Just from a visual standpoint, you can produce a truly impressive metropolis, and there’s quite a bit of replay value when it comes to building different styles of cities or going after the many challenging trophies the game has to offer. Watching buildings and other fixtures in your city magically rise up as you develop zones and districts is unbelievably satisfying, and beyond that, it becomes an addictive prospect making little improvements here and there to improve efficiency and the lives of your citizens. The good news is that, once you’ve actually got the hang of everything, Cities: Skylines becomes an absolute joy to play.

I ended up doing a lot of research on the Internet myself to see how others were getting things to work without making a complete mess of their cities, but that’s no replacement for actual in-game instruction. I could have used some concrete examples on how to, say, place water pipes in an organized manner so they’re reaching all the houses in a residential district.

You can click R3 in to get a bit of text information on individual objects you can place, which is useful enough, but that doesn’t eliminate some of the early trial-and-error. Not being a huge fan of the genre, I realize some of my problems were just not being familiar with how these games generally work, but I really think an optional tutorial system could have gone a long way here. Getting used to all this is an intimidating nightmare as a newcomer. It does, however, mean you’re responsible for knowing where buildings need to go, what they need for resources, and so on and so forth.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to take a break from building to perform surgery or anything. The key difference, of course, is that real cities have tens of thousands of people working together in a variety of areas of expertise, while this simulation puts you in the position of being an expert on everything from waste disposal to medical treatment. The only difference is that I’m not sure it’s really my fault this time.Ĭities: Skylines is all about making a set of complex systems come together in a harmonious way - you know, rather like building a real city.

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