Cities Skylines Review: Traffic Pile-up on The Learning Curve

There's something almost meditative about playing a city planning game like Cities: Skylines. It comes from the satisfaction of watching a well-planned city in action, with the constant thrum of traffic, and its residents doing daily routines like clockwork. However, getting there and becoming the perfect mayor requires know-how and strategy. Although Cities: Skylines gives you the tools you need to build the city of your dreams, it lacks instruction for properly utilizing them.

Building a Skyline

To start the game, you select a map that's full of empty space, then start constructing a town using limited resources. You have to plan out a road system and other infrastructure like water pipes and electricity. Unlike games like SimCity, you don't have to worry about weather conditions or natural disasters. It's always a sunny day, wherever you are, in Skylines. Your city will grow as you designate residential, commercial, and industrial areas. Meters on the bottom of the screen will show what's in demand so that you develop your city accordingly.

New buildings and features unlock as your population grows. Before you know it, your list of concerns will include education, emergency response, and pollution, among a host of other issues. It's your job to keep the city growing and evolving with high end residential and commercial districts, a low unemployment rate, and a road system that minimizes traffic problems while keeping the residents happy.

It soon becomes a lot to juggle, especially when trying to work in mass transit systems as they unlock, like a bus terminal and subway system. You also have to balance between the needs of the demands of the city to maintain a steady revenue. It's possible to have too many educated people in your city, which causes industrial worker numbers to plummet. Then there are a host of other issues your city might be prone to.

Communications Breakdown

The problem with all of this is that Cities: Skylines isn't very good with player feedback. There's a Twitter-like update system called Chirpy, but it's really silly. Messages about trash piling up or rolling blackouts are mixed in with silly messages like what a nice day it is, or someone reporting a lost wallet. There's no way to dismiss all the messages at once (you have to close them one at a time), so it becomes very easy to ignore the Chirpy feed altogether.

Players shouldn't have to rely on Chirpy for city alerts. There should be an advisor letting me know when my landfill is almost full, if power or water consumption is reaching peak capacity, or if my residents are largely over-educated. As it is, no new people will move into my city until I grow my industrial sector. But there's no point in adding more zones, because the existing ones are clearly failing. Meanwhile, building a highway system caused my commercial districts to crumble, when in real life, you would expect the exact opposite to happen.

As you can probably guess, the learning curve is quite high for Cities: Skylines, and it would probably be a good idea to get experience with a less hardcore city planning game before diving into this one. Object descriptions are sorely lacking, and it's often hard to figure out how to work with a building after you've placed it. For example, I placed a bus terminal and created a route. However, there's no intuitive way to delete the bus route and start over as my city evolves. The best I could do was move around the existing route, which can be a painfully annoying task.

I also purchased a train station by accident, even though the map I was playing on didn't have a supporting rail system. Still, having a train terminal that went nowhere seemed to make my residents happy, so I kept it. The game could really benefit from an undo button, especially when planning roads and other infrastructure. Unfortunately, you're limited to bulldozing over your mistakes and getting a small refund.

Stop and Go Motion

The most confusing and irritating aspect of Cities: Skylines is the one feature it's supposed to excel at: roads. Everything has to be attached to a main street (but not a highway). Buildings can only be placed on the tiles on the immediate sides of roads, which encourages grid box planning. Even subway entrances need to be placed next to a road. So, my plans of having a subway entrance come up in the heart of a office sector are dashed.

Skylines offers a host of options for alleviating traffic congestion, but they're often in the form of unwieldy roundabouts that don't fit well into gridded cities. Or they're come in the form of monstrous highway clovers that are almost impossible to place. Skylines could really use a sandbox mode, where players can try out all the city upgrades and learn to use them without worrying about a budget or city wants.

Once you get a feel for the game, Cities: Skylines can be quite satisfying and fun to play. But getting there can feel like trying to build a house without blueprints and only a vague idea of how to use each tool.