Cities: Skylines is a fantastic new city building game

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Everything was going so well. My city, Cedarville, had just cracked 50,000 residents. Money was pouring into the coffers, people were happy, and I had just built a prestigious and expensive stadium. Then people started getting sick. Really, really sick. They blamed the water. Apartment buildings turned into charnel houses. I started throwing down hospitals everywhere they would fit. I had to build half a dozen more crematoriums to handle the volumes of dead. Abandoned buildings sprang up even in my most affluent neighborhoods. My tax revenue dried up then went negative. 18,000 people died. I nearly went bankrupt. It was awesome.

Cities: Skylines, available for Mac, Linux and Windows as of yesterday, is a robust new city building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. First things first, it's wickedly good fun. This is important in a game. What sets Skylines apart from other recent city builders is the depth of the control you have over your city. This is a game that rewards micromanaging.

There are six different zones; low density residential, high density residential, low density commercial, high density commercial, industrial and office. There are policies you can set citywide, like giving a tax break to industry or legalizing marijuana. You control the budget for each major part of the city, like police, transit and education.

You can also create districts within your city and apply policies only to those districts. Want to create a sleepy suburb? Zone for low density, give some tax breaks for low density commercial and residential and ban highrises. Want to keep heavy trucks out of downtown? There's a policy for that. There are even special districts for farming, mining and oil production. You have fine grain control of the neighborhoods and industries in your city.

The cities themselves can grow to be truly massive. Colossal Order has said that the simulation is designed to handle populations of up to one million people. You start out with a small 2 km by 2 km square and can annex more land, with a limit of nine squares (there's already a mod so you can build on the entire 25 square map). Each of your citizens is actually there, with a dedicated home and a dedicated job. Your city feels like a city.

Skylines has a huge number of transit options. You design bus routes and subway routes. You can even build passenger rail lines throughout your city. I love that there's fine grain control over where you build this stuff, but I wish it were more clear if what you were building was useful and efficient for your citizens.

There are also a huge number of road options, from gravel to highways. You can have wide boulevards with green medians through downtown, tree lined two lanes in your high end residential neighborhoods, and massive concrete six lane behemoths in your industrial section. The game has a heat map where you can see traffic bottlenecks - I've spent an inordinate amount of time watching traffic move through Cedarville.

The game rewards experimentation. You're launched into it without a tutorial, so your first city is going to be a lot of chin scratching and saying, “I wonder what happens if I do this?” Luckily the game isn't punishing, so you can make mistakes without going bankrupt or accidentally poisoning most of your citizens (most of the time). The game also throws rewards at you fairly often, even for messing up. There's a statue you can build if your city budget goes into the red. It's two credit cards atop a pedestal.

I do have a few complaints. The game only tells you demand for housing, commercial, and industrial/office. I'd like to see it broken down across all six zones. Especially for commercial/industrial, where demand for jobs is based on the education level of your citizens. You see the same buildings over and over, which can make your city look dystopian after it reaches a certain size. I wish you could see how much each district contributes to the city coffers individually, right now you just get a citywide budget breakdown. More fine grained financial control, especially when your budget is tight at the beginning of the game, would be welcome. You also have to manually bulldoze abandoned or burned down buildings, which can get tedious if they start to pile up.

Laying out roads and transit lines, especially highway on and off ramps, can be difficult. You hear from your citizens through an in-game version of Twitter, it can be hard to tell how serious to take peoples complaints (just like real Twitter!). Traffic is a little borked, but people online seem to be having more problems with it than I've encountered. Even on wide roads traffic will clog one lane and back up rather than take over the whole road. This backs up garbage, police and fire responses, and in general makes your citizens angry. I kept most of my city on a tight grid system with narrow roads and things seemed to work pretty well (score one for New Urbanism!).

I clocked ten hours in the game yesterday, and still felt like I was only really starting to get the hang of it near the end. Then a quarter of my citizens died. It was such an engrossing experience that when I took my eyes off my computer screen only then did I realize that I had played until three in the morning. I still haven't touched some aspects of the game like shipping and farming. There's a lot of meat to Skylines, and the fact that the actual sim side is so robust means that whatever quibbles I have are minor. This is a game that rewards urban planning nerdery and casual gameplay in equal measure.

I'm interested to dive deeper into this game and get a couple more cities under my belt. I want to see what happens designing cities using different development models (Sprawlville versus New Urbanton).