Cities: Skylines

by Mikhail Jun 6, 2020 | 1 Votes | 33 Played | 0 Reviews

10 rate

Genres:

Simulation

Graphics:

Labels:

City Building

Platforms:

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101xp Cities: Skylines is one of PlayStation Plus’ free games for May 2020. Here, you’ll build your own city, manage your citizens’ happiness, and plan everything, from city zoning, traffic, and water and sewage. Create wonders and parks to entertain your residents and be the best mayor there is today. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/Sound Conclusion

Summary

Cities: Skylines undoubtedly the best and most intricate city-building simulator today. Developed by Paradox (known for the Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis series), the game lets you become the mayor of your own city. From a plot of land, you’ll then turn it into a thriving city of your own design. You’ll build roads, manage citizens’ happiness, build basic public institutions, and conduit buildings for outside trade. Moreover, you’ll plan out the layout of the city, including where to place residential, commercial, and industrial zones.

Cities: Skylines has a large learning curve. Though essentially is a simulator, it requires a lot of strategic thinking and a lot of studying, especially when managing traffic routes and acting as an urban designer. Regardless, it’s worth mastering: seeing the results of your hard work and design pay off is a great feeling. The game gives you free rein to exercise your creativity and try out new things.

The thing is, will it be something you’d actually want to play? Let’s check out what it has to offer:

Plotline

There’s no set plot in Cities: Skylines, although your story is you get to play as a mayor tasked with building and facilitating the growth of the city. From there, you’ll start building the city - and its story - from scratch. Citizens may end up complaining about the lack of basic services and crime rates and even openly praise the city using a Twitter-like app which shows banners airing the thoughts of the citizens.

Gameplay

The gameplay loop in Cities: Skylines is fairly simple. You’ll select from several land selections, each with different amounts of resources and landscape. For example, you can pick locations with islands, a forested area, one with a large amount of oil, and finally, one with access to a number of beaches. Note that your selection needs to depend on the type of city you want to build. It’s best to select land with the resources you want to harvest. Pick one with large farming plots to build a farming community, while if you want to make your city invest in fossil fuels, pick one with huge deposits of oil.

After you’ve selected the land you want to build the city in, the next step is to work on it. You’ll start by connecting roads to the main highway. After this, you’ll build/zone residential, commercial, and industrial areas. There’s a bit of strategy involved here: you need to put some distance between industrial and residential areas so you’ll have happier citizens. Building more roads will give you more chances to expand.

In between zoning, you’ll also need to build basic services like schools, hospitals, police stations, and fire services. Moreover, you’ll also have to micromanage traffic and public transportation by creating train stations, subways, bus routes, and taxi stands. It can get confusing and extremely challenging, especially since at the same time, you have to manage the economy. Moreover, you need to keep morale high among citizens by building parks, sports stadiums, and even wonders like towers and large shopping malls.

Considering that it’s a simulation game with a strategy-like presentation, the controls may seem to be a concern. However, Cities: Skylines managed to streamline the controls and the user interface. You can access various menus and move around the map with a few taps and you can navigate around as easy as using a mouse and keyboard. All in all, it’s a fantastic port.

Unfortunately, there is a bit of a downside. In true Paradox Interactive fashion, the game has a lot of DLCs. To be fair, the base game gives you a lot of content and features, but the experience is monumentally enhanced if you have the other chunks of content. With the right DLC, you’ll have access to more modes of transportation and even snow-themed maps.

Community

Cities: Skylines is a completely singleplayer game, although it has a thriving community of creators. You can look for tips and inspiration online, especially on YouTube and various forums to get a clear idea of the things you can definitely create. Checking out the community will drastically lessen the learning curve, so doing so is highly recommended.

Graphics/Sound

Cities: Skylines presentation elements is nothing short of fantastic. On the PS4, it holds up fairly well although you’ll notice some issues as your city’s population grows upwards to 50,000. You can admire your city from afar, but you can also scale down and view it street by street where you can see individuals walking around and going about their day.

Conclusion

Overall, Cities: Skylines is a must-play, even for those who aren’t excited about playing a city simulator. It’s an outstanding city-simulator with a lot of depth, offering PS4 players a lot of customization elements and pieces to create a fully unique city that you can be proud of. Thanks to its seamless controls that lessens the learning curve, you can quickly grasp the mechanics and enjoy what it has to offer.

New Game Added: Cities: Skylines

by Mikhail Jun 6, 2020

Cities: Skylines is one of PlayStation Plus’ free games for May 2020. Here, you’ll build your own city, manage your citizens’ happiness, and plan everything, from city zoning, traffic, and water and sewage. Create wonders and parks to entertain your residents and be the best mayor there is today.