14 DAY TRIAL // Cities: Skylines asks the player to select a map and then the game proceeds to offer the classic start of any other title in its genre: a pile of cash, a big road connection to the wider world and instructions about the first steps required to establish a city.
I first encountered this image, filled with a thousand possibilities for both success and failure, when I fired up Caesar II early in my childhood (the first title in that series still has a big place in my gamer heart), and I always react the same way: let's lay down some road.
In Cities: Skylines, I initially went over the top with my road building and spent too much money to be able to create a functioning little settlement, because I was unable to get electricity and water running, so I started over again (this also happened in the Caesar and Pharaoh days a lot).
On my second run through, I laid down a smaller network of roads, and then, in a few hours, I had a bustling city of about 30,000 people who enjoyed good basic services, a nice mix of industry and commercial areas, some impressive parks and a lot of opportunities for education.
They also enjoyed kilometer long traffic jams around some intersections and there were whole sections of the city where garbage trucks found it almost impossible to reach.
Depth and superficiality in Cities: Skylines
The title created by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive offers gamers a lot of freedom when it comes to the design of their metropolis, but it fails to make all its core systems equally important.
I spent one hour trying to understand and then untangle one of the intersections around which those huge traffic jams were forming and I actually had fun with the problem.
But Cities: Skylines does not even try to create similar conundrums linked to the water system or the electricity.
It's very easy to solve one problem associated with modern cities and almost impossible to deal with transportation, be it public or private, entirely.
I enjoy Cities: Skylines as it stands now, with its classic mechanics and player-focused features, but I would like to see a more balanced approach in the coming patches and for the almost inevitable downloadable content for the title.
