COFFIN TOPIC

Cities Skylines is a city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive waaay back in 2015. However, they do keep releasing awesome DLC to keep the game fresh and interesting.

You start off with a plot of land, which is equivalent to 2km² and an interchange that is an exit and entrance to a nearby highway or motorway along with a starting amount of money.

I have loaded up one of my games that is not very pretty, nor very advanced for the purpose of this review.

This is The Valley

As you can see, this place is fairly newly formed and consists of its original plot plus one more that I have managed to scrape together funds to purchase.

The initial stages of city management is to piece together utilities such as road network, electricity, water, education, public services, healthcare, emergency services, public transportation, waste management (here’s a tip, don’t put your town’s drinking water source downstream from your waste management site, or if you do, expect to have to build many graveyards and/or crematoriums). The most important category in this game in my own experience is how you structure your road network, this is also one of the more frustrating parts of the game. Especially when your firetrucks can’t get to a fire due to it being rush hour and they are stuck in a huuuge long line of traffic.

What I adore about this game is how hyperrealistic it is. In order to use your coal power plants, you have to have enough coal stored within them, again, this is where good road/rail networks come in handy, as your power plants can’t generate power when the trucks carrying your coal are stuck in traffic.

The game has four distinct zone types which is one of the core dynamics of the game. These four zones determine what type of buildings will spring up in the areas next to your roads. You have residential, commercial, industrial and later in the game, offices.

The wonderful thing about zones is that you can have different policies for each zone, so you can make a totally agricultural or forestry industrial area, which is perfect for those areas with high amounts of fertile lands or forests. Which you can find by looking at one of the many

Shall we take a closer look at one of my suburbs? Now, I admit that I am a total noob when it comes to building in this game, all my cities look exactly the same. They are all based on the square blocks. This is because these blocks make planning easier, there is a reason, after all, that most American cities are laid out like this after all.

The game has a real element of progression to it, as only basic buildings are available to you at the start of the game, elementary (or primary schools), small medical clinics and firehouses, basic low-density residential, commercial and office buildings.

One of the most amazing things about this game for me as a Sims player is that each home is lived in by an actual family and you can find out a lot of bits of information about your cims (as they are called in this game).

This car, for example, belongs to Kathleen Williams, and you can see that she is an educated teen, on her way to her high school. By clicking on the blue text you can see which high school she is travelling to (if you have more than one) and her home, shall we go take a look where she lives?

This is Kathleen’s home, and by clicking on it you can see how many cims live there currently, their ages, education level and the population density of the home. The higher the population density, the more cims can live here and the less area you will need to house more cims in your cities. There are very vague objectives about how you can increase the population density of each home, Kathleen’s home, for example, needs more educated cims to inhabit it before it will increase in density. The homes in this game look fabulous and can provide some awesome inspiration if you are stuck for what to build next in your Sims game

You also have the ubiquitous budget to worry about, after all, it takes money to run a city, even a city as small and crappy as mine

Here is the economy tab, it shows what your budget is for each type of service, from road

maintenance to power and water, right through to how much you spend on your education budget. You can also change the budget for the time of day, for example, your schools function mainly during the day, so by lowering the amount you budget for them at night, you free up funds to spend elsewhere.

I absolutely adore this game and would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who enjoys city management games. It is in-depth without being completely overwhelming.