is being heralded as the game Sim City should have been. It's got a slick, streamlined look that makes it a breeze to micromanage budding metropolises of all shapes and sizes. After spending 20-odd hours with the game I learned a few things. Mainly, that I cannot handle large amounts of responsibility. But also, that Cities: Skylines gets less fun the longer you play.
Don't mistake my tone. I'm not saying Cities: Skylines is a bad game. Far from it. It's a wonderful conceptualization of a genre that monopolized itself into a funk. The Sim City franchise had a stranglehold on the genre. Sure, titles like Tropico were able to siphon some of the audience but if you asked gamers to name a city-building title the overwhelming response would be Sim City.
Until now.
Cities: Skylines executes on a number of levels. The UI is simple and direct. At a glance players can discern where the traffic jams are, what resources are on neighboring plots of land and how educated the populace has become. Construction happens automatically and near instantly. Specialized buildings, like hospitals and bus depots, place immediately. The general sprawl grows over time in appropriate, color-coded zones. Residential, commercial and industrial sections are painted along roadways and, early on, it's a pleasure to sit and watch things grow.
Then shit gets real.
Cities: Skylines, for all its entry-level simplicity, slowly reveals itself to be a maddeningly complex game. If you're a gamer who thrives on extended micromanagement then Cities: Skylines is a win-win. If you're a more casual fan of the city builder, like me, then you'll find yourself loving the first few hours of growth but despising the management of a population once it gets around the 20k mark.
The primary reason for this is a steep learning curve. Early on, Cities: Skylines provides plenty of helpful pop-ups as to what's going on and what services are important. You hit population milestones frequently, earning a nice chunk of cash and unlocking better services. You get lulled into a false sense of accomplishment and the moment you think you have a nice plan in place everything goes catastrophically wrong.
You'll inadvertently poison groundwater. You'll fail to allocate enough money for extended trash removal or cemeteries. Your industries will collapse because of a lack of workers, or a lack of educated workers. Basically, out of the blue, a whole bunch of icons you don't understand will suddenly spring up across your different zones. Then you'll go looking for help online.
The forums for Cities: Skylines are great. But just take a look at this 60+ image tutorial on managing traffic to get a sense for how in-depth the late game strategy needs to be. The author is (allegedly) a traffic engineer. When I need the help of an actual city planner to play my city planning game I start to lose interest.
Cities: Skylines is easy to learn but tough to master, the hallmark of any decent game. My issue is that in the multiple sessions I created, I seemed to cross a line into not-fun territory after just a few hours. Management got tedious, not challenging, and I would no longer care about maintaining my city. The best part of Cities: Skylines is watching your city grow from nothing to 10-15k residents. After that it becomes too complex to casually play so, instead of spending more hours scouring forums for tips, I'd just start another city.
Cities: Skylines is a well designed game that appeals to casuals on the surface but builds its long-term gameplay around hardcore devotion. If you're looking for a city builder game you could do much worse. But I'd steer casuals to the Tropico franchise, with its lighthearted dictatorship storyline and smaller maps. If you want a complex city builder that requires a major time commitment and a fair amount of research, you'll love this game.
I didn't.
