For the most part, Cities: Skyline is a familiar — almost too familiar — take on the citybuilder genre. It’s generically contemporary, without any meaningful structure outside the sandbox, and it wears its debt of gratitude to Maxis’ games proudly. It plays out like a piping hot bowl of gameplay comfort food for those of us hip to RCI indicators.
As much as I want Skylines to succeed, I'm glad to finally see another review that isn't a lovefest. In my review I mentioned some of the weaknesses of the model, such as it doesn't matter if workers are prevented from reaching their workplace because of traffic. The business functions normally, the worker doesn't get upset or have a loss of income. They just happily return home. This won't bother a lot of people, but it bothers me.
I also agree with your primary plus - adjusting the road network to work out traffic problems is one of the biggest attractions. I don't know how long I spent tweaking the road network and then watching the results.
It's a game that gets a lot of the basics right, but doesn't add a lot to really make it stand out. Like you said there really isn't much difference between the special resources. Service buildings don't have any features beyond plunking them down to fulfill meeting service demands.
With it's success I'd expect to see a lot of DLC. Hopefully it is of the game mechanic expanding variety, not, 'now you can pick the color of the street lines'. Hopefully the Paradox influence will be strong and the DLC will be more Europa Universalis then Cities in Motion.
Not officially. The only way to shut up fake Twitter bird is with a mod. Which the developers regard as cheating in the same way that having unlimited money is cheating, because all mods disable achievements.
No no, the bird is definitely gone from my later screenshots. I don't care enough about achievements to endure the shrill noise of that stupid fake Twitter bird.
The devs should fix the flaws, and add the missing features. But instead they keep giving us the excuse that they are small team, and that modders (aka players who bought their game) should do the fixing instead. Wtf.
I can accept mods as temporary band aids. But they should have the money by now to hire more people who can give us well-assembled solutions.
I am enjoying this game. The traffic aspect reminds me of the Caesar/Pharaoh/Zeus games and the game would do well to consider a more interesting economy dynamic. They made it too simple.
I like that you can see what's happening but I accept that some of it a big abstraction.
The emphasis on traffic is a bit too much so i'm putting this away until the inevitable patch. I am hoping for multiple content patches to complement the tweaking of the game.
Frankly I don't think its humanly possible to test a city building game system enough to get it right the first time. I know that raises the complaint that we are all beta testers, but its a super stable product on my system and I've enjoyed discovering the flaws.
Karoliina at Colossal Order said that they are working on a solution to the 'workers not reaching jobs have no consequences' issue. She isn't promising anything, but that it is an important issue to them.
Yea, they're not the ones saying that. You're just gathering what others are saying and taking it as fact. At no point have they said they expect modders to do the fixing. Outright blatant lie, mate.
This game came out a week ago. Have some patience.
"We are very proud of the game and hope many people enjoy it, and that some who don't might find or make mods to make the game more to their liking For example there already is a mod that removes the teleporting altogether, creating huge traffic gridlocks and making the city much harder to keep in balance. It's a true hard mode if I ever saw one!"
I have been waiting since they first announced the game months ago. If you design a game from the ground up to be a bore, then it doesn't matter if it was released just a week ago, or even just a minute ago. They should've given me a game worthy of my money.
