Cities: Skyline
A game I just recently bought and started playing is Cities: Skyline, published by Paradox and made by the same people, Colossal Order, who made Cities in Motion 1 and 2. I haven't talked about a game for a while on here because I haven't found one that's been fun or interesting enough to talk about. This has changed, because Cities: Skylines is awesome.
Cities: Skylines is a city building sim in the style of Sim City. For the last years, city building sims have been in a bit of decline. Monte Cristo entered into the market with their Cities series of games, which pushed the genre forwards, allowing bendy roads, non-circular radii for building effects and dynamically zoned areas. They pushed the genre forwards, but being as innovative as they are, they went bankrupt and didn't quite do it right.
Maxis, the undisputed rulers of this genre, came out with the latest SimCity which tried to respond to these developments. The result was a game that was interesting, had potential, but was seriously bugged and couldn't handle city sizes of any decent size. In doing so, Maxis undoubtedly shot themselves in the foot.
Along come Colossal Order, who don't have any experience in the genre, but did make Cities in Motion 1 and 2. Having played the second one, it's obvious that the engine they created for the CiM series is actually pretty damn good, something that could be adapted to make a proper city simulation game. Hence the, I was going to say hype, but it's more expectation. People were saying that, should they do an even passable job of adapting their engine, the game should be really good.
I've been playing it and... I can say it's truly amazing. I've managed to grow a city from nothing to 80,000 inhabitants and the games attention to detail is truly stunning. Where the game excels is the road modelling and transport. Place junctions too close to each other, fail to design a highway interchange correctly and everything comes to a grinding halt. Once that happens, city services, which use the roads, start to clog up and undertakers can't collect corpses, garbage stops being collected. Industry can't deliver, police cars can't get to crime scenes and ambulances can't get to medical emergencies. In short, everything goes very badly to hell.
Zoning is based around the roads. By placing roads, little squares show up next to them, in which it's possible to paint zones in any way you want. So, if you want a mainly residential block with corner shops, that's eminently doable. Or office areas with small commercial units tucked into them so that your office drones can grab their morning coffee, that's doable too.
Electricity is spread naturally from adjacent building to adjacent building, but power lines make a comeback. If a gap between powered areas is too wide, no electricity gets to them. The game cares about things like windspeed too, so placing green turbines is a real art form now, with areas being better or worse for wind. The whole level of detail recalls Sim City 4.
The water system is similarly filled with detail. You have water pumps that pump water from the river and sewage pipes that put waste water back in. Put your sewage pipes upriver of your water pumps and... bad things happen. The game cares about water flow and water direction and even has a water model, so when you build that hydro-electric dam across your river, more bad things can happen. Underground pipes spread water and remove sewage from neighbourhoods, which you have to draw.
Public transport is also fun but, bizarrely for a game that descends from one that was designed exclusively about this, it isn't as satisfying as it could be. The rail system is excellent and ports work amazingly. I created a port-side industrial zone and gave it a rail connection and the industrial zone around it went into a mass fit of productivity and investment, which is the first time in any city building game that's happened. The number of times I've tried to zone proper port districts and failed beggars belief. However, the bus system, although simplified, can be a bit hard to use and place lines, while metro systems remain totally below ground and you can't cross paths by having one line go below another. The platforms on the stations are awkward to place and the system could do with a bit of a tweak, which serves to make an excellent system merely good.
Cities: Skyline also passes one amazingly important test, which is hard to adequately explain. It's that of building a city based on how you know your local city or town to work and having the game actually pick up on that and work with you. With Cities: Skylines, you can replicate structures and road patterns you actually see and have them work or not work with realistic effects. It creates a game with a great feel. For example, the success of my port district then overloaded the local highway interchange. Trying to fix that was an exercise in the harsh realities of traffic planning and exactly what should happen with a port district.
Having played it for a while, there are a couple of bugbears I'd like to pick up. The park system is one of them. Parks are rectangular, which makes for awkwardness and difficulty placing them. In the Cities franchise, parks could be made to fit left over area, looking fantastic. I wish this could be done here, to fill in bits and bob left over from non-grid road patterns. Also, something to use dead space in the middle of roads would be good. It would be nice to put parks behind buildings, or create communal gardens. The system also made the Cities franchise farming system work a lot better than it does in Skyline. farms could be dynamically assigned over area between mud track roads.
The second bugbear is that there is no tunnelling. In CiM, roads could be elevated or tunnelled with ease. Here, only elevation works. Tunnelling would be such a useful addition and would give some more complication to laying water pipes, which at the moment is a bit simplistic. Both of these are the two biggest shatterers of the almost realistic quality of the simulation.
Cities: Skyline is the most innovative game of the city building genre to come along in a very long time. I can't recommend it enough.
Cities: Skylines is a city building sim in the style of Sim City. For the last years, city building sims have been in a bit of decline. Monte Cristo entered into the market with their Cities series of games, which pushed the genre forwards, allowing bendy roads, non-circular radii for building effects and dynamically zoned areas. They pushed the genre forwards, but being as innovative as they are, they went bankrupt and didn't quite do it right.
Maxis, the undisputed rulers of this genre, came out with the latest SimCity which tried to respond to these developments. The result was a game that was interesting, had potential, but was seriously bugged and couldn't handle city sizes of any decent size. In doing so, Maxis undoubtedly shot themselves in the foot.
Along come Colossal Order, who don't have any experience in the genre, but did make Cities in Motion 1 and 2. Having played the second one, it's obvious that the engine they created for the CiM series is actually pretty damn good, something that could be adapted to make a proper city simulation game. Hence the, I was going to say hype, but it's more expectation. People were saying that, should they do an even passable job of adapting their engine, the game should be really good.
I've been playing it and... I can say it's truly amazing. I've managed to grow a city from nothing to 80,000 inhabitants and the games attention to detail is truly stunning. Where the game excels is the road modelling and transport. Place junctions too close to each other, fail to design a highway interchange correctly and everything comes to a grinding halt. Once that happens, city services, which use the roads, start to clog up and undertakers can't collect corpses, garbage stops being collected. Industry can't deliver, police cars can't get to crime scenes and ambulances can't get to medical emergencies. In short, everything goes very badly to hell.
Zoning is based around the roads. By placing roads, little squares show up next to them, in which it's possible to paint zones in any way you want. So, if you want a mainly residential block with corner shops, that's eminently doable. Or office areas with small commercial units tucked into them so that your office drones can grab their morning coffee, that's doable too.
Electricity is spread naturally from adjacent building to adjacent building, but power lines make a comeback. If a gap between powered areas is too wide, no electricity gets to them. The game cares about things like windspeed too, so placing green turbines is a real art form now, with areas being better or worse for wind. The whole level of detail recalls Sim City 4.
The water system is similarly filled with detail. You have water pumps that pump water from the river and sewage pipes that put waste water back in. Put your sewage pipes upriver of your water pumps and... bad things happen. The game cares about water flow and water direction and even has a water model, so when you build that hydro-electric dam across your river, more bad things can happen. Underground pipes spread water and remove sewage from neighbourhoods, which you have to draw.
Public transport is also fun but, bizarrely for a game that descends from one that was designed exclusively about this, it isn't as satisfying as it could be. The rail system is excellent and ports work amazingly. I created a port-side industrial zone and gave it a rail connection and the industrial zone around it went into a mass fit of productivity and investment, which is the first time in any city building game that's happened. The number of times I've tried to zone proper port districts and failed beggars belief. However, the bus system, although simplified, can be a bit hard to use and place lines, while metro systems remain totally below ground and you can't cross paths by having one line go below another. The platforms on the stations are awkward to place and the system could do with a bit of a tweak, which serves to make an excellent system merely good.
Cities: Skyline also passes one amazingly important test, which is hard to adequately explain. It's that of building a city based on how you know your local city or town to work and having the game actually pick up on that and work with you. With Cities: Skylines, you can replicate structures and road patterns you actually see and have them work or not work with realistic effects. It creates a game with a great feel. For example, the success of my port district then overloaded the local highway interchange. Trying to fix that was an exercise in the harsh realities of traffic planning and exactly what should happen with a port district.
Having played it for a while, there are a couple of bugbears I'd like to pick up. The park system is one of them. Parks are rectangular, which makes for awkwardness and difficulty placing them. In the Cities franchise, parks could be made to fit left over area, looking fantastic. I wish this could be done here, to fill in bits and bob left over from non-grid road patterns. Also, something to use dead space in the middle of roads would be good. It would be nice to put parks behind buildings, or create communal gardens. The system also made the Cities franchise farming system work a lot better than it does in Skyline. farms could be dynamically assigned over area between mud track roads.
The second bugbear is that there is no tunnelling. In CiM, roads could be elevated or tunnelled with ease. Here, only elevation works. Tunnelling would be such a useful addition and would give some more complication to laying water pipes, which at the moment is a bit simplistic. Both of these are the two biggest shatterers of the almost realistic quality of the simulation.
Cities: Skyline is the most innovative game of the city building genre to come along in a very long time. I can't recommend it enough.