Cities Skylines Review

Do you know Sims City? Well to simply introduce Cities Skylines, it is basically like Sims City except it is nothing like Sims City. The concept for both games is quite similar, it is a city-building game, but for Cities Skylines, it is a "heavy" city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive in 2015. I bought the game from a friend a couple of years ago and never touched it until I have the time to play it a couple of weeks ago. It is a different game from other city-building games that I've ever played before.

When you launch the game, you'll start by choosing your map. You can choose a couple of maps that already come up with the base game, or you can buy the DLC to unlock more maps that fit to play. You can also download maps from the community workshop where there're tons of maps you can choose from. In the workshop, there're copies of maps from real-life that you can use in the game like Boulder Rapids, Copper Creeks, and many more.

After choosing the land and play the game, you'll start by following the tutorial that are popping out left and right of your screen. I see a lot of text from the tutorial that contains useful information but since I'm lazy enough to read it or didn't even realize it exists, I skip it or ignore it. The game really needs to improve their tutorial since the texts are too long and people like me have a higher chance to ignore it. They also need to improve their UI to create better UX since it is not pleasing to read all the texts that are popping everywhere on my screen. I prefer the game to guide me to create a simple zoning district and basic building before I explore more about the game. Since I skipped the tutorial, I ask my friend to teach me how the game works and the mechanics so I can understand and play it like a normal city builder.

Before I ask my friend to teach me, I already can understand some basic concepts of city-building games. You create a road that connects to an existing highway network so people can start entering your city just like the real world and not suddenly comes out of nowhere. You'll understand the basic mechanic of power and water usage in the early stage of the game. From the power building and water building, you can start building your first house by zoning an area adjacent to your already built road.

In the game, there're four types of zoning districts that can grow into a residential zone, commercial zone, industrial zone, and office zone. At the start, you can only build a low-density residential zone, low-density commercial zone, and industrial zone. After a couple of milestones when you reach a certain amount of population, you can then build a high-density residential zone, high-density commercial zone, and office zone. The progression of different types of zoning will make sense later when I talk about other mechanics of the game.

As you progress through the city milestone, you'll unlock various types of buildings. It's better for you to start building your first elementary school. An elementary school has a major purpose to educate your citizen since non of your citizen are educated at the start of your city. An educated citizen can work in a better place for some commercial and industrial districts. Having educated citizen takes time to graduate so it's better to build the elementary school first before other buildings. If you reach a high population milestone, you can start building a high school and university to create a well and highly-educated citizen that can work in an office and get paid even more. Little note, that educated citizens will also reduce the garbage waste than the uneducated ones.

You also need to manage citizen health and garbage disposal. You can build a clinic for first and hospital after reach a milestone. A clinic will keep your citizens healthier and take care of the sick ones, it can also make citizens happier. You also need to build a landfill site to dump all garbage inside. At certain milestone, you can build an incineration plant that can burn the garbage and produces a small amount of power for your city, it could really help to eliminate the garbage and not to fill the landfill.

There're a lot of building that you can build as you progress through the milestones, buildings like parks, fire stations, police stations, transportation services, and many more. Every building has its own purpose and service to make your citizen happy and grow your city. At an early milestone, you also maintain their tax to make your citizen pay an amount of money for you to grow your city. Of course, don't tax your citizen too much or they will complain and leave the city.

What I struggle with the game is the traffic jam. The game is so realistic that every vehicle has a different purpose and destination, just like in real life. The problem is I don't have enough knowledge of how to maintain the traffic issues in my city because it is so hard to maintain the traffic issue near my industrial district. Industrial district because the district needs resources from outside since I didn't have the resources available in the city. So many trucks with useful resources coming into the city and that's what makes my industrial district so traffic, not to mention citizen who comes to the industrial district to work.

The way the city work in the game and in real life are very similar, it's just like you're really managing a growing city. I even think about how this game manages to not lag my computer where there's a lot going on in the city. It is a good job for the programmer team to not lag a decent computer since there's a lot to load in this game. But still, I assume there will be some lag at the end game where the city becomes alike New York City.

Even this is the most realistic city-building game I've ever played, there's also a flaw. You can see your city grow in the zoning district like the building starts animate with the base and building up as you play your city. Unfortunately, there're service buildings like the police station, clinic, and more that don't have the building animation. So if you have some fire problem in your city, you can just place a fire department and your problem is solved and let your firefighter do the jobs. For me, I wanted to see how the fire department takes time to build to make it realistic. Also, a situation like I mentioned before cannot happen. The player must be prepared for everything in the city before the disaster happens, just like a real city, not just an easy fix by spending money and build.

I want to mention the community side of the game. The game has a large community workshop on Steam that can provide maps, mods, and assets. You can download various maps from the workshop and play the map for free, so you don't need a DLC to play more maps. Mods can help you to maintain and build your city. There're some mods that are very useful that should be included in the base game, but unfortunately, there aren't. Assets can provide you with custom buildings like American-style buildings or Asian-style buildings. There's a lot of assets option you can choose from start to the end of the world and the community keeps making more assets for you to play with.

So far I enjoy how City Skylines taking my free time where I can grow my own city like in real life. I even wonder if this game could be considered a serious city-building simulation game because of how realistic this game is. The game is available since 201 5 and a lot of DLCs that can improve your city by adding other features like having a zoo, park, campus, and other more interesting features. I highly recommend it for those who love playing city-building or just a park managing game to play this game. You'll struggle to follow the mechanic at the start, but when you understand enough the mechanic, you'll start enjoying the game more.

Currently, in my city, I'm still having a big problem with my traffic issues and haven't reached the highest milestone yet. So I'm just going to leave it here and continue playing again to reach the highest milestone.