And while there are nods to things like garbage collection and education and healthcare, they’re much less nuanced (e.g., the buildings are less expensive, so there’s less of a tradeoff between small local buildings vs. Specifically, City: Skylines is about transportation many of the construction options in the game revolve around getting people from Point A to B. Granted, some of these features were more game design decisions than faster CPUs + GPUs, but in aggregate they make the game feel like a more expansive, better-realized Simcity derivative than anything I’ve played since Simcity 4.Īt the same time, I’m finding that I actually like the choices the developers made around its systems.
Much better graphics, looking good both from afar as well as closeup with details on buildings and vehicles,.It’s an unabashed city builder, in the vein of the old Simcity games 1 designed for modern hardware. None of these looked to mimic reality in any passable way, but they presented powerful and creative digital playgrounds, where scores correlated roughly with the how gentrified nature became under the powers of the omnipresent player.Ĭities: Skylines is the latest game that enables the building of something from nothing. These games all emphasize building from nothing, and then dealing with the problems that crop up from humanity, whether it’s pollution or social unrest or land use.
#Cities skylines instruction manual series
Since then, I’ve went through everything from Caesar IV to the Civilization series to Transport Tycoon to many of the later Simcity entries.
#Cities skylines instruction manual manual
I remember trekking out to friends’ houses every week to spend a few precious hours working through the game, and when I wasn’t playing, I was reading the thick instruction manual over and over again to paper craft strategies in vitro. And that cities, even in a super-simplified abstraction, are pretty hard to build and maintain. That there’s wonderful complexity in the interaction of systems. It introduced me to the idea of using computers for simulation. Simcity 2000 was a hell of a game for a 10-year old.