Way back in 2013, a new installment of the popular city building management sim, Sim City was released, intending to be a reboot. Nobody really liked it. The game was shackled by a host of issues, the most infamous of which being an always-online requirement for servers that couldn’t even handle the player base. By and large, this was a big failure in the city management sim genre. In the aftermath of this disastrous game, however, another game would soon emerge.

Cities: Skylines is a game made by Colossal Order, and published by Paradox Interactive. Released in 2015, the game succeeded where its spiritual predecessor failed. In fact, the reason why it was even greenlit was because of the failure of the Sim City reboot.

Starting out a fresh game sets you into one part of the map, with the ability to buy more pieces of land for expansion in the future. You first stretch out a piece of road from the nearby highway of cars, which creates areas where you can zone territory. Initially, you can zone for low-density residential, low-density commercial and industrial zones. You have to maintain a good balance between these things; commercial zones will help make money, but they’re nothing without people around to buy things, and those people need jobs because for some reason all of your initial citizens are uneducated.

Along with the network of roads that will be connecting your city, you also have to plot out electricity and water needs. Now, it’s easy to simply get the cheapest options of generating water and electricity for your city, but they run into the long-term problems of pollution. Initially, it’s not a big deal as long as you build your residential areas away from the power plants and industrial areas (which normally also exudes pollution). However, those smog clouds and pools of polluted water will get bigger if left unchecked, and when they reach the residential areas, people will start to get sick.

Of course, you don’t have hospitals at the start. To prevent players from getting overwhelmed, everything is gated until you meet certain population milestones. You’ll soon unlock hospitals, fire departments and law enforcement to serve the needs of the people. Over time you’ll unlock elementary schools and work your way up the education ladder until you have an educated workforce for the new “office” zone you’ll unlock, which could hopefully replace heavy industry and prevent pollution. Alternatively, you gain the ability to create districts and if there’s any trees in the area, you can declare industrial zones in that district to be for lumber, which will still provide jobs while lessening the carbon footprint. Cities: Skylines gives a nice steady drip of things that can help your city.

However, the drip feed also provides a host of new challenges. Trash will start to pile up, but around that time, you should be able to unlock landfills. Landfills will produce their own pollution over time and they need to be manually emptied; failing to do so will have trash piling up everywhere and people getting sick, regardless of how intricate your healthcare supply line is. The introduction of high-density areas to fill growing demands will also bring lots of traffic that will clog up the streets, which will eventually affect response times of city services and make people sick from noise pollution. If you weren’t efficient with your road work before, you’re definitely going to need to change things as the population of your city grows.

In general, the game is surprisingly robust with its traffic and transportation systems, which may be a carryover from Colossal Motion’s City in Motion games. As money becomes less of a concern, dealing with traffic ends up becoming one of the game’s biggest issues. Besides being smarter about placing intersections and building bigger roads, there’s a lot of public transport options that you have to set up. It’s not as simple as placing down a bus stop and calling it a day. You have to place down multiple stops, preferably in the most important places of your city, and set up a proper, workable route.

As you’re reading this, you may wonder, “why is this an impressions instead of a proper review?” See, the thing is, Cities: Skylines has a lot of DLC. Not counting the content creator or music packs, there are 8 big expansions to Cities: Skylines that add or expand on things. Want transportation to become even more intricate? There’s the Mass Transit expansion. Do you want to see something blow down all your hard work? The Natural Disasters pack is here for that. See, my perspective is that the expansions could significantly change things enough that merely doing a review of the base game may not be a full representative look for a review.

However, I will still say that I think Cities: Skylines is a good time. It’s one of those games where you can put something on in the background while you play, because while it may become challenging, it’s not a high stress game. It’s a very chill time, and I particularly love taking the time to zoom in on the city to get a look at things as stuff in the distance blurs to give perfect screenshot taking opportunities. If you like management games, I heartily recommend this.

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