It was clear from the beginning, when Cities: Skylines was announced at Gamescom 2014, that developer Colossal Order was banking on the void left by many recent city-building simulators. With series such as Cities XL, Tropico, and of course, SimCity receiving a lukewarm reception (at best), they were in a position that could have either brought a resurgence of this genre, or hurt its reputation even further. Thankfully, Cities: Skylines has been a comfortable success for the former, rather than the latter.
In all honesty, I enjoyed the 2013 incarnation of SimCity despite its glaringly obvious flaws. With its excellent visual and sound direction, solid economy options and robust, tactile city-building tools, the game did improve in some ways compared to SimCity 4. Of course, some features that Maxis promised (such as complex individual citizen AI and behaviours) were undeniably underdeveloped. Others, like the online requirement (which contributed to a buggy and messy launch) only seemed to make the game look worse, despite Maxisâ attempts to fix the problems in the months to come. With the features Skylines has to offer, itâs no wonder that people have seen Colossal Orderâs work as a direct challenge to the direction in which the genre was headed. Itâs especially poignant when it comes out only about a week after the closure of the Maxis Emeryville studio.
 Even the title screen for Skylines says a lot about its intent. With Steam Workshop integrated into the menu, one of the first things which any player will notice is that the sidebar automatically updates with the latest mods, models, skins, player-made cities and game saves. It also comes with a map editor, object creator, and a sub-menu specifically for managing custom content. The message is clear: this game was designed to be modded right out of the box (figuratively speaking, of course â no retail distribution for the game currently exists), and itâs designed to be a user-friendly process. It has an incredible amount of potential, especially in our current gaming climate where user-created content can extend the life of a game, long past the point where players might lose interest in the core mechanics.
Thatâs not to say that Cities: Skylines has boring mechanics â itâs up there with the likes of some of the most fun city sims of our time. It focuses heavily on zone management between three types familiar to most city-building veterans â residential, commercial and industrial. Thereâs also the usual adjustments available for tax, as well as funding in various public services (health, policing, fire-fighting, electricity, water, etc.). Loans can be taken out by those mayors who like to take a chance and spend big for future returns.
All these features are as functional as any city simulator fan might want them to be, though some arenât quite as deep or as tactile as I expected. Zones only have two tiers of density (low and high) and many public services only have two tiers in size or strength. And although there are a nice variety of ways to apply zones (by fill or custom-size brushes), players can only zone where roads have been laid first, the grid size of these zones are generally restricted, and it looks like Skylines hasnât quite figured out the art of applying seamless-looking zoning in areas that have less-than perfect geometry.
To make up for some of this depth, there are also a wide range of modifiers that more capable mayors can use to make services more efficient â at a cost. Some are fairly simple and derivative â for example, implementing a city-wide âSmoking Banâ Policy will improve health services at the cost of general population happiness. Others have higher risk and appropriately higher rewards. The most interesting of these are zoning tools that separates zones into âDistrictsâ, each themed with increasingly significant environmental and public service burdens in exchange for increased tax income. These Districts can also have adjusted tax and Policies applied individually. Because of this, not only does enforcing a District come with a distinct, visual theme like âFarmingâ, âOilâ or âOreâ, but it alters public perception of the city and adds an excellent amount of customisation and variety to what would otherwise be a limited handful of zoning options.
Cities: Skylines is no slouch in offering roads and transport options, with unsurprisingly robust and deep gameplay mechanics and the tools to match. After all, Colossal Order has a pedigree coming from the Cities in Motion series, both games almost solely focused on transportation management. Options are there to build curved and free-form roads and shapes, and the zone grids will (generally) follow the curve of the road, so thereâs a lot of room for creativity. In addition to this, the efficiency of public services like health (ambulances and hearses), policing (police cars) and garbage disposal are tied to the efficiency of a cityâs roads, and players can zoom in to see these services in action, in real-time. As a result, road and transport management is the key to ensuring fires are put out, crimes are stopped and dead bodies are delivered to the cemetery â and if management isnât good enough, the game gives great feedback on it (which makes for some oddly morbid moments).
That said, I suspect because of the amount of planning that is required, at a higher level of play the road-building freedom becomes somewhat at odds with the management focus. Being somewhat of a square (heh), I spent my time on my first city building an uncreative series of perfectly geometric rectangular grids (generally an efficient road layout) and already experienced minor congestion problems at intersections early on, even between large multi-lane roads. This problem only gets worse for larger cities, where the AI simulation of traffic is guilty of the same âfastest route taken and nothing elseâ traffic problems of the likes of SimCity 2013. But to the gameâs credit, itâs pretty forgiving when it comes to costing amenities in order to compensate. In fact, the early starting moments of each city are probably the hardest â once all the amenities are up and running, the taxes are set and the city is earning a decent income, managing and developing the city is a (mostly) comfortable, leisurely experience.
In its vanilla state, Skylines is by no means perfect, and contains some odd design quirks. During the beginning of every cityâs development, almost all transport options, Policies, public services and taxation are restricted behind population targets â even things like fire stations and bus stops. My impression is that this was supposed to slowly introduce features to newcomers to the genre, and in that regard itâs a great concept. Indeed, gating content behind population targets and city achievements isnât even a new idea (itâs a great way for players to make their own objectives in a genre where explicit ones often donât exist ) â but I donât really buy into.
Even some of the more interesting takes on the city sim formula are victim to oddities. the âDistrictâ zoning function comes with its own freeform brush, somewhat clunky in comparison to the regular zoning brushes. Its visual design is fantastic â the palette is clean and I absolutely adore the tilt shift used, since its âminiature fakingâ visual effect fully owns the feeling of controlling a little simulated city, just like the last SimCity did. However, the UI feels difficult at times. Iconography is sometimes unclear, text is uncomfortably small and scales poorly at lower resolutions. The sound design is acceptable, but the orchestral music can be dissonant and confusing, lacking the atmosphere and nuance of the likes of, say, Jerry Martin or Chris Tilton.
Despite my laundry list of minor gripes with this game, overall, Skylines has been made with a thorough understanding of the things that made city-building simulators great back in the day. Itâs not as deep or as rich in features as the games that it aspires to be, but its core mechanics are as solid as any other in its genre and for all its flaws, the game comes with the potential to easily fix them and become even better â which is a steal for its asking price.
Cities: Skylines was released on March 10 and is available through Steam, for the PC, Mac, and Linux.
Cities: Skylines Review â Reach for the Skyline It was clear from the beginning, when Cities: Skylines was announced at Gamescom 2014, that developer Colossal Order was banking on the void left by many recent city-building simulators.
