Cities: Skylines

Be prepared to spend an additional 400~ bucks minimum to get all the DLCs

After seeing that Cities: Skylines 2 is still being “finished” - although I’m glad it’s in a much better state now than it was at launch - I finally decided [i](bought some free time)[/i] to check out how the original game holds up after all these years. Just as it did when it first came out, this city-building simulator can still swallow up hours of your life. For a casual player like me, it has become the definitive city-building experience: during the first hour, you have to carefully balance your finances to avoid slipping into the red. After that, you’re free to decide which of your city’s problems you feel like tackling. Without fail, two or three hours later I find myself hopelessly stuck designing road interchanges, trying to create the most efficient routes for traffic. Then I spend another hour admiring the fact that I’ve somehow managed to make everything even worse. Overall, the simulation, objectives, and available tools are all designed in a way that makes the game incredibly difficult to put down. Despite having played it before, I immediately lost another 4.5 hours to it. A subscription granting access to all the DLC is available at a perfectly reasonable price. I can’t say that every piece of content is particularly “high-quality,” but there is now so much of it that the constant “don’t forget to check out this new building” notifications start getting a little annoying after a couple of hours. Still, I think there’s something here for everyone - especially those blessed with a good imagination and plenty of free time. City builders may not be the most popular genre in gaming, but it’s both impressive [i](and a little sad)[/i] that even after 11 years, Cities: Skylines still has no real competition. And it still plays wonderfully.