Cities: Skylines Reviews
Colossal Order's 'Cities: Skylines' is an entertaining city building game on a scale like no other, and it may be a perfect replacement for 'SimCity'.
Cities: Skylines isn't perfect, but it's an excellent city builder and a great launch for developer Colossal Order. There a few control issues, a lack of key features explanations for new players, and the building currently lack the complexity found in SimCity 4 or SimCity (2013), but I still sunk hours into the game and will sink many more. With a strong mod community, I'm sure Cities: Skylines will look great for years to come.
Cities: Skylines successfully caters for the audience left disappointed by SimCity with a level of accessibility tailored for casual city builders, combined with enough substance to delight veterans of the genre.
Skylines opens up the genre to players old and new with a user-friendly interface, intricately designed mechanics and enormous maps for maximum player creativity. One of the best.
Cities: Skylines definitely scratches that city-building itch that has been left in a void for too long. If you decide that being a mayor of a city is the path for you, be prepared to have the hours zing by as you delve into a deep experience that will reward you for your efforts. If SimCity 2013 disappointed you, look into Cities: Skylines for that band-aid.
Cities: Skylines is the city-building game we all wanted, but never got -- until now.
Cities: Skylines is the best experience for a gamer who wants to play a modern city builder that has a solid set of mechanics and manages to avoid all the traps that have sunk the reboot of SimCity created by Maxis and Electronic Arts.
That distinction between the two doesn't retroactively make SimCity a better game. A failure is still a failure. It does, however distinguish a visionary-but-broken game and one that works enough to please an itch without pushing boundaries. Skylines is a merely competent game that's smart enough to let the community innovate for it. All its problems and all its genuine innovation will come from the creative ambition of its players. It's comforting in a way, because with that you feel that you share your struggles with a larger community, but there's still the nagging feeling Cities: Skylines lacks a magic of its own.
Cities: Skylines is how city-building games ought to be. It's fun, it's pretty, it's easily approachable, yet, difficult to master. It doesn't have all the features that one might dream of in the perfect city-building simulator, but it does absolute wonders with what it does have.
Let me put it this way—Cities: Skylines made a sim game fun for me, and that's quite a feat. Though it's not something I would normally play, I had a lot of fun fiddling around with the options and just figuring out how things worked. I didn't feel like my hand was being held, but I also didn't feel like I was being asked to fly a transcontinental flight just because I had watched a documentary about World War II fighter planes. Maybe it's not the most accurate city simulation, but in my opinion, it's definitely the most fun.
The true successor to the SimCity legacy, and even though it only restates what was great about the original it still does a better job than the last decade or so of official games.
Cities: Skylines provides solid city management for the right price. And with strong mod support, its few shortcomings in gameplay and content variety will likely be resolved by the community itself.
It doesn't necessarily offer a lot that won't be found in other city-building games, but what it does offer is an open, friendly play-world where gamers can do what they want and have fun doing it. Cities: Skylines doesn't push its audience around or ask too much of them - where similar games might have forced online connectivity or reliance on fussy AI, Cities: Skylines instead opens its arms and asks players to come in, call the shots, and have a blast.
"Cities: Skylines" brings us forward, while looking over the shoulder and providing an ever so slight nod to the proud history of city management games.
Cities: Skylines comes highly recommended.
Uptown fun.
It is, after all, the best city simulator released since aeons before, and with signs of a lot more to come from the mod community and the developers, the future is looking seriously bright for Cities: Skylines that could see it become the king of city simulation.
With Cities: Skylines, you have the chance to plan the city of your dreams, complete with a complex road sysem and economic infrastructure. However, the game's steep learning curve and vague status feedback might put-off a lot of would-be mayors.
Colossal Order has created one of the most enjoyable city builders in recent memory and despite its small budget, Cities: Skylines celebrates the joy of building in enjoyable fashion.
Ultimately there's less micro-management in Cities: Skylines than in SimCity, but it in no way feels like something cut-down or "cloney." No, Cities: Skylines is its own game - an impressive feat considering the lineage of the genre.