Gamers of a certain vintage will remember with fondness the SimCity franchise from the 80s and 90s. At the time, the idea of plonking down blocks of zoning to create thriving and towns was just mind-boggling... the detail of simulation was laughable by today's standards (just as the kids of the future will laugh at our current cutting edge technology), but for a young mind, the city was alive and bustling.

Fast forward to the present, and the SimCity franchise is dead and buried, with countless attempts to recapture the magic of town and city building having fallen by the wayside. Sim gamers are a pretty picky and demanding breed of gamer!

The most successful of the city builder simulators has been Cities: Skylines (developed by Colossal Order) which was released in 2015 by Paradox Interactive. Paradox has long been known for the in-depth historical simulators... so if any publishing house could back a serious city simulator, this would be it. Even if it would be a bit clunky at launch and followed by countless expansions and DLC that would hopefully polish the game to a beautiful gem!

I've had this game in my library for ages... I've started it a couple of times, but would get distracted. Recently, my oldest daughter saw it and asked about it... and now we've been playing it quite a bit... she has her own town and I have my own, and we play on different computers in the same room... sharing stories of our developing cities! Even my wife has a town!

The Setup

With this genre of game... there is no story or set up other than what your desires and imagination guide you to build. You are dumped into a land area of your own choosing (from the preset templates or generated), with a highway connection and a wad of cash. From there... you are free to do whatever you want!

I have built a town that is more like a conventional modern city, with a grid-like structure for the streets and arterial roads for longer distance traffic. I like to think of it as efficient and optimised, whilst my wife thinks it looks ugly and that she would hate to live there.

Meanwhile, my wife has started to build her own little green utopia. Low growth, lots of green area and all of that. It's like a quaint small town, very nice place to live! Aside from the poop water...

The Game

At it's most basic, you are trying to entice new residents to come into your town by making your city the most attractive option for them to live in. To do this, you will need to provide the basic public services (health, education and other infrastructure) for them to live out their lives in comfort.

You can only directly build the public infrastructure (roads, water, electricity, garbage...) and public services (police, fire stations, education, health...) through a huge variety of different building and transport types. Thankfully, the game does drip feed these building types to you as you get more citizens, so that you aren't overwhelmed at the beginning by a gigantic wealth of things to choose from!

After that, you can zone areas in the familiar RCI (Residential, Commercial, Industrial) colours that are inherited from Sim City. Everything that happens in there is an indirect result of your city planning and policies. Maybe people will arrive to study and live and work in a eco-friendly high tech city... or a small town defined by agriculture? It all depends on how you build the city and how your provide services and policies.

Although the roads and other transport routes handle curves with no problems, the zoning and buildings are always built to a grid, which is a bit of a disappointment. Of course, it doesn't really matter too much... unless you are a person who gets bothered by the empty space! On hte other hand, it is only noticeable in the zoning mode... you can't see it normally.

How you place your buildings and transport network will determine how easy it is for citizens to access services. Or conversely, how easy it is for public services like garbage trucks and fire engines to get out into the neighbourhood to do their jobs.

Much like the original SimCity, balancing the various zoning demands (Residential, Commercial and Industrial) is the key to keeping your city growing steadily. People need houses and jobs, and industry and commerce need workers of various education levels to staff them. It's a constant balancing act, as building a new zoning area will invariably tip the balance and have cascading effect throughout the town.

The initial starting area for your town is a single city plot. You very quickly unlock the ability to purchase another expansion plot, but you can see easily see that the single plot is more than big enough for quite some time!

Plonking down buildings and zoning areas is not the only job for a budding mayor. Keeping services adequately funded is a key priority. You can pinch a few pennies here and there if you need to, but it will have ramifications for your citizens. Likewise, you can gold plate everything....

Many of the services also have more granular settings as well. For instance, you can zoom into an individual bus line and increase or decrease it's funding level to provide more or less buses. In these cases, it sticks to a slider interface, which is a little bit counter-intuitive. It should just have the number of buses that you are wanting, and not trying to slide the funding up and down until you get the buses that you want!

One of the keys to keeping the city running is the taxation levels that you will set on the various zoning areas. Too high and you will deter people from settling into your town, too low and your budget will plummet quickly into the red. You can adjust this on the fly, in case you need to prioritise a particular type of development.

Sometimes, you will need an emergency loan to tide you over a nasty spot... like if you forget to build a cemetery and people are leaving because there are dead bodies in shops. However, you have run out money and can't build the cemetery and so there is no way that you can step the outward flow of people (and tax dollars...).

Various civic policies can affect the well-being or preferences of your citizens as well. From eco-friendly policies through to those that favour productivity... these will have knock-on effects for your development and happiness of your town.

The overlays are a critical part of identifying weaknesses that need to be shored up in your city. There is a basic flow mechanic for water and winds, so this is critical to examine and understand before you start placing sewage and wind turbines. Hence... poop water...

The overlays will also show the efficiency and coverage of your services. It took me a little bit to untangle the two... coverage can still be decent enough, even if the service efficiency (mostly determined by transport access) is not stellar.

Whilst building a new building, the game will switch immediately to the appropriate overlay for that building. This gives you are real-time estimate of the effects of that building as you move the proposed building site around the map.

With some services, you are looking not so much for 100% efficiency and coverage, but some level of risk and budget balance. This is most notable in the fire and policing departments, where you won't be able to have perfect coverage and efficiency unless you are wanting to spend a crazy amount of money. So, the occasional fire is okay...

Education is the trickiest metric to handle, with several levels of education to juggle (primary, secondary and university). Different types of industry and commerce will require differing mixes of workers. Although it is tempting to have everyone university educated, there will be a distinct lack of workers to man the supermarkets... which makes them close, and then people will get unhappy as you can't eat computer chips! Cue the cascade...

The biggest mechanic that will affect your city will be the transportation network. It is the blood of your city, the means by which your citizens get around and live their simulated lives. Traffic needs to be managed, via a combination of policies, smart road building and public transport. A city in gridlock will choke to death...

... and thankfully, this is where Skylines really shines! I've never had so much fun trying to plan out decent bike paths and road infrastructure, and mapping out individual bus and metro routes!

There is a relatively undeveloped natural resources mechanic based upon the resources that you have on your map. You can district zones to direct them towards a particular type of industry... forestry or agriculture for instance. It's something that can be better developed, as the benefits of doing this aren't completely clear... unless you are playing the game more as a roleplaying sort of experience.

Visuals, Sound and Performance

I currently have Skylines playing on 3 different computers (admittedly, a bit more high end than the average computer). It is a beautiful game, that DOES require a dedicated GPU... no integrated Intel graphics. Although you will spend most of your time in the overlays and zoning... there are movements where you can just sit back and let your citizens build... and you can zoom in and sweep around your town and just drink in the simulation.

You can even follow an individual citizen as they go around their daily lives... once I accidentally followed a seagull.

The music is quite calming as befitting a simulation game, but tends to blend into the background. Likewise with the sound effects of building.

If I have a particular gripe, it is the day night cycle. It's a nice touch, but I do find that the night part of the cycle is a good deal uglier than the daytime part of it! In fact, I start to dread the night... as it starts to get hard to pick out individual buildings!

My Thoughts

Skylines is a city simulation game that builds upon the ideas of SimCity, and does it mostly with success. It has a pretty easy to grasp interface, which does front for some pretty deep mechanics. However, there are certain mechanics that are much better developed than others. This unevenness does start to break the immersion of the simulation, but like most things, your imagination starts to fill the gaps.

Expansions and DLCs have polished and enhanced certain areas that were neglected in the initial launch... this is pretty much par of the course for any Paradox game. Some of those developments have even been released for free into the base game as well... however, the cost of a complete expansion package is pretty eye-watering. There are good chunk of cosmetic DLC, which are skippable, but there are few "must-have" expansions... and for that you will be looking in the order of 50 euros, so keep your eye out for sales!

My wife and older daughter have fallen in love with the game, it's very much like building your own dream LEGO city... and they can be a tough audience! So, a game that appeals to a much wider audience than the usual teenage boy stereotype... a worthy goal, and something that should always be supported if we want our medium to be more widely accepted!

Review Specs

DELL XPS15 (9560)

CPU: i7-7700HQ
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: SSD
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050

Played at 1080p (144Hz) on:

XMG Fusion 15

CPU: Intel Core i7-9750H
RAM: 16 GB
Storage: SSD (SATA/Nvme)
GPU: Nvidia GTX 2070 Max-Q

Intel BX80662I76700 Core i7-6700 Prozessor (3,4GHz)
6GB EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC GAMING
GIGABYTE Z170N-WIFI
Ballistix Sport LT 16GB DDR4
Samsung 960 EVO M.2 512GB
S4 Mini Case (NFC Systems)

Splinterlands (aka the best blockchain game out there!)

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