Simply paint a chunk of your city with the District tool, and you can not only name it so you can spot it easily on the map, but give it unique policies that regulate everything from mandating smoke detectors to reduce fire hazards (at a cost) to legalizing recreational drug use for lower crime rates, or banning highrise buildings to create defined downtown and suburban areas. With such large cities, it’s fantastic that Skylines allows you to define and regulate areas individually.
And while you can’t directly edit terrain while you play, there’s an included map editor where you can create any land mass you choose before you jump in - or download one from the prominently integrated Steam Workshop mod support. Suffice it to say, there’s plenty of room. Then it does this seven more times, for a total possible area of 36 square kilometers. Each game begins as deceptively small, constricting you to a four-square-kilometer area (the same size as a SimCity map, entirely by coincidence I’m sure), but quickly allows you to buy access to an adjacent plot of land of equivalent size. Cities: Skylines does that.The first way this sim knocks it out of the park is in its scale. Those basics are all tried and true - you couldn’t have a city-builder without them - so it’s mandatory that they be done well. Skylines finds a mostly happy medium between the complexity of SimCity 4 and the relative simplicity of SimCity 2013 by automatically attaching zoneable areas to roads as they’re laid, but still holding onto obligatory busywork like laying water pipes. It is truly one of the best games to be released in all of 2015.Playing as part mayor, part god-king with the power to arbitrarily bulldoze your simulated citizens’ dreams and create schools with a click, building a city from scratch is mostly conventional: lay down roads with the easy-to-use tools, designate zones for residential, commercial, or industrial buildings, provide utility services, reap the tax boon, then repeat the cycle with new stuff that’s been unlocked by your growing population hitting new milestones. It is easy to write off city-builders as unoriginal or repetitive, but Cities: Skylines pushes all the right buttons to create a marvelous gaming experience that has players returning for more. Colossal Order, the game's developers, have also provided quite a few updates to the game including an After Dark feature that allows players to see their city at night.Īll in all, Cities: Skylines is a game that I will play for years to come. One of my favorite cities I have crafted takes place on a user generated map of Hyrule from the Legend of Zelda.
The mod community has created a vast array of mods from prefabricated roads, to custom buildings, custom maps, mods to change game mechanics like traffic and of course mods for infinite money and unlocking all buildings from the start.
Mod support is a crucial part of the success of any PC game, and Cities: Skylines has done the community right. Being about to zoom in and follow one citizen around your city during the day truly elevates the immersion. The attention to detail and amazing graphics in the game are also very striking. Cities: Skylines executes on both of these attributes masterfully. It is important to be able to pick up and play this type of game, but it is equally important that the developers offer plenty of choice to create a truly immersive experience. I grew up playing Sim City on SNES and hadn't really been compelled by the city-building genre since Sim City 2000. Even after so many months since release I still find myself finding new ways to play the game, and I think that’s one of the greatest parts of a city-builder.Īsif Khan, Chief Executive Officer: Cities: Skylines was a very strong contender for my game of the year choice at the time of its release. I often find myself having to remove the idea of something looking good just to make it more efficient. Anyone can build a city, but not anyone can build a beautiful and successful city. It’s such a simple game to pick up and play. I think one of the best things about Skylines though is the “tough to master” learning curve. It’s a spectacular game to play, and it’s actually taken many of the components that we’ve seen in city-builders and made them simpler, and better to use. Skylines is basically everything that SimCity 2013 should have, and could have been if EA hadn’t ruined it. Enter Paradox Interactive, and the guys at Colossal, who completely revamped and renewed my love for city builders with Cities: Skylines. Josh Hawkins, Guides Editor: Way back in 2013 EA released SimCity, and completely trashed my favorite city-building sim. Coming in at #9 we have Cities: Skylines, a flexible sim game with hours upon hours of building enjoyment. This week Shacknews is counting down its top ten 2015 Games of the Year, as tabulated by both staff votes and input from our own Chatty community.