It can also be terrifically tense, like when you realize your industrial zone has poisoned the groundwater of a residential area or when a power grid gets overloaded and you've got no money to add a new plant.
SIM CITIES SKYLINES PC FREE
It's often soothing, like when flying the free camera around or peering down at the tiny NPCs living in your creation. This gets repetitive pretty quickly, but a menu option thankfully prevents these messages from automatically popping up.Īt times, Skylines is intensely satisfying, such as when solving a troublesome traffic snarl or when all the buildings in a district begin leveling up because you've provided the right combination of services and amenities. Citizens can also communicate with you via "Chirper," a Twitter-like feed at the top of the screen. Icons appear above buildings to signal problems, like businesses with a dearth of customers or homes with sewage problems. You can view your city through several filters: pollution (including noise), crime, property values, wind speed (for turbine power), water and electricity availability, and even see how many people are using public transportation. Skylines' UI is pretty slick and easy to understand. That suits me just fine, though players looking for a deeply complex city simulation might be a little disappointed. None of this feels deep, simulation-wise-it's mostly fiddling with sliders and finding a balance between keeping a positive revenue and annoying residents with steep taxes-but nothing about Skylines' simulation feels terribly deep, at least economically, and apart from focusing on specific types of industries, or choosing office towers over factories, none of my cities have felt particularly specialized. In addition to managing the physical aspects of your city, you'll have to keep an eye on your bank account and supplement it with loans, decide what to budget for various utilities and services, and tweak taxes for residents and business. You can also create industrial districts to focus on oil and ore mining, logging, farming, or general industry. You can tax your districts differently, and even ban industrial traffic in congested areas (just make sure to provide heavy trucks an alternate route). Districts are a great feature, allowing you to tinker with policies and regulations like recycling, free public transportation, and legal drug use, without having to unleash them citywide. You can also use a brush tool to divide your city into districts. Add nearby services like police stations and schools, and amenities like parks and plazas to allow buildings to level up. Once you've got some roads built and have assigned them as residential, commercial, and industrial, basic buildings will begin appearing. If you're more interested in building unbroken tree-lined avenues and long, winding roads than logical grids, you certainly can, but be prepared for your city to lose a good deal of functionality. Figuring out the best way to build roads and intersections takes time, experimentation, and close scrutiny, something I think many players will really enjoy. Garbage collection, unattended building fires, and dead body removal were recurring problems in all my cities, and it's because they all involve vehicles (hearses, in the last instance) needing to get to specific locations quickly, which is as much a function of easy access as of smooth traffic.
It's not just traffic congestion you need to worry about, it's logical traffic routes.
It's more difficult to lay down roads that make sense. It's not unexpected that Skylines' biggest challenges involve roads and traffic, as it comes from Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive, the same developer/publisher duo as Cities in Motion, a game based around transportation management (Cities: Skylines is not related to the Cities XL series). The better news: it's also a fun and addictive city building game. That means no always-online DRM, an expansive area to build in, and support for custom content. Play it on: Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 260/Radeon HD 5670Ĭities: Skylines didn’t have to stretch far to trump 2013's SimCity: it needed to be a good city builder without any of EA’s mistakes. Reviewed on: Intel i7 x980 3.33 GHz, 9 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960. What is it? City building and management sim.
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