I cannot express enough how much of a welcome and huge change this is. It’s a real city, with highways and skyscrapers and stuff happening, unlike SimCity 4 where after 50 hours you still have a scraggy, old looking industrial town with 20,000 people. In 20 hours I have a beautiful city that looks like a place I’d want to live in, it has about 100,000 people at its peak, and plenty of neighborhoods. Cities build so much faster this time around, and this is the biggest game changer, as none of the other major improvements would work without this. This new system is elegant, yet doesn’t take away the challenge of putting zones in good places. Gone are the days of carefully planning each house size, making sure you don’t drag the cursor a tiny bit too far and messing up an entire neighborhood. It’s so much easier this time to plan out neighborhoods, as you can fill entire blocks with a certain zone or do it individually. Let’s start with the zoning as it’s the bread and butter of a city game, and it’s because it’s just one area of City Skylines that really shines. My big question when booting the game up for the first time was “does it improve on the SimCities of old, and does it fix some of their major issues?” And the answer is an overwhelming YES. So let’s talk about it!Ĭity Skylines is in every way a modern take on the first four SimCity games, and it really takes the most inspiration from SimCity 4 as far as I can tell. I was freaking out and it really was a stupidly crazy coincidence, but I ended up getting a refund on Steam to get the Switch version. Funny story, my friend recommended this game to me and I bought it on Steam the day before it was announced and released for Switch.
The game has its flaws the traffic simulation is horrible, zoning can be a pain, population grows really slowly, and the game doesn’t always give you the info you need. I’ve been playing SimCity 4 since I was little, I’ve always been obsessed with it as I just love city planning. The last mainline SimCity game was a decade before then with SimCity 4 in 2004. The servers crashed at launched and it took weeks for the game to even be playable, so it was DOA. Unlike past games which were purely single player, the game required a constant online connection and had more of a multiplayer focus. It was the first mainline SimCity game to be made after Maxis was bought by EA, and EA injected they’re nasty “games as a service” model into it. A lot of you probably know the massive failure that was the SimCity reboot in 2013.