

I love how you can build sidewalks and paths between buildings, and then drop individual trees to create tiny, freestyle parks. I love how you can painlessly elevate roads to create expressways. Probably the highlight of the game for me is just many tools and options there are for customisation. Being able to manually assign bus routes and subway lines feels great, like you've got more precise control over the movement of the people in the city. Public transport is one 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.

There's a surprising amount of micromanagement in the game once you progress and pick at it, and while some of it sucks (more on that below), other parts are great. You'll do some very big things, like planning entire regions and suburbs, but you'll also be doing some very small things. Instead of trying to somehow depict this as "real", or even video gamey, Skylines shoots for something more tangible, and it plays a big part in how much I enjoyed just scrolling around the streets of my city, basking in the cuteness and order of it all.

This might sound trivial, but it's really, really cool! After all, your job as a player in these kind of games is to operate as a God-like figure crafting a fake city out of nothingness. But it sets out to recreate the vibe of a model city/toy railway, and it absolutely nails it, from the bright colour palette to the fact it even has a tilt-shift setting in its menu. Not in a "video game graphics" kind of way even with the settings maxxed out everything still gets a little blocky (anti-aliasing just isn't really there). We'll get to why this is a bad idea a little later.Ĭities: Skylines is a gorgeous video game. Some will unlock all the land area, others will unlock every unique building, others granting you unlimited cash, while one flips all that and turns on a "hard mode".
Cities skylines vs simcity mods#
If you are struggling, though, the game ships with a few mods you can activate to change things up. The game's demand displays (indicating how many homes you need to build, etc) did the trick and I always had a steady flow of cash coming in, so I'd always have money for the next road or building or bus station or whatever the hell else I wanted/needed to build. I built three cities in total in my time with Skylines, and not once did I run into money trouble. The game's default difficulty setting is pretty damn easy, and that's good news for artists and builders. Below, however, you'll see that it doesn't even take up half the available territory. It's a huge city, big enough that it's spawned secondary business centres and some industrial/rural communities. Trust me, if you've filled in every area you can eventually unlock, you have made one hell of a big city.Ībove is the result of that week. I mean, those walls are out there eventually, but I've been playing this game non-stop for over a week now and haven't come close to hitting the map's limits. You never feel constrained, like you need to pack a certain area in because you'll run into an invisible wall. It gets to the point where you can start building satellite communities just for the hell of it, because your primary city is so damn big. Skylines begins small, but as your city grows, you're able to unlock more and more of the surrounding countryside. If you despised SimCity for its tiny scale, this is not a tiny game. Straight roads, curved roads, designated office blocks, districts with their own tax rules, it's all at your fingertips. Never before have I felt like I could just walk up to an enormous tract of land, open up some tools and just.build whatever I wanted, however I wanted. Good news first! If you play city-building games to, well, build cities, this is the best you can get. Regardless of what you've been hoping for, whether you've been interested in Skylines because of the developer's pedigree (they made the excellent Cities In Motion) or to fill a Maxis-sized hole in your library, I've got some news. So there's a surprising amount of excitement and expectation for Colossal's attempt at fixing SimCity's mistakes. The People want a good city-building game to play, and it's been a long time since they got one.

Cities: Skylines is a game coming in hot.
