➤ My city 🎮

You look around and see nothing but a vast green area nestled in the inlet of a large river. This is the typical starting scenario of every city builder. There is your first city, which you still have to shape. It's an ancient game concept like SimCity, which has been interpreted in very different ways over the years. The perfect city builder is not the one who asks you to build a city, but the one who demands that you know how to make it work.

You have to start looking at its streets as veins in which the blood that allows buildings to live flows. One of the biggest problems of the more recent competitors of Cities: Skylines is that they have largely lost the spirit that animated the progenitor, stranding the gameplay in an aesthetic of growth for its own sake, useful more for selling extra content than for putting test the player in his role as virtual mayor. Effectively it is ironic that the true heir of the SimCity series arrives on the market in the week following the closure of Maxis Emeryville, study sunk by the failure of the last chapter, the one that was to mark its relaunch in the social world. Colossal Order wins by stepping back, not in the sense that it has given up social features for Cities: Skylines. Indeed, perhaps there are many more than in the title of Maxis. Wisely, however, he did not force his hand by violating the supporting core invented by Will Wright and associates to insert harmful functions for the gameplay into it, instead he used all the means at his disposal to enrich a winning formula that needed modernity, but in a modality that did not dismantle the characterizing elements of the genre. In other words, there was a need for a game that would allow the player's vision to be transformed into pulsating life, while allowing him to develop it in a natural and thoughtful way, that is, through realistic growth mechanics that did not fall into "farmvillization".

The city I would like

We start by building the first roads, connecting them to the highway where those who will be our first virtual citizens run. The game interface, briefly explained by textual tutorials, allows us to quickly create an avenue with two intersections. Empty squares are visible next to each street.

These are the building lots that are automatically generated with the communication routes. Reasoning by reading the interface we decide to create habitable areas, then to distribute some areas for commercial activities. With part of the remaining budget we pull another road, forming a series of square lots away from the residential areas. It is the perfect place to build our first industrial core! It only takes a few moments to see the first home grow: a single-family house with a nice garden. Then a second one is built, then a third one, accompanied by the first shop and so on. The industrial zone is also starting to develop ... but what are those flashing icons on the houses? A lightning bolt and a drop. We immediately understand the problems: there is a lack of water and electricity. Citizens, rightly enraged, express their complaints on the local social network, whose icon is clearly visible at the top of the screen. This is an apocryphal version of Twitter, fully managed by artificial intelligence, where we can read in real time the complaints and compliments of the citizens we administer. Before the situation escalates, we pause the passage of time and look around us. Let's start with the water supply. We build a pump on the river and build pipes to get the water into the houses. Then we place a sewer drain next to it, which is also connected to the water network via pipes. The game is done. Now we have to choose how to produce and distribute electricity. Let's try with wind turbines, which make noise, but pollute less than other solutions. Unfortunately there is very little wind in the surroundings and it is difficult to find an area adjacent to the small urban fabric that has just been created that allows a good production of wind energy. We therefore decide to rely on a more traditional and polluting coal-fired power plant, which, however, we are sure will guarantee electricity to everyone, at least at the beginning. We place the generator in the industrial area, which is already polluted by itself, and we build pylons to carry the light to the houses, shops and factories.

Cities: Skylnes is the real heir to the SimCity series? Find out in our review

Invisible Cities

Cities: Skylines grows with the player. Once the initial problems have been addressed, others will soon arise, which will accompany the growth of the population. For example, a small group of houses will not have crime problems, but in a city of fifty thousand inhabitants the problem will have to be managed with more attention, by building police stations and police stations.

Soon it will also be necessary to worry about the education of citizens, building schools of different grades, or take care of safety, investing in firefighters and social policies to reduce the number of fires. To the few houses built initially, others will be added. Many others. Those already present will increase in value. Stores will start asking for skilled workers, as will industries. The roads will become increasingly busy and traffic will become a central problem, with the small and narrow streets initially built that will no longer be enough to contain the new flow of cars. How to solve? By building bigger roads, of course, but also by enhancing public transport with buses, subways and trains. If you have a stretch of water to exploit, you can also build a port. The available budget will grow, as will the expenses to be incurred. In case of need, a loan can be requested, to be repaid in convenient installments, or to be repaid in full in a single solution, in cases of particular prosperity of the economy. The important thing, mind you, is not to end the accounts in the red. The city can be divided into neighborhoods and in each of them different policies can be implemented regarding energy consumption, water consumption, waste recycling (you certainly don't want your beautiful city to be filled with landfills, do you?) And so on. . As mayors we will be given complete freedom of choice as to how to grow our metropolis, but we will never be left to fend for ourselves, given that we will always have handy summary screens that will allow us to immediately identify where the major problems that displease citizens are.

The city alive

Soon we will be able to admire our colossal work with all its branches, its neighborhoods and its problems. Leaving the game and making the necessary comparisons with the competition, we think of SimCity, but also of the very recent Cities XXL, it is easy to indicate the strength of Cities: Skylines: there are no easy and decisive solutions.

A seemingly optimal neighborhood for living can become problematic over time. In the other titles this is felt much less, with the cities becoming large cemeteries, albeit full of beautiful buildings. Instead, the cities of the title of Colossal Order remain alive even where all the problems of the moment have been solved, as indeed happens in any real urban agglomeration. The player never feels forced into the role of the interior designer, but remains careful in his role as mayor. Of course, there is no shortage of decorative buildings, such as the unique ones that embellish cities by following their logic, that is, unlocking themselves according to the objectives achieved. To say, an ecological city will have unique buildings different from a more industrial one, precisely in honor of its conceptual structure (who would build a monument to ecology in a very polluted city?). The above does not make you fear for the worst, because Cities: Skylines is yes complex, but easily manageable thanks to an excellent interface, enormously more functional than the more essential but too cumbersome one of Cities XXL, and even better than that of SimCity. In short, Nordic rationality can be seen in its entirety, even if it is well mediated by playful needs. The result is that after a few hours of play you can manage every problem in a natural way, even when you have to manage new buildings, whose connections are easy to understand thanks to the summary screens. This does not make you fear a trivialization of the information provided to the player, because this is not the case. Not only is it possible to access dozens of useful data for the city administration with a few clicks, but by clicking on every object, building, vehicle or person, you will get small and precious summary windows that will allow us to better understand what are the areas where the level of satisfaction is higher, and those where discontent is spreading.

The dead City

In the midst of so much magnificence, Cities: Skylines, however, does not lack some flaws, especially from a stylistic and visual point of view. Let's face it: some buildings are not beautiful and, in general, the feeling is a cut below that of SimCity, a title that however had an enormously larger budget and a much larger development team (and it cost even more, let's face it).

Aliasing problems are also evident, which you can verify by looking at one of the images accompanying the article. Nothing disastrous, in truth, but we notice it, especially when the size of the urban agglomeration heavily approaches one million citizens. On the other hand, you can't complain about the fluidity. On the test system, played at the maximum level of detail, the title of Colossal Order has never shown signs of slowing down in the frame rate, even with the presence of thousands of buildings. This is no small technical achievement, as the Cities XL series took five chapters to become fluid, not even completely succeeding. We also mention another weakest point of the game, namely the soundtrack, made up of bad music and well-made environmental effects and nothing more. Rest assured, we won't be spoiled by some mediocre songs. Let's lower the volume of the music, play a disc of our choice in the background and enjoy the magnificence of Cities: Skylines without thinking about it, waiting to see the first works of the users that will flow into the Steam workshop as soon as the game is available for everyone , given the presence of an excellent editor designed for the most willing and creative players.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Intel Core i7 -4770 processor
16 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 video card
Windows 8.1 operating system

Minimum requirements

Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1 (64-bit)
Processore: Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.0GHz o AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+, 3.2GHz
Scheda video: nVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, 512 MB o ATI Radeon HD 5670, 512 MB
RAM: 4 GB
Disk space: 4 GB
DirectX: 9.0c

Recommended Requirements

Operating system: Microsoft Windows 7/8 (64-bit)
Processore: Intel Core i5-3470, 3.20GHz o AMD FX-6300, 3.5Ghz
Scheda video: nVIDIA GeForce GTX 660, 2 GB o AMD Radeon HD 7870, 2 GB
RAM: 6 GB
DirectX: 11

Comment

Digital Delivery Steam Price 27,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

9.0

Readers (147)

9.0

Your vote

We reiterate and clarify the fundamental concept expressed in the long article: Cities: Skylines is the best city builder from SimCity 4 to date and the only one designed to inherit its spirit, while innovating the genre in different aspects. It is also the only one in which the desire of the developers is perceived to really play the player in the shoes of a mayor and not in those of a casual clicker. In short: it is designed for an audience of lovers of the genre born in 1989, not for those who delight in Farmville and associates.