Cities: Skylines (PC)

The original SimCity and other games like it hold a special place in my heart. As a child, our family computer couldn’t really support high-end gaming. We could play games like SimCity, however, without too much trouble. I was never able to build my city to that fabled futuristic level, largely because I found the game unforgiving of mistakes, or because of my own inability to think long-term in city layout. Cities: Skylines, a city-builder from Swedish strategy masters Paradox Interactive and developed by Finnish games studio Colossal Order (Cities in Motion) turns out to be a thoroughly enjoyable sandbox game, even though it is plagued by the same issues that have annoyed fans of city-building sims since the beginning. For long-time city-building fans, it offers nostalgic appeal and delivers in ways that the 2013 SimCity could not. It also offers lots of freedom to build for those new to genre.

Point and Click

This broad range in choice is not overwhelming. Despite having no tutorial, Skylines does ease the player into the depth of what can be built by including a city leveling system based on population. As your population increases, your city levels up and allows access to additional buildings, zones, road types, etc. While this isn’t a substitute for a tutorial, it doesn’t overwhelm the player with options, either. Even necessary services such as police or fire are not available right away. I greatly enjoyed this "RPG" aspect of the game. Sandbox games are not for everyone, and this particular attribute is a simple way to attract gamers who are more attracted to more progressively linear or types of games with their periodic advancement.

Another satisfying aspect of Skylines is the way you can specialize your industries. Industrial zones may specialize in one particular field, either as a whole or just the districts you pick, exploiting the map’s natural resources. Since you cannot interact with the map through terraforming, as in some of the older SimCity games, specialization makes makes it important to be familiar with the map specs you spawn at the beginning. Depending on the map, you may incorporate foresting, oil exploitation, ore mining, or farming into your city. Each has a cost-benefit relationship with your city in terms of  pollution, water and energy costs, education, and tax income. For example, oil as you can imagine gives the greatest tax income but also the greatest pollution output and electricity requirements, and on top of that it's non-renewable. On the other hand, foresting grants a decent tax bump, requires little electricity, and is renewable but produces substantial noise pollution. Industry specialization is only for additional tax income and is not required to advance your city’s level.

Designing Traffic Jams

Road expansion more or less favors using the most recent transportation level in each new area. This leads to massive traffic issues for the city as a whole, and I think this is something the developers really need to address. Essentially, the road system as whole is not in sync. Six-lane roads may suddenly drop to four or even two lanes for no apparent reason, causing massive congestion. The AI doesn’t seem to operate on an “avoid traffic” system. Instead, the shortest (but not necessarily the easiest or fastest) route is used, regardless of traffic. And unless you have an incredible income to overhaul your city, you can't actually redesign the road system. Honestly, this "challenge" of the game may prove quite annoying for some players, while it might be a dream puzzle for others.

For example, after I started my second city, I built up a population over 25,000 with more than $4 million in the bank, with no signs of stopping or slowing down. I couldn’t expand quickly enough. I was even bulldozing and adding additional hospitals, schools, etc. in older districts to up the property value and make sure all my areas were covered. Despite all this, a plague of some sort hit the city (still not sure how) and suddenly I noticed my hospitals were overwhelmed and nearly 25% of my city became ill overnight. I was dumping money into building new clinics, hospitals, crematoriums, and graveyards. I lost track of the number I was building because I was just bulldozing and building as fast as I could...all the while bleeding money out of my $4.5 million surplus. My city was largely abandoned, the population was down to around 11,000, and my surplus was down to around $100,000. Eventually, I went into the red with abandoned buildings all around. Why? Because my city traffic was so bad that the hearses and ambulances couldn’t get anywhere, so people were dying and being left in their homes causing more illness. My industrial and commercial sectors were almost completely abandoned due to the lack of a workforce. Since population is a city-wide figure rather than tied to individual districts, even areas apparently untouched by the illness were abandoned, one would assume because people live in one place and work all the way across town. This may be more realistic, but it makes for poor gameplay and lessens the impact of creating districts in the first place. And as side note: there is no day/night sequence, so traffic is constant and unrelenting.

Tied closely with the traffic issues is the lack of a built-in auto-bulldoze or reconstruction function. Abandoned buildings are extremely annoying in this game. In my city, the entire industrial sector was abandoned. The game will only bulldoze abandoned buildings automatically if there is a high demand for that property type. In a dying city, this isn’t possible. But, you can't create demand without bulldozing to increase property values again. So, you’re stuck clicking and bulldozing each individual structure. I chose to just give up on my city because how many building were abandoned (check out the screenshots).

Landscaping

The music isn’t anything to write home about, but fits perfectly with your growing city. Building construction, traffic rushing around, and industry growth all seem to unfold along with the music. The ambient city noise can get a little annoying, though. Everything from horns, sirens, people’s voices, rushing wind, etc. all come to flood your ears...just like in a real city. The level of realism here is almost too much. I turned off much of the sound effects after ten minutes and just let the music play.