The citizens of Skylines are pretty tolerant, but let them suffer too long and they'll abandon you in droves. It can also be terrifically tense, like when you realize your industrial zone has poisoned the groundwater of a residential area or when a power grid gets overloaded and you've got no money to add a new plant. It's often soothing, like when flying the free camera around or peering down at the tiny NPCs living in your creation. This gets repetitive pretty quickly, but a menu option thankfully prevents these messages from automatically popping up.Īt times, Skylines is intensely satisfying, such as when solving a troublesome traffic snarl or when all the buildings in a district begin leveling up because you've provided the right combination of services and amenities. Citizens can also communicate with you via 'Chirper,' a Twitter-like feed at the top of the screen. Icons appear above buildings to signal problems, like businesses with a dearth of customers or homes with sewage problems.

You can view your city through several filters: pollution (including noise), crime, property values, wind speed (for turbine power), water and electricity availability, and even see how many people are using public transportation. Skylines' UI is pretty slick and easy to understand. If you're more interested in building unbroken tree-lined avenues and long, winding roads than logical grids, you certainly can, but be prepared for your city to lose a good deal of functionality. Figuring out the best way to build roads and intersections takes time, experimentation, and close scrutiny, something I think many players will really enjoy. Garbage collection, unattended building fires, and dead body removal were recurring problems in all my cities, and it's because they all involve vehicles (hearses, in the last instance) needing to get to specific locations quickly, which is as much a function of easy access as of smooth traffic. It's not just traffic congestion you need to worry about, it's logical traffic routes. It's more difficult to lay down roads that make sense. It's not unexpected that Skylines' biggest challenges involve roads and traffic, as it comes from Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive, the same developer/publisher duo as Cities in Motion, a game based around transportation management (Cities: Skylines is not related to the Cities XL series).

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