14 DAY TRIAL // Initially, the freedom of Cities: Skylines feels intoxicating, and I spent a happy 10 hours simply discovering exactly what the title had to offer, with no intention of creating a plan or a strategy or any kind of benchmarks to measure the progress of my creation.
I then ran through three or four big cities, projects where I tried to find a good way of increasing population while keeping the budget in the red and finding solid ways of constantly optimizing my city without becoming obsessed with every intersection and metro stop.
I liked the version of Campina (my small home town) that I created in Cities: Skylines, but after I experimented with the districts and tried out the various starting territories, I started to find that the game did not have a clear way of pushing me forward and keeping me engaged.
I suspect that as I think more about the title, I will find new things to try out and I will tweak my city once again, or I’ll finally make the jump into mods to see what they have to offer.
But, in an essential way, even if I spend 20 more hours with it, I think I am done with Cities: Skylines until significant DLC or a big mechanics-focused patch is delivered.
Cities: Skylines is good, fails to offer a long-term reason to engage
Even the failed SimCity from Maxis and Electronic Arts understood that gamers needed to have long-term goals to remain engaged, and even if its mechanics were a failure, the idea of introducing big projects that more than one player could work on together was a good one.
Looking back even further, Pharaoh managed to make it even more interesting to play for a long time because its end-game consisted in the creation of the pyramids and the Sphinx, which took a huge amount of both resources and time, especially on my old and limited computer.
Most of the mechanics of Skylines are working well, but once the player unlocks most of the buildings and tests out a few ideas, there's no huge project to keep him interested in churning out neighborhoods.
There's the simple challenge of playing to tweak and optimize, but it feels a little empty at times, especially once a metropolis seems to perform quite well on its own.
