For some reason I thought I had already written about Cities: Skylines. It's a city builder. As in, you build a city. I guess it might be more like designing a city, since you're not actually the one hammering the buildings together, but generally its genre makes it pretty clear what the game is about. If you've ever played any SimCity, then it's basically that, except everyone agrees Skylines is better. It really is pretty much the undeniable leader among city building and management games, and with fairly regular updates and mod support, it's unlikely that will change soon.
I had actually played it near its release almost 3 years ago, but since it is having a free weekend right now, I figured I would give it another try, see if it's gotten better - and it has. If you know that city building is your thing, then you can just stop reading and go play it, maybe buy it at a nice discount right now, the rest isn't much relevant to you. Otherwise, I'll share some of my personal thoughts on it that I had 3 years ago, as well as today.
As mentioned, Cities: Skylines is the best of its kind there is. That is the case not because there are few of its kind or that all the others are bad, but because it has pretty much everything you could ask for in a city builder with very few flaws to point out.
Whether you're great or bad at these kinds of games, the difficulty is adjustable and will ensure that your experience is neither too hard nor mind-numbingly easy.
There's a wide variety of things to construct, from the usual residential, commercial, and industrial zones, to public service places like schools, hospitals, police stations, parks, to various kinds of transport, and some unique buildings just in case. Basically everything major you would find in a real city.
The entire thing is really well simulated that creates a feeling of depth down to the tiniest of details. All of your thousands of citizens, all the cars, even the water in the rivers and lakes is tracked. You can really observe any building, person, truck, or whatever to see its life.
What impressed me the most was how the traffic ties into all of this. The thing is that various buildings that require other buildings don't just work by some magic over the air or via some AoE. If your citizens want to get to work, they will have to walk, take their car, or some public transport to get there. Garbage actually needs to be collected by trucks. Firefighters and police patrols actually have the get to the scene to do something. If the roads coming into your city are congested, your factories won't get their raw material imports which propagates to stores having less stuff to sell, citizens being less happy, and so on. Nothing teleports, everything has to be delivered, and if your roads are filled with traffic jams, everything will suffer. It's amazing.
A decade ago I would have played this game to no end, but these days I have games like Dwarf Fortress and Factorio, as well as a ton of other building and management games that are not about cities. They scratch the same itch, and do it much better for me, personally, since they're more specialized. Skylines is too general, and while that's what gives it its wide appeal, it's also the reason why I don't like it. There were quite a few features I didn't use, as well as some that I used only because I had to. The fact that I'd rather play just the traffic management part of it, like I would play OpenTTD, speaks quite a bit. Parts of the game felt like a chore so I could continue experiencing the parts that appealed to me more. There was too much to do, and the only goal for I saw behind it all was something that I didn't really feel like striving towards.
I felt this 3 years ago, and I still feel it today, despite noticing that Skylines has indeed improved. But these improvements are best for people who already liked it - they won't change my mind.
Finally, to answer the question I always do, because I always do... Would I recommend playing Cities: Skylines? Absolutely. But I won't be.
