Cities: Skylines Review

“Are you playing Indian traffic jam simulator again?” is an oft asked question by my husband. The answer is yes, and I’m enjoying it. My cims might disagree, with 200 of them queued up at one bus stop in my city of 17,000.

A bit of disclosure here: I own all but one of the expansions (Natural Disasters) and it has been so long since I played with just the base game, I don’t really know what that experience is like anymore. This will reflect my gameplay experience as of Sept. 23, 2021 with those expansions.

At the moment, Cities: Skylines is the most enjoyable city builder on the market (of the ones I’ve tried with my limited wallet, to be more precise). Before I played this game, I didn’t even know that I would enjoy solving traffic problems, let alone watching videos of other people fixing traffic (shout out to Biffa). I don’t watch game streams. Yet, this game has me not only watching videos of other people playing it, but I’ve descended down the related video rabbit hole and have found myself watching videos about real world traffic engineering and reading wiki articles about highway interchanges.

All of this has enlightened me as to how American the traffic and road style of Cities: Skylines is, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. This surprises me, because the developers, Colossal Order, are Finnish. Then again, I have no idea what the road system in Finland is like, and maybe it is starting to embrace the American urban sprawl. It is very easy to create a city in this game that looks like your average American city, sans giant parking lots. If you want your parking lots though, there’s a mod for that.

The modding community in Cities: Skylines is active and supported. With my favorite mods of all— Traffic Manager and Move It— I have to wonder why they aren’t part of the game. They’re among the top subscribed mods on Steam, so I think other people agree with me. They do a good job of smoothing out the interface struggles of getting the roads to do what you want them to do. And that’s important! You don’t want your cims moving out because all of the garbage trucks are stuck in traffic.

While on the subject of mods, there is one I have long desired but have not found. The starting concept of Cities: Skylines bothers me. Why would these people plonk themselves down in the middle of nowhere off of the highway system? It’d make sense if they wanted to make use of the natural resources in the area, but natural resource industry is locked at the beginning of the game. No, they didn’t move next to the river to fish. Obviously they wanted to work in a shirt factory, duh. If someone could make it so my city narrative could be a reality, I would be super happy.

My gripes with Cities: Skylines have come after hundreds of hours of gameplay. That number suggests that the game has plenty to recommend it. Your city constantly wants to grow, be it in population, industry, or commerce. Each section you add on creates its own problems and opportunities. Sometimes it even creates problems in areas that you thought were running like a well-oiled machine. But that is the fun of it: you get to fix the problems (or you might just end up crying into your tea, but that’s fun too).