Cities: Skylines Review - IGN (2024)

Much as I prefer to let each game stand on its own, certain games demand comparisons. In the case of Cities: Skylines, developer Colossal Order has overtly modeled its game after SimCity – not just the fundamental concept and methods of building and maintaining a simulated city from the ground up, but much of the look and feel as well. And on almost every count, Skylines compares very favorably to the former standard-bearer of the city-building genre. It is, in fact, the best of its kind to come along in a full decade – a powerful, flexible, beautiful, and all-around impressive simulation that lets you build sprawling, single-player metropolises to your heart’s content. Building has to be its own reward, though, because the lack of random events or disasters leaves the job of running these towns feeling sleepy and meditative.

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. 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. 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. Cities: Skylines does that.

With such large cities, it’s fantastic that Skylines allows you to define and regulate areas individually. 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. In industrial zones, you can specialize the businesses to exploit a map’s natural resources in the area to mine ore, drill for oil, farm on fertile land, or harvest trees for forestry. You can even create tax incentives for a specific type of zone within each district.

Making a major city’s traffic flow smoothly is a puzzle I haven’t come close to fully cracking yet, but I do feel good when I easily create overpasses and freeway onramps to experiment with routes that direct the flow and ease the gridlock... at least partially. By default, most advanced road types are locked out at the start, which makes planning a city around trains or subways nearly impossible (unless you plan on supervillain-level demolition later on), but there’s a sandbox mode that’ll allow you to build whatever you want, whenever you can afford it. (There’s also an unlimited money mode.)

Mass transit is a tricky beast. It’s not enough to lay down bus stops and train stations; you have to plot out routes individually, or no one will go anywhere. It’s easy to get lost in that, especially as routes start overlapping and it’s frustrating to get your bus stop placed on the correct side of each narrow road. But there are a lot of options, and the endorphin rush from making a red traffic data overlay turn green makes it all worth it.

What Skylines isn’t good at is telling you what you’ve done wrong, and what problem you need to solve right now. For instance, when I hit 50,000 citizens, the gauge at the bottom of the screen that indicates what new zone type my city wanted in order to expand bottomed out. It didn’t want anything at all. Hundreds of buildings were abandoned, without explanation. How can I address the issues that are hamstringing my city when I don’t know what they are, and the in-game advisors provide no insight? I built new residential, commercial, and industrial zones and waited; eventually, without my taking any deliberate action or receiving any explanation, the zones filled and growth resumed upward of 100,000. I don’t understand why.

It’s limited to man-made crisis-management because there are no earthquakes, tornadoes, destructive floods, nuclear meltdowns, zombie outbreaks, UFO or monster attacks, or anything fun like that. The only thing close to a disaster is a fire, and those don’t spread from one building to another, even if left completely unchecked. I don’t mean to fault Skylines for not cloning every single feature of SimCity, but I do consider disaster management to be a major part of running a big city, and without it Skylines lacks a certain sense of excitement that’s been a staple of the city-building genre since the beginning.

I suppose I could probably drive public opinion down if I took the bait and really tried. Skylines grants access to unique buildings like stadiums and observatories behind achievements, which range from encouraging, such as educating 50 percent of your population, to the demoralizing, such as allowing garbage to pile up, unemployment to skyrocket over 50 percent, average health to plummet, have 1,000 simultaneously abandoned buildings, or other generally unpleasant things. I haven’t brought myself to wreak that kind of destruction yet, since I do have a sort of attachment to my cities, but I have unlocked enough of them that I was able to reach the somewhat underwhelming final goal of building a Wonder - in my case a Space Elevator, which served as yet another tourist attraction. Regardless, a lack of public approval doesn’t seem to be something you need to fear in Skylines, which is slightly demotivating.