the price.

I think this was a good move on the part of Paradox and Colossal Order, get the core of the game made and release it for a lower price point, and then expand and build on it, much like they’ve done with their grand strategy games.

So what do we have, in the zoning we have both low and high density housing and commercial, as well as industrial and offices. There definitely needs to be another level for the industrial zoning, since I find that once my education gets to university level I have to change everything to offices otherwise I run into employment problems. We need something like a medium tech that bridges the two levels.

I’d also like to see the parks feature from Cities XL franchise implemented here, where any free space that can’t be used for zoning can be filled with parks, fields, markets, or even a construction site. Purely a cosmetic thing, but it would be a nice feature to fill up dead space.

Randomised starting points, as it stands at the moment when you start a new map you’re always in the same starting zone. Given how big the maps are I’d love to see them change the starting locations, it would add to the variety and styles of maps.

However one of the biggest issues comes from the engine they’re using, Unity, it has some heavy restrictions that hold the game back. In the asset creation tool you restricted to 65 placeables, which includes everything from trees to props. While messing around and trying to create my own park I hit this limit with almost build attempt. If this is an engine limitation, that’s fine, though a reason to have picked a different engine. However if it’s a choice on their part, I hop it’s one they remove.

However the engine suffers from a rather low limit for placeables in the game, only 250k and this includes all trees and bushes already part of the map. So once again when using the map editor to make your own maps you run into problems, as well as when adding trees and bushes in normal games.

The map creator is bloody awesome! You can take real world maps and import them into the game. So you can import your home town into the game and remake it the way you want! Though it’s not a perfect import, height map doesn’t seem to be imported properly all the time. But personally I don’t really see that as a huge issue as a lot it can be fudged in with the map editor tools.

The big question though is, is it worth getting? Well, the answer is absolutely! I’ve spent close to 70hours in the game so far since its launch last week and I’m still addicted to it. Out of the current city builders doing the rounds at the minute, this is by far the best I’ve played. It’s also the best supported game, from both the modding community and the developers. It’s clear that both the developers and the publishers love this game and want to see it grow.

What’s more I don’t seem to be alone in my love of this game, Paradox recently announced that the game is the bestselling game ever, having sold over 250k units in its first 24 hours. At the time of me writing this Skylines is still holding the #1 sales spot steam!

One of things I’m loving in the game is its build variety, this game is so addicting because it’s so flexible. Sure you can make a standard guaranteed to work city, but there’s also a hell of a lot of fun to be found in going off and creating unique cities. This means that no two cities made by people are really going to be the same. I also recommend you watch AKiss4Luck, she’s got a flare for the design that makes me more than a little envious!

If you love city builders go grab this game! You won’t regret it!