As anyone that reads my blog or has known my gaming preferences would know, one of my favorite game genres is city builders/simulators. However, for the last 13 years, myself and any other city sim fan knows, we have been having to play the same game. Sim City 4 was the last good sim made for folks like me, and all the other garbage release since has been nothing but huge disappointments. I never understood why, I mean the formula for SC4 was already good, all it would take is a bit of a graphical overhaul and a few new tweaks and you could have another great title out. Somehow every developer has been focusing on the wrong things, not what players wanted. Until now...
Paradox is one of my most respected companies in the gaming industry, and in combination with a finish developer (Colossal Order) they produced the long awaited title for us city sim fans, Cities: Skylines. This is a modern take on what SC4 last did with a huge number of improvements. In particular, this title added a crazy amount of attention to traffic, to the point that I can't even imagine how it keeps track of so much data for each vehicle and their routes. The road system and traffic are some of the best improvements in this game.
Another great addition to this genre was the physics. This game has great water physics that makes it so much fun and so easy to cause irreparable problems to your city. Just to give you a sense, in one of my first cities I decided to put my waste water into this convenient pond located on top of a hill, that way the drinking water wouldn't come from the same source. Great idea no? Well turns out the game kept track of my waste water, which had no escape and as the city grew the pond started to fill up. Until the day I got a lot of chirps about flooding in my industrial zone. I took a look and the streets of my industrial area was covered in shitty water and the stuff was starting to rush all through my city. I lost about 6-7 hours of gametime building a city that was almost irreparable at that point... best gaming day I've had in a really long time. I was so happy to see that kind of attention to detail in a game like this.
This isn't really a review of this game, it's mostly just me saying what I like about it, from the perspective of a huge fan of the genre. So the last thing I wanted to bring up is the map maker and the asset editor which come with the game for free. Basically you can make awesome maps and make awesome buildings for your city with the tools that already come with the game. Below is my attempt at a map I've been working on. It's incredible, and what's more amazing is that because they are so integrated with steam, all this stuff can be shared with other players and downloaded seamlessly right inside the game.
So if you are a big fan of city sims,
you must purchase this game. It is even available for Linux, so if you are a linux user, make sure to buy it from your linux client so it counts as coming from linux (which is good to indicate to developpers that linux people are buying games)
