Cities: Skylines
Developer: Colossal Order
Rated: E
Platform: XOne, PC, Mac, Linux
Nominations: N/A! [Ryan is the black sheep…]
Cities Skylines is one of those games that comes out after (or before) a disappointing entry of a beloved series that fans can point out as what that game should have been (see: any of the top-down dungeon hack ‘n’ slash games that did the idea of Diablo III better than the genuine article). Cities Skylines is the wonderful, addictive, customizable city builder that we should have gotten out of 2013’s disastrous SimCity 5. Even past all the always-on DRM problems with SimCity, the game itself was disappointing with its small maps and few building options. The rival Cities XXL games were a good start, but had problems of their own.
Cities Skylines, on the other hand, (no relation to the Cities XXL franchise) is the finest city builder since SimCity 4. If you know how the SimCity games (well, the good ones at least) go, you pretty much know how Cities Skylines works: you build and zone a city and watch it grow in a bustling metropolis with several intricate public works to manage.
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The game has massive maps that you can do so much more with than any other game before it. You can choose to skip the “huge city” thing altogether and build something like counties with little towns and small cities connected by the game’s wonderful public transportation system. It’s the only city builder I know of that let’s you do nitty gritty things like plan out bus lines. The game’s mod support is fantastic and can allow for things like meticulous traffic planning that most SimCity franchise fans have been clamoring for since the third game.
The only knock against the game is that it might not run on lower end computers; My laptop can just run it on low settings and I’m still having a ball with it. It might not be as “exciting” as some other games, but it’s easily my favorite game of the year – Ryan Gibbs
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