Developer: Colossal Order
Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Genre: City Building Sim
Players: 1
Console Reviewed: PC
Progress: Mayor of Blackthorn City (population 50,000)
Though we’re only in the first quarter of 2015, it’s turning out to be an exciting year for city-building sims. Earlier we reviewed the revamped Cities XXL which was a worthy, if uninspiring entry in the series. Now we have been blessed with a brand new take on the genre from a developer that burst onto the scene a few years ago with a duo of transportation simulators. As a civil engineer I am especially excited to evaluate the merits of city-building sims, not only by how they function as a video game, but also by how closely they can emulate reality in a fun way. The developer of Cities: Skylines is marketing this product as the ultimate anti-SimCity. They sought to make the definitive city-building sim that is everything that SimCity failed to be, without the destructive, toxic influence of Electronic Arts. Is this the revolution in city building that we have been waiting for? Is this the one sim to rule them all? Read on to find out.
With the litany of city-building sims available today, I was eager to dive into Cities: Skylines to see how the developer made their simulator stand out from the pack. City building is a complex venture to be sure, but a good sim can capture that complexity and refine it into a fun and easily understood process. The latest SimCity and Cities XXL do a decent job of this; therefore it is no surprise that Cities: Skylines liberally borrows much of their concepts and functions. It is immediately evident that the developers of Cities: Skylines have played other city-building sims, and that they love the genre. The benefit of being the 3rd major entry is that you can improve and fine-tune things that have worked in the past, while tossing the things haven’t. Cities: Skylines succeeds because of the sum of its many parts, and it shows potential to be truly great.
Readers will remember that I came down hard on my review of Cities XXL for its lack of a standout feature. Fortunately this is definitely not the case for Cities: Skylines, which stands out for one major reason. Never before have city-builders had so much control over the roadways and transportation systems, and this feature shines in several ways. Firstly, players have access to a huge number of roadway types with varying numbers of lanes and can choose from options such as tree-lined sidewalks, boulevards, parking curbs, or even sound barriers. Each of these options are not just for aesthetic purposes, they have pollution and noise implications for the surrounding area. Secondly, players are free to craft their own interchanges through the ability to pass multiple levels of roadways and ramps over and under each other by controlling their elevations. There are countless possibilities of interchanges you can make, which may range from the functionally simple all the way to the pretentiously bizarre. So versatile is this tool that I can see the creation of entire online communities of players showing off their unique interchanges. Thirdly, complete control is given over to the other forms of transportation as well, such as rail, water, and mass transit. Lastly, I found the road laying snap-to guides to be very helpful in properly spacing out the roads to maximize density. Overall, it’s not surprising that the studio that cut its teeth on transportation simulators could carry over such an impressive level of control of transportation systems to a city-building sim.
One thing I greatly disliked about the most recent SimCity was how it severely limited the size of your cities, such that you were forced to build multiple small specialized cities in a region. As I mentioned before in the Cities XXL review, this creates a disjointed experience of constantly jumping back and forth between cities attending to their individual needs. Thankfully Cities: Skylines throws out that idea and substitutes in a brand new innovative approach. You start out rather alarmingly with a small square plot of land, but as your city reaches population milestones, you are given opportunities to purchase additional equally-sized adjacent plots of land. As your population grows your city limits expand larger and larger, and not necessarily in a perfect square depending on which side of the city you want to expand. For example, if you want to take advantage of access to a river you can choose to push the city limits out in that direction. This is another example of the developer putting control over the destiny of your fiefdom firmly into your non-elected hands! Cities: Skylines gives you a large enough space to make your city formidable and self-sufficient, which is something I prefer to SimCity where I was always bumping against the edges. Cities: Skylines also improves upon the concept of city specializations. Instead of specializing different cities, a new innovative feature lets you specialize “districts” inside of your city. Inside these districts you can specify industries and policies that pertain only to the individual district and not to the city as a whole. These new features work pretty well and I feel like it could become the standard going forward. Cities: Skylines certainly cannot be faulted for not trying to innovate the genre and try new things.
Though I did not see a tutorial, Cities: Skylines helpfully guides you through the process of laying out the basics: roads, power, water, and zones. Its gets more complicated after that, but most things become unlocked gradually as you play, allowing you to become familiar with more advanced features as you go. If you get lost or confused, there is a great deal of help and information available nearly everywhere. Advisory buttons are embedded in each of the major city development tools, and almost everything displays a bite-sized tidbit of information if you simply click or hover over it. Such loving attention to enhancing playability does not go unnoticed as I found myself initially unaware of what things were or what they did. After getting over the learning curve, I found the menu system to be pretty well organized and compact enough to not take up too much of the screen, but the controls were not quite as smooth and polished as they are in SimCity. I made some rookie mistakes in my first couple of towns, but eventually I got the hang of it and soon my cities were growing as quickly as I could zone and build services. Overall, everything felt very familiar since all of the major city-building sims share a lot of the same basic premises.
One area where Cities: Skylines disappoints is in its visuals. I applauded Cities XXL for its beautiful attention to graphics both in the close-up high resolution building details and its stunning landscapes. In Cities: Skylines the environments look fairly decent, and there are some cool effects thrown in. For example, you can see the swift choppy waters of the rivers and the graceful sway of the trees. However when you zoom into the city you are hit with muddy colours and low-res textures, even at high graphics settings. It would have been nice if special buildings such as schools and police stations had a more distinctive appearance because I was often forgetting where I put them. They just don’t stand out at all from the muddy soup of buildings that rise out the zones around them. Thankfully, navigating views and panning around the map is smooth and intuitive and no problems were encountered.
The act of building a city in Cities: Skylines is fun and addicting. The game congratulates you for reaching population milestones and unlocks new buildings and features as your city grows. It is rewarding to watch your small village grow into a boomtown and later into larger cities. Once you achieve certain objectives, such as a large enough area of industrial or a certain number of educated citizens, you unlock special structures that further add to the dynamic of your city. By constantly rewarding me for my efforts I was always encouraged to keep trying to reach the next level. The in-game music ranges from pleasant background instrumentals to booming orchestral overtures with blaring brass horns. The music comes on a wee bit amplified and overbearing in my opinion, because in a game like this it shouldn’t be as distracting as it is. Luckily you are free to adjust the volume or turn the music off entirely. When zooming up close to ground level, the sounds of the bustling city in motion drown the music out, which is always a nice touch in a city-building sim. A quirky new feature in Cities: Skylines is the Chirper notification. Chirper is the Cities: Skylines version of Twitter, and as the mayor you receive chirps from your citizens that notify you of their general wants and needs. This feature occasional provides useful information, but most of the time the chirps are just silly and not particularly helpful ? just like the real Twitter!
Overall, Cities: Skylines is a fantastic city-building sim. It builds on the successes of its recent SimCity and Cities XXL brethren, and avoids falling into some the same traps that held them back. I was impressed with the plethora of options available for building roads and interchanges, which are light years ahead of anything I’ve seen before. Unfortunately, the graphical detail of Cities: Skylines is definitely not on par with its competitors, and the in-game music can be distracting at times, but the game functions well and has an adequate level of complexity that is not too difficult to understand if you have played city-building sims before. Newcomers may have a bit more trouble getting started, but Cities: Skylines was really meant for veterans who were frustrated with the SimCity debacle. I think they succeeded in crafting an excellent city-builder that will keep us busy for years to come.
[taq_review]
A review code for the game was provided to us by its publishers.