A potentially brilliant city building simulation game

Jan 9, 2015 15:01 GMT  ·  By

Our Incoming 2015 series focuses on the most important game launches of the next 12 months, and next up we talk about one of the hottest city building simulation games coming out in 2015, Colossal Order's Cities: Skylines.

What we know

The game is being built to deliver an exciting and in-depth simulation of what it takes to build a gorgeous and thriving urban environment, complete with infrastructure and everything else you can think of.

Cities: Skylines offers a promising city building simulation, with players being in control of zoning, road placement, the running of public transportation and services, and that ubiquitous plague of the modern world, taxation.

Developer Colossal Order promises a sandbox type of experience set on massive maps, where players can potentially craft their dream cities, including the ability to import their own custom assets, which means that, if someone builds an Eiffel Tower and puts it up for grabs, you can decorate your metropolis with it.

The whole affair rides on the in-depth simulation systems implemented by Colossal Order, from the way water behaves when building dams to individual citizens' wants and needs.

Player-determined civic policies can subtly affect the development of the entire city, or of chosen individual districts, and the open-ended gameplay rewards careful planning.

The huge maps come with their own natural resources to exploit and terrain challenges to tackle, and things like oil wells, water sources and forests can shape the future path of your city.

Furthermore, the resources you lack can always be imported from your neighbors, by way of motorways, airports, trains and boats.

Why it matters

A lot of people were eagerly waiting for Electronic Arts' SimCity to deliver the ultimate experience, but unfortunately, that ship has sailed, leaving only disappointment in its wake.

The Finnish developer is determined to offer a satisfying experience with Cities: Skylines, one that enables users to revel in the urban sprawl and take care of their budding metropolises the right way.

The game uses an in-depth road-building tool that lets users craft the most utopian and/or crazy highways they can think of, including options to reduce noise pollution or increase property values in the surrounding area.

The possibility of adding user-generated content such as buildings, vehicles and so on to the game makes things much more exciting, because dedicated modders can eventually create something as wild as Bedrock, the hometown of The Flintstones.

Building a dream city is something that many gamers would like to do, but running for mayor in the real world has the unfortunate prerequisite of getting your hands dirty with politics. Cities: Skylines, on the other hand, seems to benefit from a rather clean aesthetic and shows immense potential so far.

The fact that you can control and master challenging aspects such as industry, the flow of goods, pollution, transportation, at both a micro and macromanagement level only makes Colossal Order's upcoming title more exciting.

For the time being, Cities: Skylines doesn't have a release date pegged, aside from sometime in 2015.

Cities: Skylines screenshots (6 Images)

The view from a street corner
The massive scale of the mapsZoning, my favorite activity
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