Alex24's Cities: Skylines Review

After playing 26 hours of Skylines I want to sum up my experience in this review:

1. Introduction
2. Gameplay

a) Roads
b) Zones
b) Districts and Policies
c) Public Transport
d) Education, Health, Secrurity
e) Water, Waste and Energy
f) Parks and Decoration
g) Economy and Resources
h) Milestons and Areas
i) Info View and Statistics​

3. Graphics
4. Music and Sound
5. Modding and Customization

1. Introduction

Cities: Skylines was developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. Colossal Order is mostly famous for the transport simulations Cities in Motion and Cities in Motion 2. Thus they have some experience needed for the development of a city simulation. You can clearly see that in the simulation of traffic. But you can also see in many ways that Sim City was a big inspiration for the developers. However Colossal Order did their job a lot better than Maxis. Although there doesn't seem to be much influence from Cities XL. You will find a lot of comparisons to other games in this review




2. Gameplay

The Gameply is where Skylines is best at. They considered the most important aspects for a city simulation and added some great features you won't find in other similar games. The simulation is balanced and makes an overall good impression, though there are still some bugs to be solved.

a) Roads

Placing roads is pure amusment! There are 3 different methods to place roads. The first one is the straight road. Pretty straight forward... straight... NOT. E.g. if you want to make a exit the game supports you by making it a bit curvy. On the one hand this is helping you a lot, on the other hand it's no 100 % straight mode.




The next options are curved roads and free-form roads. They are easy to handle and make some really nice results.




You can decide between small roads, medium roads, large roads and highways. Every road got a pure concrete version, another one with grass and a tree version. Small and large roads have one-way roads. They highway is placed in seperate lanes and got a version with sound barriers. Sadly there are no exit lanes.

Of course the capacity, speed limits and costs differ from road to road.

Placing bridges is easy though you cannot set a custom height, it's done by steps.

All regular roads do have parking lots. Additionally buildings got their own parking lots.




b) Zones

Again this is relatively simply. You have 3 different core zones: Residential, Commercial and Industrial.
Residential and commerical zones are split into low-rise and high-rise. There is only one zone for industry. An office zone is also available.

All regular roads have up to 4 cells on each side. This doesn't look too well when placing curvy roads.




more coming soon... (that's a lot of work actually )

​