Overview

Cities: Skylines is a city-building simulations/management game that was released March 10^th, 2015 on Steam. The game was developed by Colossal Order, and published by Paradox Interactive.

Graphics

Cities: Skylines was created using the Unity game engine, an engine widely used by indie game studios.
The game offers a basic amount of graphical setting such as Shadow Quality/Distance, Texture Quality, Level of Detail, and Anti-aliasing. With all those settings Cities: Skylines has pretty low minimum system requirements for today's standards of pc hardware. The minimum needing a Intel Core i7-930/AMD FX 6350, Nvidia GeForce GTS 450/AMD Radeon R7 250/Intel Iris Xe G7, and 8GB of RAM. A decent pc from today can run the game with no problems.

Cities: Skyline is a graphically vibrant game. It uses bright and colorful visuals. A lot of detail was put in the homes, building, and structures. As well as the landscape, you have the option to change how to landscape looks with options to paint the land, transform it, and add vegetation/props, while building your city. You also have more landscaping options in the editor mode that allow you to create custom maps to starts your city in. As well as an option to edit exist assets and create new ones from scratch.

Sound

Cities: Skylines has a pretty diverse set of soundtracks. The background music that plays by default has a usually upbeat and happy tone to it, which shifts to an calming tone when pan out the camera to admire your city.

Now for the other soundtracks, the game has the options to turn radio stations. These radio stations offers a wide variety of songs created by various artist for the game ranging from genres such as Lo_Fi, Jazz, Electro etc. . The base game only comes with a few radio stations. The rest of the radio stations can be purchased through DLCs. The Cities: Skylines radio station bundle does allow you to purchase them all at once.

The sound effects are pretty well done and gives life to your city, from the sounds of vehicles zooming down the highway, sirens of emergency vehicles weaving through traffic, the chatter of citizens in busy areas/parks/monuments, and the loud clanging of heavy machinery from the industrial areas. Their is never really a dull moment in citie:skylines.

Addictiveness

Cities: Skylines practically feel likes it has an endless amount of content. Even just the base game, no DLCs and such, its hard to say when you will stop enjoying the game. You're almost never really limited for how you want to create your cities. You're not even limited to how you want to play the game, you have the option to play as an city-management/building game, but you also have the option to play just build the city without the worry of actually managing the city, just pure city-building.

With 675 hours of playtime on this game so far its hard to remember any moment when I didn't enjoy playing this games for hours on end. While the game has an insane amount of replay-ability already, what also helps keeps this enjoyable for many years after its release was the modding community.


Story

Cities: Skylines doesn't have a story. This is normal for the simulation game genre. Unless you want to come up with your own story of a mayor

Depth

As stated before, Cities: Skylines has a seemingly endless amount of content. The game offers a lot to do, and seems hard to actually become bored of the game. You have the option to create your own maps and assets for the game.

You can create your own maps in the editor. You start off with flat and empty surface, you can transform the surface however you want. You have the options to change the terrain height, water levels, add several types of trees and vegetation, props, add highways and rail connections, also well as plane and ship connections as long as you have a body of water that support them. You do have options to use the official maps and player created maps on the steam workshop.

When you do load up a city for the first time, you are limited to a starting plot of land which you can set if you created the map you're using and a highway connection. You unlock other plots of lands by buying them. Their are many ways to make money, taxes, producing and selling goods, leisure and luxury buildings, and tourism. Those are the big money makers, but you're not limited to just those options. You can make money from transportation, and education, while also having the option to make those free. If you need more money you can take out a loan in the game.

Now you have the option to build the city however you like, You're not limited by how the city streets, buildings, and highways are laid out. You can build your city based around how real life cities look, or you can make obscure and unique looking cities just for fun. You can always start a brand new city whenever you want.

Lastly, the steam workshop allows you to add mods, custom assets, and custom maps made by other players which allows you to bring even more life to your city. The mods can help you improve the gameplay more and fixes some underlying issues with the game. Maybe you have a really good pc and want the game to look more beautiful with some graphics mod. I would say 90% of my city is using content from the workshop, and really keeps this fresh.

Difficulty

Cities: Skylines is not much of a difficult game. It is a challenge if you are new to the game as its not easy to catch on to the mechanics of the game. The early stages of building your city is the hardest since you start with low level houses, buildings, and other infrastructures. As you progress and make more money you can start building higher level infrastructures that generate more wealth. You do also have to face more challenges like keeping the happiness high, maintaining infrastructures, keeping the pollution low, making sure all your citizens are at least educated, and making sure natural disasters hinder your city growths. Failing to accommodate for those can lead to stagnating or deteriorating city growth which will impact your city's income and wealth.

Now if you really want a good challenge the game offers a hard mode on the mod menu. This causes the construction and maintenance of buildings to go up by 25%. Refunding building will give half of what it costed to build. Buildings will take longer to level up, and lastly the demand for new infrastructure is lower.

You can also play this game without the management aspect and just build a city without the worry of money, happiness, or even natural disasters. The mod menu does give you preset options for unlimited money, and everything unlocked. Just build a city and watch it grow.

Overall

Cities: Skylines is a great game, and my personal favorite. This game has the most of my playtime on steam. I enjoyed putting so much of time and effort into the multiple cities I've made. If you're a big fan of city builders or want to get into them, cities:skylines is a great game to pick and play.

Never heard of this game. But based on your it sounds like it would be a fun game to play. Based on your review this game reminds me of some of the games in the 1990's that you could build cities by unlocking and solving puzzles. Awesome review as always.